Acclaimed neuroscientist Fred Gage is a serial trailblazer. Decades of dogma were overturned when his team confirmed the adult brain continues to make new brain cells. Incredibly, now scientists can even turn skin cells into brain cells with a chemical push! But, if their potential to treat brain diseases or damage is to be realised, transplanted cells need to be able to call your brain home. Stanford biologist James Weimann has a major advance. TRANSCRIPT: Transcripts are available Wednesday after broadcast. Streaming and downloadable audio on Saturdays.

Neuroscientist by day, novelist by night - David Eagleman has just written an extraordinary little novel about the afterlife. He´s also a leading researcher in synesthesia, studying people who taste sounds, hear colours, and live in a remarkable world of sensory cross-talk. He joins Natasha Mitchell in conversation about life, death and the in-between. TRANSCRIPT: Natasha Mitchell: Hello, Natasha Mitchell joining you for All in the Mind on ABC Radio National, with a colourful sensory treat for you, because imagine if I gave you a glass of milk and it tasted blue to you, or if your partner´s voice just felt like a wonderful golden brown, the colour of buttery toast? What if the number two and letter J conjured up the shade of letterbox red, or the name Derek tasted like earwax? Or whenever you heard music, a kaleidoscope of colours exploded inside your head; different tones and textures for different notes. Vladimir Nabokov was one, so is artist David Hockney, in fact one in a hundred of us could be a person with synesthesia, the surprising cross-wiring of the senses in the brain. My guest today heads up one of the top centres in synesthesia research based at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. By day he´s a leading neuroscientist but by night he writes novels, and he was out in Australia last year to perform with Brian Eno at the Sydney Opera House a piece based on his totally intriguing new novel called Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives. So meet the energetic David Eagleman. David Eagleman: In the moment of transition between life and death only one thing changes: you lose the momentum of the biochemical cycles that keep the machinery running. In the moment before death you are still composed of the same thousand trillion, trillion atoms as in the moment after death. As you degrade, your atoms become incorporated into new constellations: the leaf of a staghorn fern, a speckled snail-shell, a kernel of maize, a beetle´s mandible, a waxen bloodroot, a ptarmigan's tail feather. But it turns out your thousand trillion, trillion atoms were not an accidental collection, each was labelled as composing you, and continues to be so wherever it goes. So you´re not gone, you´re simply taking on different forms. Instead of your gestures being the raising of an eyebrow or a blown kiss, now a gesture might consist of a rising gnat, a waving wheat stalk and the inhaling lung of a breaching beluga whale. Your manner of expressing joy might become a seaweed sheet playing on a lapping wave, a pendulous funnel dancing from a cumulo-nimbus, a flapping grunion birthing, a glossy river-pebble gliding around in eddy. From your present clumped point of view this afterlife may sound unnervingly distributed, but in fact it is wonderful. You can´t imagine the pleasure of stretching your redefined body across vast territories, ruffling your grasses and bending your pine branch and flexing an egret´s wing while pushing a crowd towards the surface through coruscating shafts of light. Love-making reaches heights it could never dream of in the compactness of human corporality. Now you can communicate in many places along your bodies at once, you weave your versatile hands over your lover's multiflorous figure. Your rivers run together, you move in concert as interdigitating creatures of the meadow, entangled vegetation bursting from the fields, caressing weather fronts that climax into thunderstorms. Natasha Mitchell: Well, welcome to Australia, David Eagleman. David Eagleman: Thank you, great to be here. Natasha Mitchell: What´s a neuroscientist doing writing a fantastical novel about the afterlife – do you believe in the afterlife? David Eagleman: I have no idea, in some sense the reason a scientist is writing this is because what you really learn in science is the vastness of our ignorance, you learn all the stuff we don´t know. And the afterlife just happens to be one thing that´s a perfect example of that. Everyone seems to have a strong opinion about whether it does or doesn´t exist and what it might or might not look like, but the fact is all of us are completely shooting in the dark. And so the idea of this book was to write 40 mutually exclusive stories that in some sense celebrates our uncertainty. Natasha Mitchell: And there are a delicious uncertainty, I mean in this collection of stories the character you call God takes many forms. I mean in one story he´s a bacterium and in another she´s frustrated at having to judge people´s lives in a binary way – good and evil. In another vignette he gets sacked and replaced by a committee. David Eagleman: That´s right. Essentially what I was doing is I looked at the sort of basic ideas. If you stopped someone on the street and said, 'Hey, what do you think the afterlife is about?' Of course everybody just has in their mind whatever their parents or their community has told them, and when you really start putting those ideas under the spotlight, what you discover is they´re ridiculous. So for example the one where God is getting frustrated in having to do this binary categorisation into good and evil. it´s a perfect example of how goofy the story is because people are much more multi-dimensional than that, they are much more complex than that. And so in that story God decides to sort of revolt against that structure that she had set up and she instead invites everybody to come into Heaven and to be a part of Heaven. And what ends up happening actually if I can just read the last line here: 'So she brings everyone to Heaven and everyone's achieved true equality and the communists are baffled and irritated because they have finally achieved their perfect society, but only with the help of a God in whom they didn´t want to believe. The meritocats are abashed that they're stuck for eternity in an incentiveless system with a bunch of pinkos. The conservatives have no penniless to disparage, the liberals have no downtrodden to promote, so God sits on the edge of her bed and weeps at night because the only thing everyone can agree upon is that they are all in Hell. Natasha Mitchell: One of my favourite scenarios is God as a single, lonely quark particle, dashing across the space–time continuum, drawing the world into being with energetic pencil strokes. It´s a classic scene. David Eagleman: Yes, in that story God is just a quark. as he races back and forth through time, He´s essentially leaving little pencil strokes and discovers he can draw the whole universe that way and we are his drawing, essentially. He´s a great story teller and loves to tell these stories. Natasha Mitchell: But I mean playfully this is about us not coming in to the world through an entity bigger than us, say the Big Bang, but in fact by something infinitesimally smaller than us. David Eagleman: That´s right. A lot of what I´m doing in this book is really trying to play with ideas and provide a mental stretching. So when I sit next to people on aeroplanes and I ask them what their opinion is on whether there´s a God, or what they would look like, or what an afterlife would look like, it turns out there´s such a lack of creativity, everybody just says whatever their parents have told them. So this book is all about really mentally stretching on spatial scales and ideas of gender and number and all sorts of things. Natasha Mitchell: It´s a great little novel and, look, you´re playing with the metaphysical here, and I wondered to what extent there is room for what has become a very material enterprise – neuroscience, your enterprise – for the metaphysical and the philosophical, even the theological. Is there room for any of this in the neuroscientific effort? David Eagleman: Oh yes, that´s a beautiful question. I think in any scientific effort all of the big pieces of progress always come about from whacky leaps of faith in some way. The science textbooks always paint the picture as though it´s a linear process where someone discovers something and then the next step happens, and the next step happens and it turns out it´s completely BS, science never works that way. It´s always people leaping on to some island where they have no right to be there and then they look back and figure out if they can build a bridge to what we know. And when they can. then that´s science, that´s progress. So I think that with neuroscience there´s so much media attention where we sort of act like we know everything and the fact is we are absolutely at the foot of the mountain with the brain. I´m saying this as someone who has devoted my life to it. I´ve written books on the brain and we have massive textbooks in the field, but in fact there´s so little that we understand. Natasha Mitchell: And yet we´re seduced by the bright lights of the brain scan aren´t we? David Eagleman: Oh yes, which is funny because it is just a false seduction in some ways. I mean I don´t mean to imply that we haven´t learned a ton with this whole armamentarium of technology that we have. We are making progress but it really is baby steps and the biggest questions, the 800 lb gorillas in the room, we haven´t even touched those. Questions like how consciousness comes about, how do you ever string together tens of billions of pieces and parts and get something out of it that has private subjective experience. So if I were to hand you billions of Tinkertoys, you know those little toys you put together, and you start hooking them up so that when you touched this, that happens and so on. At what point would you add one more Tinkertoy and say ah, now this is having conscious experience? We don´t even know what the theory would look like on that. I mean here´s another way of looking at it. When I was a child I absolutely expected that by the time I was this age we would have robots, that we would have CP3O serving our dinner and cleaning my room and so on. The best we have is the Roomba vacuum cleaner, and it turns out that things like intelligence is really, really hard to figure out. and even things like computer vision is very, very difficult. Natasha Mitchell: Before we come to your own research. which is extraordinary too, in another scenario in your new novel Sum we´re really reminded of what a unique experience it is to occupy the brains and bodies that we do. You have your character in the book, us, choose to come back as anything we want to in the afterlife and we choose to come back as a horse. And it all goes sort of potentially horribly wrong, doesn´t it. David Eagleman: Right, so in this story you get treated to this generous opportunity where you can choose to come back as whatever you want. So you decide you want to come back as a horse because you want simplicity and the idea of being a horse seems so lovely to you. So a magic wand is waved, you start to metamorphose into a horse. Natasha Mitchell: You can feel your fingers 'blending hoof-ward', as you put it, 'synapses unplugging and replugging on their way to equestrian patterns...' I love it. David Eagleman: Yes, and this mat of strong hair erupts to cover you and your musculature and your skeleton starts changing, you start becoming a horse and it´s really lovely for a moment. And then you become aware of the problem you overlooked which is that the more you become a horse the more you forget the original wish. You forget what it is like to be a human wondering what it was like to be a horse. And so this is this moment of revelation that serves as the punishment for your sins, because you realise you won´t be able to ever return here and that your slide down the intelligence ladder is irreversible. And then the last line of the story is just before you lose your final human faculties you painfully ponder what magnificent extraterrestrial creature, enthralled with the idea of finding a simpler life, chose in the last round to become a human. Natasha Mitchell: And that´s it, you will never understand what it was to be a human, you will never be able to wish to be anything but a horse. David Eagleman: That´s right. Natasha Mitchell: And Professor David Eagleman is my guest on All in the Mind this week, I´m Natasha Mitchell, coming to you on Radio National abc.net.au/rn and globally on Radio Australia and as podcast. And David´s new novel is called SUM: 40 Tales from the Afterlives,published by Pantheon Books which he´s performed on stage at the Sydney Opera House in a collaboration with Brian Eno, whose strains you can hear under us. But David Eagleman is one prolific neuroscientist, there´s more. The fact that you´re a neuroscientist by day but write fiction by night is perhaps not a surprise, because you head up a centre for synesthesia research at the Baylor College of Medicine and in many ways the experience of synesthesia is wrapped up in the way we use metaphors, just like novel writing is. How we use metaphors to describe the world. David Eagleman: Yes, synesthesia is a condition that about one per cent of the population has, and some researchers have estimated that there are maybe 152 reported forms of synesthesia. They have a mixture of the senses, so for example if you have synesthesia you might hear music and it causes you to physically see colours, or more common versions are things like the numbers and letters of the alphabet having colours, or textures or shapes, or genders or personalities. You might taste something and it makes you feel like you're feeling something on your fingertips, or you might hear something and that puts a taste in your mouth. For one synesthete, for example, whenever he hears the name Derek it tastes like earwax to him, it puts the taste of that in his mouth. And for other people, you know for different words, it puts the taste of cinnamon in their mouth, or some metallic taste in their mouth and so on. It´s not just that they´re being silly or metaphorical or artistic, it´s actually that there´s cross-wiring in their brains so that from the parts of their brain that care about hearing, and the parts or their brain that care about taste, there´s a little bit of cross-talk going on, so particular auditory experiences will trigger gustatory experiences. There are many different forms of synesthesia but what they all have in common is that they represent a blending of the senses. And it used to be thought that this was very rare but we now know that it´s really quite common, it´s at least one per cent of the population. So to come back around to your question, because of this increased cross-talk in the brain it has been suggested that maybe synesthesia is related to creativity and metaphor, because essentially that´s what it is for somebody to be very creative or to speak in metaphor, is to find parallels across different domains in the brain. So as an example, there are many phrases in the English language that were probably introduced by synesthetes and they sort of stuck around in the language. So when we talk about cool jazz, or sharp cheese, or a loud tie, or even a sweet personality, things like that. These are all phrases that represent a connection across different domains that sort of normally shouldn´t happen. And they were probably introduced by synesthetes. Natasha Mitchell: I mean in fact you´ve just written another new book, Wednesday is Indigo Blue, with another trailblazer in synesthesia research, Richard Cytowic. Forty per cent of synesthetes see with their ears – what´s coloured hearing? David Eagleman: Coloured hearing is where there is a sound and that triggers a visual experience for you. So one of the pictures we have in the book is a very beautiful painting of a woman who whenever the furnace kicks on and goes whoosh, she has a very rich visual experience associated with that. And many painters like let´s say Kandinsky had coloured hearing and so what he would do is turn on the music and have the music blaring and he would stand in front of his canvas and paint the colours, the textures and the shapes that were triggered. Natasha Mitchell: I mean you´ve worked with many people who have synesthetic experiences and...I mean, give people a sense of what it´s like to live with this experience. Is there a form or an incarnation of synesthesia that´s surprised even you? David Eagleman: Some of the synesthetes I work with have a very rich synesthesia. So one woman is a musician and her synesthesia is so rich that different notes have personality, and gender, and colour and form to them. Different instrument timbres have this sort of thing, different chords or intervals. And not only that but different sorts of runs of notes will make her feel things physically, that she´s in different body positions, kinesthetically about to leap or tripping over a stair or things like that. And it´s not that she´s just being poetic about it, it´s that actually that parts of her brain that care about music are tied in to parts of her brain that care about colour, and form, and texture, and shape, and movement. And this is one of the great lessons of synesthesia, is that people´s realities can be quite different on the inside. For a synesthete, they accept that as their reality, so if a colour-blind person asked you, 'What is it like to see colours, is that distracting, does it drive you crazy?' it wouldn´t have even struck you that reality could be different. There´s no sense in which it´s distracting or strange. Natasha Mitchell: A sort of sensory clutter? David Eagleman: Yes, it´s not sensory clutter, in fact most synesthetes will go through their entire life not ever suspecting that other people don´t see the world they do. Natasha Mitchell: And it´s quite shocking to them when they realise, sometimes well late in to life, that their world is quite different to the rest of us and how we experience our sensory world. David Eagleman: You´re quite right. Natasha Mitchell: I mean some people also see forms, so they might think of a series of numbers or days of the week and they´ll see them in forms suspended in space in front of them. I mean that sounds rather like a hallucination, doesn´t it? David Eagleman: Yes, except that they are not actually seeing it there. So what you´re describing is what we call spatial sequence synesthesia, and that´s where people have let´s say – take the months of the year: January, February, March, they´ll feel that each one of those has a specific location. So maybe January is off my left shoulder at about arm´s length, and February is to the right of that, and March is to the right of that but a little bit lower and so on. Whenever they think about one of these elements of the sequence it just seems self evidently true to them that there´s a spatial location that should go along with that. But here´s the funny part, it´s not that they´re seeing it in space; it´s just that they know it should be there. So as an example imagine that there were a big orange pumpkin on the chair on the right of you. It´s very easy for you to picture it there and even think of its colour and its location and so on, but it´s not a hallucination, you don´t actually believe it´s there, it´s just that if I were to ask you later hey, where´s the pumpkin you would say oh, it´s over here to the right – that´s its spatial location. Natasha Mitchell: But the key is that the experiences are actually quite specific, those associations are quite specific. So someone might consistently when they taste milk they will visualise blue, and that will be the case over many, many years. In fact there have been some hardnosed sceptics about the very existence of synesthesia arguing that it´s people attention-seeking or just simply the metaphorical connections that we´ve made between the senses as we were learning as kids. David Eagleman: Yes, there actually are no more sceptics now. Here´s why: for about 100 years synesthesia fell out of the scientific spotlight mostly because of the behaviourist school of thought which said, you know, we´re essentially reflex machines, input-output, and you really weren´t allowed to talk about private subjective experience. But what´s become more interesting in neuroscience lately is to say. well you know it actually feels like something to experience reality and have consciousness. so that´s now a real area of study. And so what happens is my co-author Richard Cytowic essentially reintroduced synesthesia in the late 80s, he wrote a book called The Man Who Tasted Shapes and really put synesthesia back on the map. And then that induced younger scientists like me to start really studying this in earnest. And what my lab and other labs have done now is develop rigorous methods of testing for synesthesia. And essentially the way this works is by testing their consistency, so just as a quick example let´s say you have coloured letters, so I present you with the letter J and you pick from a colour palette of 16 million different possible colours, you pick exactly the colour that best matches your letter J. And to you J is green, those are equivalent concepts, and you experience greenness in your head. And so I end up showing you all the letters and numbers in random order three times each and then you see the letter J 57 trials later, if you´re a real synesthete you´ll pick out exactly the same shade of green. If you´re faking it there´s no way you´re going to get it. So what we´re able to do in this way by testing the internal consistency of your answers is to very sensitively discriminate who is synesthetic and who is not. Natasha Mitchell: There has been some quite compelling brain scan work revealing that this is in fact an experience that is in the visual part of the brain where colours are registered. David Eagleman: Yes, that´s right. So the neuro-imaging in some sense has verified what we already knew, and it´s nice to have the confirmation. So what it shows is that for example the parts of the brain that cares about numbers and letters and the parts of the brain that cares about colour, they are right next to each other and in synesthetes there´s an increased amount of cross-talk there. When the synesthete sees a letter it actually tickles into activity in that part of the brain that cares about colour. Natasha Mitchell: You even go as far as to argue that synesthesia is really forcing a paradigm shift in the orthodox view of the brain and how it´s organised. That´s quite a claim – how is it? David Eagleman: It turns out that when we think about how the brain constructs reality it´s a very challenging question and always has been, because we´re essentially like fish trying to describe water. We´ve never experienced anything other than it and so it´s very difficult to wrap our heads around. But synesthesia is a really good inroad into discovering the ways in which reality is a construction of the brain and that different brains can do it differently. And depending on your genes and, you know, a single-nucleotide change in one gene somewhere on one chromosome, you can actually experience reality very differently, so somebody´s water is very different from someone else´s... Natasha Mitchell: It´s challenging at its core, what has traditionally been a very modular view of the brain that senses and actions happen in very distinct parts of the brain and never the twain shall meet. David Eagleman: That´s right and we know that it´s much more fluid than that now, and depending on which parts are talking with which parts, that changes how you perceive reality. Natasha Mitchell: One interesting suggestion is that in fact we´re all latently synesthetic. it´s just that the connections between the senses is something that we´re not all consciously aware of – synesthetes are, that in a sense there´s a lack of inhibition between different parts of the sensory brain. David Eagleman: That´s exactly right, when you look at the anatomy of the brain there´s something very surprising, which is you have fibres carrying visual information that are plugging into the auditory part of the brain. And you have auditory fibres plugging into visual, and when you look carefully at the micro-anatomy you find that everything is completely cross-wired. This is in all brains. Now the strange part is that under normal circumstances you don´t experience visual things in an auditory manner or vice versa, but it turns out so we know now about one per cent of the population does. Yet these connections exist in everybody. And so when people take drugs, when non-synesthetes take drugs like LSD or DMT, they can experience synesthesia. It´s also the case that sometimes if you get very fatigued you can experience synesthesia. So if you´re just falling asleep and somebody slams a door, you might see colours or shapes. And these things are essentially unmasking these connections that already exist in everybody. And so it turns out that what synesthetes appear to be are those that actually have conscious access. Nonetheless there are ways in which we can tease this out in everybody. So for example if I were to take a piano and I were to hit the high note and then I would hit the low note and I would ask you which one is brighter,what would you say? Natasha Mitchell: I would say the high note. David Eagleman: Right, and if I asked you which one is bigger what would you say? Natasha Mitchell: The low note, weirdly enough. David Eagleman: Yeah, right. Well it turns out everybody does that, it turns out everybody gives the same answer to that, which is really hilarious because there´s no reason why auditory sound should map on to brightness or size, but it does, in all brains. And so this is the sense in which we all have this cross-talk going on in our brains that links different parts. Natasha Mitchell: So synesthesia may sort of lie on a continuum with ordinary perception, basically. David Eagleman: Yes, here´s the weird part though, we think that you´re either synesthetic or you´re not, and we don´t exactly understand why that is but essentially some people really have access to it and other people don´t have access to it, in terms of, let´s say, coloured letters or seeing music and things like that. Natasha Mitchell: Well one other suggestion is that in fact we´re all born totally, absolutely, synesthetic. The blooming, buzzing, confusion and profusion of neurons that, you know, is what occupies babies´ brains is sort of synesthetic by default, and as those connections are pruned away, as our brain develops into adolescence, we lose our synesthetic ability. What do you make of that theory? David Eagleman: Well it is the case that when you´re born your brain does a lot of refinement over the first few years. So it is true that you have a lot more cross-modal connections when your first born. Whether that is exactly like the experience of synesthesia, we actually have no way of knowing, because most synesthesias for example are triggered by things like letters and numbers, and weekdays and months – these are all overlearned sequences that you learn when you´re let´s say four or five years old. And so you can´t ask a baby what colour is Wednesday, because they haven´t learned that yet. So synesthesia is something that expresses itself later. We don´t actually have any good idea about what experience is like for a baby, even though we were all there, we all forgot to write down the memories of it. Natasha Mitchell: In a sense you need a language to be able to articulate your synesthetic experience. Do you think you´re any closer to understanding why some people are so especially synesthetic and the rest of us aren´t? David Eagleman: Yeah, so what I´m doing is working on pulling the gene for that and I think this is going to be the first hit in something that I´m calling perceptual genomics. So the idea is there are great genetics labs all over the planet now who are busy pulling genes for eye colour, height, weight, aortic stenosis, diabetes, all kinds of things like this. But what hasn´t happened yet is seeing how single changes in genes map on to how you perceive reality. There are various competing theories about what exactly is causing synesthesia, and once we´ve pulled the gene for it or a gene for it... Natasha Mitchell: One genes, many genes – a whole network of genes I would imagine. David Eagleman: Precisely. It´s almost certainly to be multiple genes involved in it, but once we´ve pulled those, then we´ll know, mechanistically we´ll actually know how you can change a little thing here, let´s say with changing one little bit of an inhibitory receptor in the brain, and that changes the way you perceive the world. That´s going to be a very different kind of science than what we´ve had before. Natasha Mitchell: So it might actually drive the sort of hyper-connectivity between different sensory parts of the brain? David Eagleman: That´s right. And the debate has been whether it is actually physical wiring that´s connecting...where you have more physical wiring in a synesthete or, the hypothesis that I favour is that there´s the same amount of wiring in everybody´s brain but it has to do with the balance of inhibition and excitation. Natasha Mitchell: Does working with synesthetics actually change your perception of the world, especially given that you´re a novelist by night? David Eagleman: Yes, it causes me to pay a lot more attention to how I perceive reality and just be a lot looser about the knowledge that it´s not one size fits all, and being inside different people´s heads yields very different things. Natasha Mitchell: Nothing´s normal? David Eagleman: That´s right. We can talk about normality in a statistical sense, most people are not synesthetic and so they perceive colours, and music, and letters in a particular way but it´s up for grabs, there is no right way to see the world. Natasha Mitchell: Well the other realm that you also research is time perception. I'd love to talk about that at another time, we're right out of that though, and, look, thanks for joining us on the program this week and good luck with the productions with Brian Eno, David Eagleman. David Eagleman: Thank you so much. Natasha Mitchell: And if you want to hear Brian Eno speaking with David Eagleman I´ve linked to the discussion they shared on Late Night Live with Phillip Adams. David´s other new book, this one written with Richard Cytowic is called Wednesday is Indigo Blue: Discovering the Brain of Synesthesia just published by MIT Press. And David heads up the Center for Synesthesia Research at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston Texas. References, links, the audio, transcript and our email at abc.net.au/rn/allinthemind and pop into the All in the Mind blog for a read and your say too. My thanks to Anita Barraud, I´m Natasha Mitchell and next week all new All in the Mind content for 2010, catch you then

News of the largest studies on the genetics of autism to date is out, paving the way for genetic risk testing in the future. And, Australian research suggests autistic behaviours can be detected as early as eight months. So should we be screening newborns for neurological disorders like autism? The ethical debate unfolds on All in the Mind. TRANSCRIPT: Natasha Mitchell: And welcome to All in the Mind on ABC Radio National, Natasha Mitchell joining you and great you´re here. Today, some really compelling science, but also extremely vexing territory: autism, genetics and the ethics of screening babies; not just for autism, but all sorts of neurological disorders, some very rare. How far should we go and on what basis? Cheryl Dissanayake: Ask yourself, you know, is he looking at me, what´s the quality of that look, what´s it like, is the baby smiling with me, is he following into what I´m pointing out, is he interested in interaction, is he initiating interaction? You look for this range of behaviours and if the baby is not doing all of that then I would certainly be worried and certainly our data is saying, well 81% of those babies are going to have a diagnosis of autism at two. The public purse is hurt much more by not identifying these children because the cost of each child to the community across their lifetime is huge. If you identify early and act early, the cost further on is much less, because what you´re doing is ensuring that these people are fully participating members of your society that might otherwise not be the case. Jennifer Kwon: I think that if you really want to be safe about children, you need to do more than just screen for diseases. You need to clearly understand when you have a treatment available, and if you don´t have a good treatment available or you have an imperfect treatment available, you need to be pretty clear with families about the kind of supports that they´ll get after the screening is done. And I think that we can´t really impart on talking about wholesale screening without having a serious commitment to educating the public about the interpretation and the consequences of this screening. Natasha Mitchell: Paediatric neurologist Jennifer Kwon, with real concerns about the increasing screening in newborns for neurological disorders. And at the head, developmental psychologist Associate Professor Cheryl Dissenayake. She makes the case for picking up on signs of autism much earlier than we are now—in babies as early as six to nine months. That´s the behavioural signs, but what if we could screen newborns genetically for risk of autism, or the autistic spectrum of disorders? There is a strong genetic story here. If one identical twin is autistic, a sibling has about a 90% chance of being autistic too. But it´s been harder to consistently pin down the specific mutations in our DNA, or gene variants responsible. It´s likely a case of many mutations, some rare, playing small but co-dependent roles. Makes sense given how complex and varied autistic behaviours are. So now I want you to imagine a child who isn´t talking, is banging their head, who is irritable, doesn´t look you in the eye and imagine zooming in on one brain cell in their frontal lobe and then zooming in again inside the nucleus of that cell to where their DNA is packaged up in tight bundles of chromosomes. That DNA codes for all the important proteins in that part of the brain. Well two of the largest genetic studies of autism have just been published in the journal Nature and, crucially, the results have been replicated. Professor Hakon Hakonarsen, director of the Center for Applied Genomics at the Children´s Hospital of Philadelphia led the studies, one of which combed the genomes of almost 11,000 people and 600,000 genetic markers. And one particular region came up strongly—a series of mutations on a stretch of DNA on our 5th chromosome. Most of us have them, but people on the autistic spectrum were more likely to, much more. And it seems they influence how brain cells connect to each other via a key gene in the neighbourhood. Could these molecules be important in autism? Hakon Hakonarsen: What they do is that they sit on the surface of the cells and every time when we learn, when we experience some stimulus, somebody speaks to us or we visualise something, the nerves they act and they form connections between themselves and they communicate the message. And they have to make new connections all the time so it´s a very dynamic process and this gene is critical in the process of enabling the nerves to connect to each other. So if you were to remove it you get abnormal neuronal activity and this is particularly visible in the part of the brain which is the frontal part of the brain where autism has actually been consistently attributed to have abnormalities. Natasha Mitchell: And in fact you did actually take foetal brain tissue and looked at where that gene might be expressed, and did find that it was more expressed in the frontal lobes of the brain. Hakon Hakonarsen: That is correct. So in the developmental state where the brain is perhaps most vulnerable for the development of autism, the frontal and the temporal parts of the brain appear to express this gene most intensely. Natasha Mitchell: So just to clarify, why would the connectivity between brain cells be so crucial to autism, especially? I would imagine it´s crucial to everything, not just autism. Hakon Hakonarsen: You are absolutely right, but in autism the studies that have been done today to image the brain, they have suggested that the nerves are not communicating, or connecting normally to each other and that there may be regions of the brain where you have hugely, perhaps, over-connected regions, and this is where you see certain regions of the brain be bigger in autism. And then there are other regions where you see the brain is not responding the same way in autistic children, and that may be regions where neuronal connectivity doesn´t develop normally. Natasha Mitchell: Yes, in fact this week there´s a new study out in one of the journals of psychiatry that reveals that the amygdala, which is really involved in process emotion, is enlarged in the first two years of the life of a child with autism. Hakon Hakonarsen: Right, that is correct. And this gene, actually, when you look beyond the foetus, when you look at the expression in older sort of brains, you see that the gene is actually strongly expressed in that region as well, which is quite interesting. Natasha Mitchell: And in a second study comparing children with autistic spectrum disorders with healthy subjects they´ve just uncovered another set of DNA mutations, deletions and duplications across a range of chromosomes, many of which also drive the molecules that influence how brain cells connect to each other. Cheryl Dissanayake: Awfully exciting, I mean these very recent studies that have come out are cohering nicely with some of the knowledge we already have about autism, and in identifying these gene variance that are involved in neuronal communication I really think we are starting to paint a very clear picture that´s emerging from the behavioural data, from the imaging data and now from the genetic data. Previously some studies had found certain genes that are involved in nerve cell communication and these new studies are really confirming that, and accounting for a greater number of cases. So I do think that these new findings are pushing the field forward. Natasha Mitchell: Associate Professor Cheryl Dissanayake heads up the new Olga Tennison Autism Research Centre at La Trobe University in Melbourne. Cheryl Dissanayake: But we must be cautious as well, because these new studies, while they account for a large number of cases, it´s still only 15% of cases of autism that we think are affected by these two rare gene variants that have been identified. Natasha Mitchell: But would you envisage a stage where we might genetically screen newborns, even, for key high-risk gene variants to ascertain whether they might be at risk of autism? Cheryl Dissanayake: I doubt we´d do that at a universal level, because these gene variants are present in 60% of the population. But in cases however where you have risks, so where you already have a child with autism and now the infant sibling is an at-risk baby, then you may be able to use these sorts of findings to screen whether those babies have, or that baby has this gene variants, which then would really tell you that that baby is at more increased risk, and then maybe you´d want to start intervening straight away as a preventative strategy. Hakon Hakonarsen: It will probably take another 2,000 patients to really sort of make such an impact that you can have a very strong test to predict autism. So we will likely have medications to impact the consequences of these variants and fix the problem in the future. But I mean that´s going to be ten years down the road. But in the interim any sort of an intervention, stimulus training support of the child with the highest risk is going to be beneficial for the child. And the more you know about that the better off you may be. If you do have a family history of autism and you were to test for the variants that we know of today you can still make a considerable impact over and above just guessing. Natasha Mitchell: Are you saying that there is potential to screen now? Hakon Hakonarsen: So they are a start. And knowing that, for example, a child born in a family where you have another child with autism puts it atconsiderable risk—knowing that the child would not have any of these variants is a strong negative predictor. But it´s less of a positive predictor if you have them because you can have them without getting autism. So I think this is probably something that we will see out on the market I would say no later than next year because these are going to become available as tests. Natasha Mitchell: A concern with genetic screening, certainly of newborns, is that a lot of this information is just a little bit too raw, it´s not ripe enough to in a sense unleash on the public. who are then faced with the reality and the fear and indeed the stigma of a newborn that is considered to have risk of autism. Hakon Hakonarsen: Yeah, that is correct, and the tests as they are, you know, all these variants as we know about them today, they are not really going to make much of an impact for screening autism for the general public. Natasha Mitchell: Professor Hakon Hakonarsen. Interestingly he´s the former Chief Scientific Officer for the company Decode, the first to market genetic tests for common diseases and disorders direct to consumers. Send in a cheek swab and get a personal genome scan and a whole plethora of information about potential genetic risks. But autism is surely more complex. Cheryl Dissanayake: Again, it´s very early days, and you know many other studies are likely to find many other genes, and so which of these genes do you screen for. I guess you screen for all of them, and then you´re talking about very complex screening. Natasha Mitchell: And we´ll hear more about developmental psychologist Cheryl Dissanayake´s research in detecting autistic behaviours in babies in a moment. This is All in the Mind with me Natasha Mitchell on Radio National on air and online at abc.net.au/rn going global on Radio Australia. Today the genetics and ethics of screening babies for difficult disorders like autism. Jennifer Kwon: I don´t know that I would necessarily like to see a genetic test for autism. Natasha Mitchell: Jennifer Kwon is Associate Professor of Neurology and Paediatrics at the University of Rochester with a research focus on neurogenetic disorders in children. Jennifer Kwon: I think we have good tools available to diagnose autism. I guess I´m not sure how that screening would be used, I know that families want to have better diagnostic tools for autism. It seems naive to think that a blood test or even a very complex series of blood tests can do anything more than tell you whether or not that somebody has a vulnerability or a trait for developing autism. But autism can take many forms; some children with autism don´t talk and are very, very difficult to engage. Other children with autism have a lot of language but have a difficult time with inter-personal relationships and yet are able to manage in school. So there´s a range of how children with autism can develop. And I don´t know that any genetic screening tool is really going to give you those nuances. And in fact we get at these nuances using a series of behavioural and educational tests, psychological and educational tests. And I think those are the current mainstays of autism diagnosis. Natasha Mitchell: But Jennifer Kwon has wider concerns about the proliferation of newborn screening more generally, especially in the USA, where screening can be mandatory and for an increasing number of disorders—two dozen or more, many rare. In Australia newborn screening is a choice, but 99% of parents say yes. Just recently the US president´s Council of Bioethics released a report suggesting that for 40 years the moral focus of newborn screening has been what´s good for the infant; but that that is rapidly changing. Jennifer Kwon: When newborn screening first started we screened for disorders like phenylketonuria which we knew could cause terrible mental retardation and disability. but if caught early and treated through a special diet. the neurologic symptoms could be prevented and children could lead essentially normal lives. Another disease that we screened for is congenital hyperthyroidism. Again, if it´s caught early, we can prevent a lot of morbidity. The newer diseases that we screen for are disorders that we understand much less well. They are rare disorders that we´re able to identify and then diagnose because of advances in the technology of diagnosing these conditions. And one of the advances is a technology called mass spectrometry, which allows us to look for a number of chemical metabaloids on a tiny sample of dried blood. Natasha Mitchell: Yes, I wonder what´s motivating the proliferation of tests. Is it primarily a case of medical knowledge and understanding or is there an element of techno-lust in the mix, too, let´s test because we have the technology or the know-how? Jennifer Kwon: Well it depends on who you ask. I think for the families of children who suffer from these diseases and who have also suffered from what they perceive to be medical ignorance of these rare conditions and delays in initiating treatment for these rare conditions, they really want to have newborn screenings so these conditions can be diagnosed early, before symptoms begin and when the treatments might be the most effective. Natasha Mitchell: But Professor Kwon´s concern is that screening has now expanded to a host of disorders for which there is no effective intervention or even much knowledge. In her state of New York for example all babies are being screened for a rare neurological disorder called Krabbe disease. Children with it rarely make it beyond infancy and the experimental, invasive intervention is a bone marrow transplant in the first two months of life. One identified has died from the risky procedure already. Now you have some real concerns that in this case, as with others, screening has got caught up in the politics of advocacy but also in the desires and needs of clinical research projects. So in effect you´re saying that newborns have become partly guinea pigs. Jennifer Kwon: It´s even a little more difficult than that. In some ways I wish there were stronger research protocols placed around newborn screening. We have identified children who we basically don´t know what to say to them, or how to follow them, and the families are understandably upset because I think to most people when their newborn is being screened for a disorder there is an assumption the government and the physicians caring for the infant know something about the disorder. So I don´t necessarily think that there is a sinister agenda on the part of rare disease experts, I think that they sincerely want to improve the lives of children who have these conditions. I think newborn screening is a complicated way of trying to do that. It´s not a research program, and because it´s a public health program people don´t clearly have the kinds of protections we would want research subjects to have. People who are very interested in rare diseases or people who might have a stake, for example pharmaceutical companies might have a stake in the treatment of rare diseases, are also involved in the process of advocating for these newborn screening programs. Their voices are heard much more strongly and compellingly than perhaps the general public, who may have a very different view of how newborn screening should work and how these public health dollars should be spent. Natasha Mitchell: Jennifer Kwon, Dwayne Alexander of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development has called for a new approach to screening newborns: to screen unless there is a compelling reason not to screen. So he´s shifting the focus away from screening because of the good you can do for an infant but to screening unless there isn´t a compelling reason not to screen. I mean he points to what he calls a dogma that dooms us to continued, these are his words, a 'dogma that dooms us to continued ignorance and unavailability of treatment because individuals are not identified until they exhibit symptoms too late for effective preventative interventions to be tested or applied.' He´s really getting to the heart of this proliferation of newborn screening isn´t he? Jennifer Kwon: What I would say is that if that is really your mandate, if you really think that what we should do is prevent these disorders and understand them, it does seem that what you´re calling for is a form of newborn screening that should really directly be tied to a carefully thought-out research program. Natasha Mitchell: Paediatric neurologist Jennifer Kwon. Unlike Krabbe disease, which occurs in 1 in 100,000 births, autism might manifest in 1 in 150, perhaps even 1 in 100. As we´ve heard, there´s no blood test for autism though, the focus so far is on behaviour, and all the screening tools and questionnaires are geared towards picking it up in older children, say 2 or 3. But Cheryl Dissanayake and her colleague Josephine Barbaro are detecting signs in babies— so pre-verbally. Cheryl Dissanayake: Although not all children will show signs very early on, but certainly by 12 months the signs are becoming very clear. But some babies in our studies in fact we found that within the first six months of life the quality of eye gaze and how babies communicated their affect was different. Natasha Mitchell: So by affect you mean emotional engagement. Cheryl Dissanayake: Emotional engagement yes exactly. It´s not that babies with autism don´t show emotions, they certainly do, but they don´t communicate it, so they won´t smile and look at the same time. They may smile because they are gaining enjoyment from something, but they don´t look to share it, which a typically developing baby does. Natasha Mitchell: I noticed also that one of the games that is an indicator is the peek-a-boo game, how so? Cheryl Dissanayake: Well the peek-a-boo routine is highly stimulating for young infants. Eyes for a typically developing baby, eyes are very important. And the peek-a-boo game really highlights the anticipation the baby feels when you play that game and they start to anticipate you revealing your eyes, whereas the baby with autism doesn´t show that anticipation, or especially doesn´t show the affect that comes with the -'boo' and, you know, your eyes being revealed. Natasha Mitchell: You just said a baby with autism—and I just wonder whether it´s possible to label a baby with the diagnostic label of autism, given that autism develops so differently in so many different ways in different people. But also how do you distinguish the signs from other possibilities, like they might be accounted for by just developmental delays or disabilities of other kinds? Cheryl Dissanayake: Yes, well disabilities of other kinds and developmental delays, while they have certain expressions, it´s the social connectedness that defers in these babies. The baby with autism doesn´t show the same level of interest in other people, and babies with developmental delays— let´s talk about Down syndrome babies, they are still very sociable, they still seek out other people. In terms of diagnosing babies, we can´t diagnose autism in babies and we are restricted by our diagnostic tools. However, the toddler autistic observation schedule is just about to be released and, you know, you can get very clear signs right from 12 months now, so with this new tool we´ll be able certainly to say whether a baby is developing autism or not. Natasha Mitchell: Would you advocate for widespread screening of babies for autism or autistic signs of behaviour? Cheryl Dissanayake: Absolutely, and I´m not alone in this, in 2007 the American Academy of Paediatrics put out a call saying all babies should be screened for autism between 12 and 24 months, and I´m a very strong advocate for this. And this is what I´ve been trying to promote here. We´re not talking about a one-off screen at a given age, we know studies that have done that and the results aren´t good, the tools aren´t sensitive enough. But what I´m advocating is developmental surveillance so that all primary carers of children are aware of what signs of autism are like in early development. In this way I think we will pick up these young infants. Natasha Mitchell: Difficult territory, this, and I´ve put the full interview with Professor Dissanayake on the All in the Mind blog but her research and others looks for clues in the early months of children diagnosed with autism by going back to home videos and the like. And they are conducting a large study, training maternal health nurses in Victoria to pick up questionable signs early, so Cheryl´s team can track babies over time. The American Academy of Paediatrics is now recommending routine screening for autism for children under 4, and certainly there´s a push to screen babies from as early as 9 months for signs of autistic type behaviour. What do you make of that trend? Jennifer Kwon: I do have a question about what the Academy of Paediatrics is trying to accomplish with autism screening. I certainly think it´s important to recognise when children have such a fundamental difficulty with engagement as learning and learning as children with autism do. So I think it´s very important to be aware of that and aware of the challenges that these children face. And so it is important for paediatricians to be aware of the diagnostic tools available. But I think that our ability to treat and manage autism is somewhat limited and I´m not sure that diagnosing earlier will clearly allow us to eliminate autism, or how much of an affect we can have on the later manifestations of autism. Cheryl Dissanayake: There´s now increasing evidence that early intervention is working with these young children. A typically developing baby learns just by attending to its social environment. A baby with autism isn´t attending to the things it should be attending to and so it misses out on learning opportunities. The sorts of things you do with babies is to rather than re-directing the baby's attention, following in to the baby's focus of attention. For example if a young baby might be looking at the edges of a carpet because that carpet has certain lines, and somehow the baby´s interested in the sensory feel of the carpet and is attending maybe to some aspect of that stimulus. So what you do is you begin by following in to the baby´s attention and commenting on what the baby´s looking at and using that experience that the baby´s finding interesting to create a social interaction around that, to create turn-taking opportunities. It´s really quite remarkable watching therapists work with babies like this and making these pre-verbal communications relevant for this child with autism which previously was not relevant. Natasha Mitchell: What´s the evidence though that suggests that makes a difference in terms of how autism might reveal itself later in that child? Cheryl Dissanayake: That evidence is only just starting to come out now, identifying early is a new science; certainly developing interventions to intervene early is very new. For example the Early Start Denver Model that was developed by Professor Sally Rogers and her colleagues are finding that if they intervene in the second year of the child´s life from 12 months, 90% of these little guys are developing language, functional language, most of them by the age of three, which is remarkable—you know, it´s an age generally that these kids aren´t yet diagnosed. So in terms of tracking brain development, though, are we altering brain development? We don´t yet know that, but we now have the tools to be able to look at that. To be able to see whether the outcomes are different for these children by using imaging techniques later on in development. Natasha Mitchell: There is a risk here though of, one, pathologising what could be not problematic behaviours subsequent in life and two, false positives. By that I mean kids are defined as potentially autistic or are likely to be autistic as early as nine months old, and in fact they don´t turn out to be autistic at all. And that has all the attendant consequences of raising parental anxiety, interventions that didn´t need to happen—a whole plethora of ethical questions really. Cheryl Dissanayake: Oh absolutely, and I just want to make very clear when we´re talking about signs at nine months, we don´t talk about autism, we talk about social attention and communication. What the research is telling us is that the false positives are kids who also have developmental disorders but not autism. But it´s much better to intervene with a child and assist their development. The earlier we know that the better, because we can affect change in all of these children. But certainly this field is new, it is a fledgling field. Natasha Mitchell: Associate Professor Cheryl Dissanayake, Director of the Olga Tennison Autism Research Centre at La Trobe University. And before her Dr Jennifer Kwon, Associate Professor of Neurology and Paediatrics at the University of Rochester. And look, I´ve popped extended interviews with them both on the All in the Mind blog if you want more. And feel free to add your thoughts there too. The audio, the transcript, our email, lots of links and references on the All in the Mind website at abc.net.au/rn/allinthemind and Twitter us too. Thanks to Anita Barraud and Alex Stinson, I´m Natasha Mitchell back with you next week.

Born into the bloody horror of war, Sudanese rap artist Emmanuel Jal was 9 when he was recruited into the Sudanese Peoples´ Liberation Army as a child soldier. Incredibly he survived, and his music reaches a generation of Lost Boys. TRANSCRIPT: I believe I have survived for a reason To tell my story to touch lives I believe I have survived for a reason To tell my story to touch lives Natasha Mitchell: Rap artist Emmanuel Jal thinks he´s about 29, but like the generation of Sudanese lost boys he´s not sure. He was born into the second Sudanese Civil War, his mother died when he was a small child, he witnessed rapes, murders, his village was burned down and he was separated from his five sisters and brothers. I did not understand the politics behind all this Coz I was only a child After a while I saw the tensions rising high Between the Christian and the Muslim regimes We lost our possessions My mother, my mother's mother Suffered depression And because of this I was forced to be a War Child. Natasha Mitchell: Emanuel´s policeman father, his baba, became a commander with the SPLA the Sudanese People´s Liberation Army. This was a war between the SPLA of the south and Sudanese government forces of the predominantly Muslim Arab north, who instituted oppressive Sharia law. At least 2 million people were killed; over 4 million dispossessed. Emanuel´s rebel fighter father forced his small son to Ethiopia, where he was recruited by the SPLA as a child soldier and fought his first battle at just nine. It´s a story which he tells in his new book War Child with co-writer Megan Lloyd Davies. And when you read it it´s hard to imagine how on earth he survived to share his story with us today on All in the Mind. Death, starvation, violence; all form the core of his childhood. So on ABC Radio National Summer, joining you today with Emmanuel Jal. Emmanuel Jal: 'Lost Boys' and 'Lost Girls of Sudan' are actually war children. For me, I´ve given myself a new identity, I call myself War Child because I was born in the time of war and also I´ve participated in the war when I was still young. Some of them are those who ran away, were the only one who survived in their village when their village was attacked. Some of us were taken to Ethiopia because we were told we were going to school -that there´s a place called Ethiopia where people are saved, that there´s food dropping from (the) sky. The trek and the journey of the Lost Boys can be tracked by the skeletons on each step. If you go to South Sudan you can actually - find a dead body here, after a few minutes´ walk you find a dead body, so it's like, that´s how the journey can be tracked from South Sudan. Natasha Mitchell: There was a path of skeletons up to those refugee camps. In fact they weren´t schools they were refugee camps but they were also recruiting grounds for the SPLA, the Sudanese Peoples Liberation Army. Emmanuel Jal: Yes, refugee camps are always a place for recruiting ground for any rebel movement, even now in Darfur, you´ll find the rebels will go and raid the refugee camps, take the children, and train them as child soldiers. Ethiopia was well organised, the UN think they were actually controlling the camp but it was run by the SPLA. Natasha Mitchell: How did you view, through a child´s eyes, the SPLA, the Sudanese People´s Liberation Army? How did you view that movement? Emmanuel Jal: SPLA was the only movement that we saw at that time that was going to deliver us. And we had a leader called John Garan, he knew how to speak. I remember after we were trained he came and spoke to us and kids would faint, people fainted with happiness. The level of motivation that is motivating us and giving us hope that we are going to get freedom, that we are going to get our land. You get so excited that you just faint. We saw this as the only hope we have, we had nothing to lose anyway if we supported because we have lost everything that we had. Natasha Mitchell: There were three camps, refugee camps along the Ethiopia border, 400,000 southern Sudanese there. You were recruited by the SPLA – how did that come about? Emmanuel Jal: One day there was an assembly and we were asked how many can testify they haven´t seen their mothers, or they haven´t seen their village burnt down. Nobody was able to testify that they haven´t lost anything and when we are told 'how many want to be trained?', everybody´s hands were up. And for me as the commander was talking I would visualise...they took me back to my home in my mind, the bomb exploding, my mum screaming, tension, how my mum was beaten and I said, 'look, I want to be trained, I want to learn how to fire AK-47. I want to kill as many enemies as possible'. Natasha Mitchell: Now you were 9, a little boy. Emmanuel Jal: I think I was 8, 9. When I finished training I was, like, 9.As I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I fear no evil As I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I fear no I fear no Mama told me when I was a kid Resist the devil and so I did still the demons keep haunting me I persist and resist and so they flee The truth I speak set me free As I pray to the Lord my soul to keep I don't have to worry about where to sleep The Lord is my shepherd and I am his sheep And since then a seed was planted in my heart of hating a certain race. And that seed when I was trained as a kid I said I want to kill as many Muslims and as many Arabs as possible. I didn´t know what we were fighting for, I didn´t know what freedom is, but all I knew was I wanted to revenge my family...my village has been burned down and that´s what I have to revenge. I have to find out where my brothers and sister are. Natasha Mitchell: The SPLA told you, there´s a line in the book "always remember the gun is your mother and father now". Tell me about the relationship that you had as a boy to the AK-47 you were given. It was taller than you when you first got it. Emmanuel Jal: An AK-47 gives you so much power when you hold it in your hand. With this thing I can shoot an elephant down. With this thing I´m equal as an adult, I can make an adult scream and beg for mercy. And the way it was brought to us was we were told: "this is your father and this is your mother". And it kind of makes sense. When you have an AK-47 you will not go hungry, you eat anywhere you pass, any village that you go to - you just sit under the tree and people will bring you food. That´s the power it had. When you don´t have it you become like a child again, you become vulnerable. And also the way we are trained with the movement is, it´s like we idolise it, it´s more important than your family members. If my father was against me I would fight my father, that´s how we took it. Like I don´t know how people can convert somebody to be faithful like that - to a gun or a movement -that you can actually pick the gun and shoot your brother or your mother or your father. We are not trained like the child soldiers from Sierra Leone we are trained properly and we were disciplined and we were given ranking and we used to be called Red Army, jenjamesh, that´s the name given to us. Natasha Mitchell: There´s a scene of your first battle, the first time you used that gun in a battle, and you basically close your eyes. Emmanuel Jal: I´ve closed my eyes in many places and I never fired running like the way adults would do, 'cause it´s too strong. Natasha Mitchell: Too heavy. Emmanuel Jal: Yeah, but enjoyed the beat of the sound, the beat of the sound gives you energy. But the bad part is when sometimes when it is so hard you cannot hear your gun, like the guns of your enemy sound so loud that even your gun as it shakes, you don´t hear it. That´s when you really get scared a bit. There´s something exciting about going to war, I don´t know, when you win the battle you want to win another one and you want to win another one. Natasha Mitchell: What was your relationship to death at that stage, as a little boy. You were surrounded by death, there seemed to be more death than life? Emmanuel Jal: I got used to death from when I was born. And even then when I was 12 I think my mind was still like a child, I did not know the importance of life, I didn´t know you just die once. And also 'cause my Mum told me like there´s another world that people go to, so there´s another place you go to. So that death wasn´t really important, so even if I die now I´m going to meet my mother and there´s a different world that people go to meet so you´re not completely dead, the body just remains here. And so that was another thing but now I know the value of what life is. Then I didn´t. Natasha Mitchell: Many of the songs on the new album Warchild focus on the detail of this experience and one of them is very potent with the title 'Forced to Sin.' Give voice to that song and where it comes from. Emmanuel Jal: 'Forced to Sin' talks about me. Where it says "forced to sin is to make a living. Sometimes you´ve got to lose to win, and never give up, never give in". So that poem rap gives me strength whenever I sing it, because I was forced to sin to make a living by circumstances. It´s not because I wanted to. So it helped me also to console myself, because we raid a village because we are hungry, we want to eat, so I am forced to raid that village because I wanted to eat.Sometimes We find ourselves pushed to Extremities of circumstances Where our natural survival instincts Governs our actiona's Which forces us to do things that we Under normal circumstances Would consider to be Inhuman and barbaricBut when the choices are to kill Or be killed Steal Or be stolen from Eat Or be eaten Then what can we do When we are forced to sin to make a living At the same time it´s a song that talks about me leaving home at the age of seven and a year later I had to fire an AK-47. Then we had to learn how to sleep with one eye open, you don´t sleep with all your eyes closed because when I was with other ex-child soldiers we had a bigger ones that would molest kids and so I learned how to when we trained I´d realise how important it is that you have to sleep with one eye open and one ear. Natasha Mitchell: You also, actually, this is a really potent scene you learnt to sleep with paper bags in your pants so that you would wake up if the older boys in the army came to molest you. Emmanuel Jal: yes,like you'll make a paper bag that would make noise...chhh...to them so that they would stop. Natasha Mitchell: Did you have friends in the army amongst the children, was there a sense of friendship, or was it something else? Emmanuel Jal: It´s hard to make friends, but you can make friends at a certain level. We are taught to be brothers.I carry the banner of the trauma Warchild Child without a mama Still fighting in the saga Yes as I wage this new war I'm not alone in this drama No sita stop As I reach for the top I'm fully dedicated Like a patriotic cop I'm on to fight Day and night Sometimes I'm doing wrong In order to make things right It's like I'm living a dream First time I'm feeling like a human beingThe children of Darfur Your empty belly's on the telly Now it's you That I'm fighting for Forced to sin, Forced to sin to make a living 'Forced to Sin' - in the song I testify about a place where I was tempted to eat the rotten flesh of my comrade, which meant my friend died and I look at him and say I´m going to eat you tomorrow. Because cannibalism, the way, the level of starvation that we went through changed my senses, and I look at my fellow neighbour or my fellow comrade, they smell like food, I want to eat them, my saliva would drop, that I want to eat somebody raw without cooking them. And that was one of the lowest forms that I´ve been in my life. And after now I became forced to sing as a song become the strength of me, because here I was eating snails, vultures, rats, tempted to eat my friend 'cause there´s nothing to eat. And then luckily when a bird came to stop, a crow – I had made a prayer and then a crow came, that crow became the bridge between me and eating my friend. So I didn´t eat my friend 'cause I ate that crow. And after then I met Emma McCune and she smuggled me into Kenya. Natasha Mitchell: Yes, the story about Emma McCune, this is 1993, you´re about 13 or so, she´s a British aid worker, she was also married to one of the rebel leaders and she saves you. And you call her an angel. Emmanuel Jal: Emma is my angel because she came at the right moment and she smuggled me, she risked her life smuggling me into Kenya. Natasha Mitchell: I guess you wondered if she picked you or you picked her? Natasha Mitchell: She decided to pick me, I don´t know why me? Why did she pick me? I don´t understand, I have no answer.This one goes to Emma McCune Angel to the rescue one afternoon I'm here because you rescued me I'm proud to carry your legacy Thank you Bless you R I PeaceWhat would I be if Emma never rescued me? What would I be? What would I be, another starving refugee? What would I be? What would I be if Emma never rescued me? Yeah e yeah yeah e yeah There´s no doubt though that Emmanuel had spunk. In the UK refugee camps of Ethiopia, where he became a child soldier, he was the face of a number of stories in the western press. Sudanese rap artist Emmanuel Jal is my guest on All in the Mind today here on ABC Radio National reaching every part of the world on Radio Australia and as podcast, I´m Natasha Mitchell. British aid worker Emma McCune who Emmanuel calls his angel, the woman who took him and other child soldiers from the rebel army settled him in Kenya and in school, but not long after she was tragically killed in a car accident. And so he was alone again with his nightmares. How do you think about the deaths you caused with that AK-47 now, as an adult? Emmanuel Jal: It´s hard you know, only the torments and the dreams, flashbacks, come once in a while. But now I do music, the music has become my therapy. The pictures of my mum crying, or I'll see my village burning down, so when those things come, flashback, playing of things that upset me happen, that´s what put me into action to do something when I´m scared. So when I´m scared, my psychology, my brain automatically play the tape of the past and that angers me and gives me strength to move.I believe I have survived for a reason To tell my story to touch lives Natasha Mitchell: So how has your relationship to music changed now? You call music your therapy, I wonder if you´ve received any other formal therapy at this stage of trying to heal. Emmanuel Jal: The music keeps me busy, it´s the pain killer. I´ll not run away from the reality of the things that have happened, but I can only reduce the effects by what I do. You see even if somebody can see the way I walk, the way I talk, I´m affected. If you look at me you may think I take drugs, I smoke weed. But it´s not weed. I´ve been moulded by the life that I had, and that´s what makes me like this, slow, there´s so much going on in my mind. And, music plays a big part in my emotional disorder. I try my best every day to try to be as nice as possible, try to change my character and try to improve my disorder and to be focused because my head is always busy. It´s like my head is busy even when I´m sleeping, there´s too much going on. Natasha Mitchell: At one point you do talk about a madness and having to suppress that madness. What was that madness? Emmanuel Jal: The thing is I went to Kenya. When I was smuggled into Kenya by Emma, I still have the anger and desire to kill even in cold blood. When she takes me out with Muslim friends, some would say my name is Mohammad or like this. I feel like taking that fork or the knife and jumping at their throat and doing something. But luckily you know Kenya became a transforming area to help me to forgive. But you know when I visit my family the wounds are scratches that have healed and I feel the pain again and I tend to forget I forgave and I want to pick an AK-47 again to go and fight. Then part of my brain tells me no, this is not about Muslims, it´s not about Arabs, what is killing you is the oil. So, because I discovered the truth oil is what is killing us, and it´s the religion has been manipulated to mobilise people because...so they get what they want. And so now I know the truth, should I continue hating or not? And so that´s where I have to keep on struggling when I get really mad and have to suppress it. Natasha Mitchell: You originally were put in, this is in Kenya now, you were put into a school a class of 5-year-olds and you were 13 or so, and this is a very common experience for returning child soldiers. Emma McCune said you need to be a child now, you need to sleep and grow and be a child – did you feel like a child? Emmanuel Jal: Not really. One problem was with the drawings that I used to make were scary. I would draw a tank, a jeep, I'll draw a house burning, I'll draw somebody´s head chopped off, I´ll draw a gun shooting. In a way that´s how kids do therapy, they draw what they have seen and as they draw it down they are communicating. So I was communicating with them. So when I go to class and that´s what I draw and when she sees the pictures she says "these are awful things you are drawing". And so she brought me books, hippopotamus, cartoons, so I started drawing that, the only thing I could draw better was a hippo. Natasha Mitchell: A hippo! Emmanuel Jal: I can draw a hippo easily in ten seconds, 'cause she brought me a hippo story. Natasha Mitchell: I wonder what the other children made of those drawings, they hadn´t been in the war necessarily at the schools that you went to in Kenya, you must have been a bizarre specimen for them in some sense? Emmanuel Jal: My drawings are different, their drawings are about cars, or nice beautiful Cinderella, or something different, but mine are about wars. I´m drawing things that shock them. Then later on they were told I was a child soldier or something, and then the way I was treated was weird. And some people treated me nice, some were looking 'oh, he´s dangerous for children' and all that. Natasha Mitchell: Emmanuel, there´s music all the way through this book in an interesting way, there´s the music of your childhood but then Sharia law replaces that with the Muslim call to prayer, that becomes a music on the landscape. There´s music in battlefield as well, isn´t there, there´s music in the rhythm of the gun, the silence of the battlefield after death, it keeps coming up. Emmanuel Jal: There´s something people don´t know, if soldiers go to war and there´s no musician they will not win that fight. Music gives them morale to want to fight. If you win you sing, you rejoice, dance. When you lose you sing a song to accept that you've lost but you have to keep on going. When you´re scared you sing a song that will make you brave. So music was always there, the songs of wars. But most of them are vulgar, they use really big words like swearing, really, really swearing words and if you want to energise, it´s like the way you start anger and abusing somebody, saying all kinds of names that you have just to make yourself... Natasha Mitchell: These were the songs you learnt as a kid, as a soldier? Emmanuel Jal: Yes, these were the songs. Or, we used to make our own songs.Many rivers to cross Lord make me cross those rivers Many rivers to cross Where the hippos and the crocodiles lie and wait Father give me strength give me faithMany times in my life I've crossed the river Nile I walked bare feet for hundreds and hundreds of miles I crossed the desert aisles Made it out from the war Made it passed being poor Now I'm standing on the western shores Many rivers to cross And I can't seem to find my way over... Natasha Mitchell: How do you view art as a healing force – for you as a former child soldier? Emmanuel Jal: Art is one of the – apart from faith, you know faith heal, religion helps in the healing process, but art is one of the quickest therapies you could ever give somebody who has been tormented. It could be dancing, it could be acting, it could be singing music, anything that is an art form, drawing. I don´t know what it does, it engages your mind into doing something, so you let your mind to be creative. Instead when you´re left idle, even going to school is therapeutic because your engaging the person´s mind, 'cause when I´m busy, I´m performing, I´m here and there, I´m dancing, I´m in the studio, I´m busy. So the time for my nightmares to catch up in my stress and frustration and flashback is reduced. But when you´re idle, when you´re not appreciated by society, when there´s no love around you that´s when you begin to regret, you begin to go back and you begin to curse God. But when you´re busy – it´s like, I think when the army comes from war the reason they are in a horrible condition is because the society failed to accept them back and give them something to do. You know, if they come back from war, find out what are their hobbies: playing pool, golf? Let them have fun, music, just give them anything. Natasha Mitchell: Re-engage them, their minds. Emmanuel Jal: And appreciate what they do. So when you engage people´s minds it helps them in the healing process. One very important key is acceptance. Now when they are accepted some will voluntarily come and tell you their story. And when they tell you voluntarily it doesn´t affect them, it becomes therapy. So maybe you will be sitting with somebody someday, you don´t even ask them questions, they´ll just come up with the story and say , "in Vietnam it was like this, like this, like this". Like yesterday we were talking with some Lost Boys, all of a sudden we started talking about a certain war, 'how did you run', 'what happened'. That way was therapeutic, and we would laugh about how someone was running, who was scared, what did so-and-so do, you know, and then in the end you get into deep detail, what happened and how horrible it is. Like one of them just told me how they were chased into a highland for weeks and they are staying in the mud, so they had to eat raw fish, that´s how they were surviving, food is getting rotten, you know, because you are in the water, when you come out the water soaks your body. And so that was like therapy for him, and he didn´t know, because we were sharing it in a way that you´re not asking questions, so everybody is participating and I think those are the things that help a lot. Natasha Mitchell: You´ve channelled a lot of energy into a charity that you´ve set up as well, as well as your music. Tell us about the motivation there. Emmanuel Jal: When you have a cause you can channel a lot of energy there. You see if I have nothing to do now, if I had no cause at all, I think I may be violent. But now I´ve used that energy with all the skills I have to channel the energy and the anger into trying to change my community and doing something. Natasha Mitchell: What do you want to do with the charity? Emmanuel Jal: We have a foundation, a foundation I founded called Gua Africa, we find sponsorship for children, survivors of war from Rwanda, Uganda, Lost Boys, Kenyan children to go to school. But the main project we have now is to build a school in honour of Emma so it´s going to be called Emma Academy, because we want to show people that this woman meant so much to our family, meant so much to our communities and she meant so much to me. She´s the one who rescued me, I never had a chance to say thank you but this is the best gift to give her to honour in our community. And so building this school now is built on sacrifice. So I´m eating one meal a day until we raise the money to build the school. The meals that I´m eating, the one I´m missing is lunch and breakfast, so I only eat dinner and all the meals I´m missing I´m donating the money to the cause. And I´m calling people, look, miss out your breakfast, send us that... Natasha Mitchell: And the idea is that people donate for the meals they miss and they donate for the meals you miss too. Emmanuel Jal: It´s a different way, you know there are a lot of people who have so much food, instead of you wasting that food can you reduce that food for that week and buy less food and donate for us that amount and let´s change the world. And so that´s the idea. I was born in Sudan in a place called Tong In a village by the river where the people bond strong Irrespective of the fact that the place is war torn The people are still strong Natasha Mitchell: Thank you Emmanuel Jal, thank you for joining us on ABC Radio National. Emmanuel Jal: Well thank you.What I love about my people is that in the hard time they can still afford to give you a good smile That you can see from a mile When I was a child I use to sleep with my belly facing The sky with my eyes staring at the moon and the stars Natasha Mitchell: And I´ve popped the details of Emmanuel Jal´s charity Gua Africa on the All in the Mind website. His book is Warchild, published by Little Brown Books and it´s also the name of his latest album which follows the success of his debut called Ceasefire which was a powerful collaboration with Muslim Sudanese artist Abdel Gadir Salim. He has a new free single just out on Myspace to commemorate his year long fast. The show´s audio, transcript and our email and the All in the Mind blog for your comments all via abc.net.au/rn/allinthemind and you can now add your comments directly on the All in the Mind website too, where you can find the transcript and audio for each week's edition. Thanks to Anita Barraud and Joel Church, I´m Natasha Mitchell catch you next week.

Dreams feel meaningful—drawn from a mishmash of content from our waking lives. But it's a hot debate among scientists, who are yet to confirm why we sleep, let alone dream. Neuroscientist Matthew Wilson's extraordinary experiments involve eavesdropping on the sleeping minds of rats. He proposes dreaming is central to how we remember and learn. TRANSCRIPT: Matthew Wilson: Memory is really much more than simply a record of experience, it is what really defines who we are and who we are going to be. We really have to rethink the term itself—memory. Edwin Robertson: There has been an intuitive connection for literally thousands of years between sleep and memory. I mean even such simple phrases as, 'Oh, I´ll need to sleep on it,' suggests that we have an intuitive notion that sleep is important for memory processing. Natasha Mitchell: And welcome to All in the Mind on Radio National Summer. I´m Natasha Mitchell. And in this show - memory—is it the stuff that dreams are made of, literally? So sit back, start counting those sheep. Believe it or not, we´re dreaming one neuron at a time. Last week you might have caught my interview with dream worker and Jungian analyst Robert Bosnak and you can catch the audio on our website. On the question of whether a psychoanalyst´s take on dreams can ever be reconciled with a neuroscientist´s—here´s what he says. Robert Bosnak: Oh yes, I think they are being reconciled as we speak. For instance we´re finding in neuroscience that cognition and the neocortex is involved in dreaming and that therefore meaning can come from dreaming itself. I think that more of these connections are going to be found. You have to see that neuroscience is very young: MRIs started in 1993 so we´ve been doing MRIs for 16 years and the resolution on MRIs is about as good as photography in the 1820s. So it is just beginning, and I think that neuroscience as it matures will find more and more connections between their field and ours. Natasha Mitchell: So today we´re considering a vexed question in neuroscience—do we dream in order to remember? One of the reasons this is tricky for science is that, surprisingly, we don´t really know why it is we sleep, let alone dream. Edwin Robertson: Yes, it is surprising that we spend so much of our time asleep but yet we still don´t really have a clear understanding of why it is that we do sleep. Natasha Mitchell: Edwin Robertson is assistant professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School. Edwin Robertson: I think that part of the problem very often is that we imagine that all animals use sleep for the same purpose. The function of sleep in humans might be quite different from the function that a koala uses sleep for. So the koala most likely uses sleep for the regulation and conservation of energy and that's why it ends up sleeping for 20 hours a day, whereas our human need for sleep may be driven by other alternative factors. Natasha Mitchell: Is sleep there to help our body recover metabolically, or is it actually fundamentally about allowing us to consolidate the stuff that goes through our brain during the day? What do you think? Matthew Wilson: Well I think it´s a combination of all of these things. Clearly there is a metabolic component to it. So this is something cells should do, that bodies should do. The question is whether that´s all it does. Natasha Mitchell: Matthew Wilson is professor of neuroscience at MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory in Boston. Matthew Wilson: The resting brain is not really resting at all, it´s extremely active and that activity in many respects is indistinguishable from the activity that´s engaged in during wakefulness. Can all of that be going on to no useful end? And I think that the answer to that is probably no. But to be fair to those critics that argue that nothing goes on during sleep, there is no processing of memory, there is no learning, it is something that has not yet been proven unequivocally but this is simply a matter of time. Natasha Mitchell: As you´ll hear, Matthew Wilson is leading the charge with some extraordinary experiments testing a theory that sleep is key to remembering and learning. And without the capacity to learn we wouldn´t really be human would we? We´ll come to where dreams fit in in a moment but let´s start with why the machinations of our memory might need sleep. Each time we remember something a vast network of brain cells fire together corresponding to that memory, they chemically communicate with each other across the synapses or junctions between them. The more a memory is recalled, the stronger those synaptic connections are. Edwin Robertson. Edwin Robertson: Sleep is often viewed as a special environment for memory processing. Some people might argue that this special environment is merely that it performs protective function, it´s a protective cocoon, because when you´re asleep you can´t get any further experiences during that time and it prevents memories from being interfered with. Other theories would say no, that´s incorrect, that there´s actually profoundly important electrophysiological events that occur in the sleeping brain that are important for memory processing per se. Natasha Mitchell: What´s the other prevailing theory for why sleep is so crucial for memory? Edwin Robertson: There´s an idea that essentially sleep allows a homeostatic readjustment of synapses during awake you´re bombarded by experiences and that leads to multiple synapses being engaged and their weights being changed. And then what sleep allows—and specifically actually slow wave sleep—is a pruning back of those unimportant synapses. So it´s kind of like I imagine in some senses the judicial pruning of your roses to get a nicer flower. So the idea is that the slow wave sleep is able to prune back synapses that are energetically wasteful but are also wasteful in an information processing account because they are adding noise. And that clearer crisper signal then translates into improved performance the next day. Natasha Mitchell: So from the possible role of sleep to that of dreams. Is it simply a coincidence that we often dream about things we happen to remember, things that have happened to us or that we´ve learned from our waking lives? Some scientists think of dreams as epi-phenomena that is meaningless, random by-products of the real business of the thinking brain. Neuroscientist Matthew Wilson—controversially for some—disagrees. Matthew Wilson: I think they are not meaningless. It´s easier to see what the meaning, that potential meaning, might be when we study animals like rats, whose life experience is much simpler than ours. So when we study the dreams of rats we´re studying animals that have only had months of experience and we´ve controlled all of that experience, and what we see reflects very closely their actual experience. Now a human, when we think about our own human dreams, we´re thinking about dreams that now have access to decades of experience. They may seem complex and obscure because they are bringing together, combining and evaluating decades of memories and experience. But if we think about dreams not as a process of simply retrieving, of replaying memories, but of re-evaluating, reorganising something—akin to taking piles of paper that have accumulated and now one needs to organise it. As you go through this process picking up one piece of paper and another they may not seem related but as you organise them the end product is something that is actually more useful. So if we think about dreams and the seemingly chaotic structure and nature of dreams as reflecting this process of reorganisation, I think we get a better idea of what might be going on during sleep. Again, not simply taking memories, replaying them and transferring them to other parts of the brain, but really re-evaluating, reorganising. Natasha Mitchell: So in a sense it´s a filing process and some people think that sleep and dreams allow for memories to be organised into a sort of more efficient storage system. Matthew Wilson: Correct. The most efficient again being the discovery of rules and relationships and condensing it into something that now captures all of the relationships that were present—the rule—and so discovering the rule may be precisely the kind of complex, difficult to understand processing that goes on during sleep and dreams. Natasha Mitchell; It´s so interesting, because our dreaming brain seems to want to try and make sense of all the elements that it´s you know messing about with. I mean my dreams I´ve got to say are grand epic narratives every night on a scale of Gone with the Wind, I´ve got to tell you, it´s exhausting. It certainly seems much more anarchic than the way we normally remember in our waking lives. Matthew Wilson: I think if we think about this kind of process not simply about retrieving memories and storing them, but taking them and trying to imagine a future that could have come from them, synthesising rather than simply storing. Perhaps your epic narratives are in a way projecting where you would like to go, where your memories and your experience feel that you could go. You know you may never get there but the brain is trying to understand in a sense, pushed to its limits, where experience tells it it might go. Natasha Mitchell: Memory is imagining the future not just storing the past—nice idea. Matthew Wilson comes to dreams from his first research love which is memory. And if you thought sleep was scientifically elusive, try memory. It´s that complexity that AS Byatt reflects on in her recent collection, Memory and Anthology a compilation of literary and scientific musings on the many faces of memory.[Reading]: I have a memory I think of as 'The Memory'. It is seen from the point of view of a small person seeing over the wall of a playground in East Hardwick Elementary School. The stone is hot, and is that kind that flakes into gold slivers. The sun is very bright. There´s a tree overhead and leaves catch the light and are golden and in the shade they are blue/green. Over the wall and across the road is a field full of daisies and buttercups and speedwell and shepherd´s purse. On the horizon are trees with thick trunks and solid branches. The child thinks I am always going to remember this, then she thinks, what is remembering? This is the point where myself then and myself now confuse themselves into one. I know I´ve added to this memory every time I have thought about it, or brought it out to look at it. It has acquired notes of Paradise Lost which I don´t think it had when I was 5 or 6. It has got further away and brighter, more or less real. I always associate it with one of my very few good memories of my maternal grandmother, a perpetually cross person who never smiled. The year she died she began to forget, and forgot to be irritated. She said to me sitting by the fire at Christmas, do you remember all the beautiful young men in the fields? And she smiled at me like a sensuous young girl. She may have been talking about the airmen who were billeted on her in the war, or she may have been remembering something from long before my mother was born. I shall never know. But I can see the young men in the fields. Matthew Wilson: Memory is really more about learning, learning from the past rather than simply storing it. The challenge that the brain has is trying to form a model of the world; we are constantly trying to understand how the world works so that we can make predictions. Of course our biggest challenge is making good decisions in novel contexts or circumstances. Not simply repeating the past, often repeating the mistakes of the past, but rather trying to learn from that so that we can make decisions in unpredictable circumstances. And that´s what really separates us, sensient organisms that are able to move forward in an unpredictable world, separates us from simple computing devices. And so my deeper interest is in this re-evaluation, revisitation—how memory is retrieved, restored and re-examined because this is memory put to use. Natasha Mitchell: But take us inside your lab, you´ve developed some quite extraordinary experimental techniques to effectively eavesdrop on memories as they´re formed in the brain cells of rats. What approach have you taken and what have you been able to measure? Matthew Wilson: Well what we are measuring are the discharges of individual brain cells. Brain cells communicate through electrical signals, changes in voltages much like the pops and clicks that you might hear on the radio if you tune it to some place between stations on the dial. These little electrical discharges are driven by input from the outside world so there´s a code that is created. Now what we would like to be able to do is to listen in on these signals, and what that requires us to do is take very fine electrodes—electrodes are little wires about the size of a human hair, smaller than a human hair actually—we take these wires and we send them down into the brain where they can listen in to these signals. They are placed next to brain cells. We leave them there permanently so that we have little microphones distributed across the brain and as animals engage in normal behaviour: sitting, resting, sleeping, running, we can follow the activity of these brain cells. Not just individual brain cells but many of them because we implant many of these very fine electrodes. So what we have are rodents, rats and mice, that have little badminton shaped hats, now it´s these hats when we plug our electronics into them we´re able to take the signals, the brain signals out, amplify them and record them on our computers, then follow the patterns as animals engage in normal daily experience. Natasha Mitchell: Well as normal as the life of the rat in a lab can be, I guess. The making of memory, ours and rats', involves a couple of key brain structures, our brain´s ancient core which we share with reptiles called the limbic system and especially a structure in it called the hippocampus, and this communicates with the outer layer of our brains, the neocortex; newer in evolutionary terms, and busy with the processing of sensations, perceptions, thinking, planning, evaluating social behaviours etc. So back to that extraordinary rat rig-up we just heard about. Matthew Wilson: One of the reasons we were interested in sleep is that during sleep the brain in a sense is cut off from the outside world. So that if we see patterns, or we see traces of past experience popping up once again, we know that it is in fact memory, because it´s not being driven by anything the animal is currently experiencing. So we are using sleep as a way of looking for and examining the content and structure of memory. And what we found was that when animals would engage in very simple behaviours, running around in little mazes, and as the animals would run along these tracks in this part of the brain, the hippocampus, very unique patterns that allowed us to tell from moment to moment precisely where the animal was and what it was doing. So very much like a video record of the animal´s actual behaviour. Now we would look for these patterns as they changed over time, much like we would be watching a movie and then going back to see whether or not that movie was being replayed. And what we discovered was that during sleep, in fact small segments of these animals' experience running through the maze was replayed. But it was replayed in a form that was compressed: seconds or even minutes of experience would be re-expressed in just a fraction of a second. So little flashes of activity in the brain which would replay small segments of the animal´s past experience. And this would go on over and over as the animal slept. Natasha Mitchell: I wonder if that´s a conscious process or an unconscious process? Matthew Wilson: Well that´s a great question, of course now we can´t ask the rats whether or what it is that they´re thinking about. We can only measure what it is that they are thinking about. So it is a bit of a stretch, I´m always a bit reluctant to refer to what we are looking at as a process of thought, but I have to say that if it looks like a duck, if it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck it probably is a duck. And in this case I believe that these rats are thinking but we don´t know how much of it is actually making its way to the level of consciousness that we might introspectively think we engage in. Natasha Mitchell: How do you know that the patterns of neurons that you´re measuring, firing in a sleeping rat who happens to be remembering an activity when they were awake, actually corresponds to those precise patterns that they also played out in their brain when they were doing the activity. I mean is the correlation that precise? Matthew Wilson: It is that precise. Literally individual brain cells in this part of the brain, the hippocampus, they fire in a unique pattern, a unique sequence when individual animals engage in unique behaviour in a unique context. If we take an animal and we put it in one room and have it run back and forth for chocolate, we will see one pattern. If we have the animal do exactly the same thing but simply move it to another room, we see another unique pattern. If we bring the animal back to the original room, that original pattern returns. So it is as though an animal´s experience in a given place at a given time is captured. So it´s the fact that we can see the unique fingerprints during awake experience that then allows us to go back and interpret these unique fingerprints of brain activity during sleep. So it is the remarkable property of this part of the brain, the hippocampus. Natasha Mitchell: Eavesdropping on the neuronal fireworks going on in the hippocampus of a sleeping rat—it´s incredible, but at what point does dreaming come into this story? Matthew Wilson: We follow that up by looking elsewhere in the brain and discovered that when this part of the brain, the old part of the brain, the hippocampus, was replaying these memories that the new part, the neocortex, the part that deals with perception and action, was also replaying the same information. So as the hippocampus replayed memory of what the animal was doing, the visual cortex would replay what the animal was seeing. Now you might think of that as being perhaps a description of what we would call a dream, events that seem to occur over time that carry with them the imagery of experience. And these rats seemed to be engaging in precisely that kind of behaviour during sleep—just as we introspectively feel that we do. So it suggested that this part of sleep, slow wave sleep, is the kind of sleep that you enter into, it´s a very primitive form of sleep, not what you typically associate with dream sleep but the slow wave sleep where you can see this memory replay going on. Now we realised that this kind of sleep like activity didn´t simply go on during slow wave sleep, it also went on whenever animals were simply sitting quietly, resting. There was even more than simple replay going on. We found these events being replayed but in reverse time order, it was as though the animals were playing their memories backward, backward in time. Now that seemed curious, why would you want to play memories backward in time? Natasha Mitchell: Why indeed? Matthew Wilson: Well it turns out there had been a whole field of study in the area known as machine learning, trying to get computers to learn the way animals and humans do. And this strategy of playing things backward turned out to be important in learning for machines. It simply wasn´t known, or perhaps even believed, that it could be done in biological systems, in animals or humans. And so here in a sense these rats were demonstrating that memory was being processed precisely in the way that it should if it were being used to drive learning. So it wasn´t simply replaying it for the purpose of creating imagery, creating dreams, it was doing it in order to learn from it. So that when animals were sitting quietly they were pondering what they had done, perhaps planning what they were going to do for the purpose of learning, trying to figure things out, building models in order to try to anticipate future choices and decisions. Natasha Mitchell: As convincing as the data from Matthew Wilson´s lab rats sounds, linking learning and memory, there is a robust debate going on here and not everyone´s convinced that memory and dreams are linked. Edwin Robertson. Edwin Robertson: They´ve shown very nice work, showing that in the hippocampus during slow wave sleep or in the parietal cortex, in the motor cortex, in the prefrontal cortex, that during periods of sleep the patterns of neural activity that you see as an animal is moving around and navigating around a maze are re-instantiated, are replayed during periods of sleep. The challenges that face the community in fully fleshing that idea out I think are several-fold. Firstly the replay that people see neurophysiologically is at a completely different time base than when the rat is finding its way around the maze neurons go a lot more slowly than when you see that replay occurring during sleep. So why is it time-compressed and can we really think that time compression as being really truly replayed? I think the second point, which is a far stronger and more problematic element, is that no one has yet demonstrated that that replay is then linked to the benefits or the behavioural manifestation of memory consolidation. So it´s never been shown for example if you disrupt that replay that you prevent memory consolidation. Nor that the amount of replay is related to memory consolidation. So certainly does replay occur during sleep? Yes. Does it have anything to do with memory processing? Unfortunately we still don´t know, it certainly as a neuro-physiological phenomenon it occurs, how that relates to my behaviour the next morning we still don´t know unfortunately. Natasha Mitchell: That said there is an effort to probe what happens to our capacity to learn and remember when we miss sleep—and don´t we all—and it seems to be bad news for humans. Matthew Wilson. Matthew Wilson: Now one can also see that there are effects of sleep when you train an animal to perform a difficult task. One sees that the structure of their sleep changes, that the amount of this kind of processing that we see changes, that they use sleep to try to go back and study, replay, re-evaluate things that were important in solving tasks. Natasha Mitchell: Well that´s interesting, isn´t it, because science is certainly starting to tangibly prove that if we miss sleep our ability to learn and remember is fundamentally affected. Matthew Wilson: That´s correct, there´s a lot of evidence that points to that. Now again to be fair to the critics of the sleep, memory and learning hypothesis, that does not indicate that the memory processing during sleep is important; only that the sleep state itself is important—that when deprived of sleep it affects general things like attention, it affects stress; it´s generally disruptive. Not specifically disruptive to memory; the sleep, memory and learning hypothesis really says that it is the information that the brain is actually processing, the things that you dream about, that lead to specific enhancements, specific learning when you wake up. And that´s again something that requires more study. It is something that I firmly believe that we will answer. Natasha Mitchell: We´ve heard about the rats replaying and reorganising memories, at least during slow wave sleep. We do dream in this phase but the dreams aren´t as lively or as frequent as is the case for REM sleep. But some folk don´t experience REM at all, and if memory and dreaming are linked according to Matthew Wilson´s theory, does that mean they can´t remember anything either? Matthew Wilson thinks REM sleep might in fact pay more of a value-adding role after slow wave sleep has done its work, a sort of mental testing ground for creativity and imagination, new ideas and possibilities. Higher order thinking—but is that something rats can do though? Traditionally I guess we´ve possibly thought that animals can´t possibly have as rich a dream life as us. Matthew Wilson: Or a dream life at all. Natasha Mitchell: Or a dream life at all. Matthew Wilson: Absolutely, I think that the idea that animals live in the present, this is a very common, persistent and overwhelmingly dominant view: memory allows them to modify the brain, to change the way they act in the present, but they simply don´t live in the past, they don´t think into the future. I think that that is changing; what we´re seeing is that they do both, and that the way in which they do it may not be entirely dissimilar from the way in which humans do that. So that all of cognition, not just human cognition, may possess this kind of rich tapestry of experience. And I think that that is something that, to me, is very reassuring, that we are not alone, we are not unique in the domain of animals and organisms, that the world is a much richer place for all of us. Natasha Mitchell: Matthew Wilson you are a neuroscientist and an engineer, you´re a long way away from the realm of Dr Sigmund Freud, but he embraced dreams and memory with equal passion to yourself, and I wonder if there´s an interesting potential for a convergence between the thinking of psychoanalysists like Jung and Freud and your own investigations of dreams and memory. Matthew Wilson: Well I think to the extent that we start on common ground and that is the belief that there is meaning to dreams, that these are windows into a level of brain function that´s not normally accessible during our awake life. Now trying to interpret the imagery, you know the content, that´s where things become difficult, that that´s probably where basic neuroscience diverges from the Freudian psychoanalytical perspective: we´re not simply trying to interpret the patterns that we see, we´re trying to understand how the patterns contribute to the process, the construction of models of the world that we use to guide decisions. Natasha Mitchell: Matthew Wilson from MIT, thanks for joining us on ABC Radio National, and sweet dreams. Matthew Wilson: You´re welcome, you too, Natasha. Natasha Mitchell: Professor Matthew Wilson from the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT and before him Edwin Robertson from Harvard Medical School. And we´d love your comments on the last two shows on dreams on the blog, simple to do and it always sparks conversation among other listeners, we love that. All at

Jungian psychoanalyst and psychotherapist Robert Bosnak is a dream worker. To him dreams are an ecosystem of imaginings—powerful bodily experiences populated by characters with their own intelligences. When you encounter the images of your dreaming mind do you find one Self, or many? And, next week, a leading neuroscientist probing the possible link between memory and dreaming. TRANSCRIPT: Robert Bosnak: While you´re dreaming, you´re in a real place. At the moment that you´re in a dream you actually believe firmly that you´re awake. And so as you are in that world everything around you is embodied. When I am in a dream where I´m sitting at a table and I knock on the table, the table will give me sound and it will give me the feeling of hardness. So in a dream the imagination presents itself as embodied. Natasha Mitchell: We are channelling your dreaming mind and body on All in the Mind over the next two shows here on Radio National Summer. A warm welcome to you, I´m Natasha Mitchell. Next week a leading neuroscientist probing the connection between memory and dreams and his work is conceptually staggering as you´ll hear. But today, the therapeutic potential of dreams, my guest is well known Dutch psychoanalyst and psychotherapist Robert Bosnak. After 25 years in the USA he now lives and works here in Australia. He also runs an internet dream network called Cyberdreamwork. In his most recent book, called Embodiment:Creative Imagination in Medicine, Art and Travel, Robert explains a compelling idea that dreams are a sort of ecosystem of imaginings, powerful bodily experiences—and the body is key—that are populated by characters with their own intelligences, and that curious idea really forms the basis of his work. Robert Bosnak thanks for joining me on All in the Mind this week. Robert Bosnak: Thank you very much for having me again. Natasha Mitchell: Look, some scientists think of dreams as having no real biological purpose, they are just our forebrains trying to make sense of what some people dub cerebral white noise that´s generated by our brain stem when we sleep. It´s a live debate isn´t it? Robert Bosnak: At least for the last few years it was mainly fought out between people that adhere to the notion that we dream mainly during REM sleep and the other people who say yes, we dream 95% during REM sleep, so during REM sleep when you wake a person up during rapid eye movements they will report a dream 95% of the time. But 70% of the awakenings for instance with sleep onset when there is not REM sleep also give you dreams. And therefore the brain is doing different things than we thought initially, because REM sleep comes from the brain stem and there are now people who say (and I agree with them), that the whole brain is involved, also the cortex. So that there is meaningful information coming that is not just noise out of which the forebrain, the cortex, makes information, but information that is inherently meaningful. That´s the debate at the moment. Natasha Mitchell: Still though many scientists see dreams as essentially devoid of meaning, that they are simply the neuronal flotsam from our waking lives. The jury is still very much out when it comes to neuroscience, less so for psychoanalysts like yourself. Robert Bosnak: One of the interesting things of course about dreaming is that it will present the face that you look at it with, so if you think that dreams are utterly meaningless, then you will get dreams that are like a jumble of information. If you believe however that dreams are meaningful, that they contain intelligent information, then you get dreams that are more intelligent. It´s very strange about dreams because for instance people that are in Jungian analysis after a while will report dreams that fit with Jungian theory; people in Freudian analysis will get more dreams that fit with Freudian theory. So it seems that the creative imagination of dreaming very much presents the face that you face it with. Natasha Mitchell: Well that´s human nature in a sense isn´t it, we find meaning where we look for it and how we look for it? Robert Bosnak: Absolutely. Natasha Mitchell: Let´s climb inside this idea of embodied imagination that you´ve been working with for some 30 years now. Before we unpack how you use it with clients, where did the idea stem from? Robert Bosnak: The idea has been around for a long, long time, I would say thousands of years. In my life it comes from a scholar of the visionary tradition in Islam and his name was Henry Corbin. And Corbin said that these entities that we encounter are intelligent, they carry their own intelligence, and that creative imagination is inherently intelligent. And this was a way of looking at the imagination that was particularly strong up until about 800 years ago, and then slowly imagination became the opposite of reality. And that´s where I started. Natasha Mitchell: In a sense from the point of view of the dreaming mind at least you suggest that dreams are real events in real environments. Robert Bosnak: Exactly, that´s the point of view where I start, because I think that the moment you wake up you wake up into your particular culture. Now my interest has been to go to many different places in the world and see how people dream. They dream very similarly, but when they wake up, they wake up into their culture so if you wake up as someone who believes that dreams stem from the ancestors, then you´ve heard ancestors. If you´re a psychologist and you believe that dreams relay parts of yourself, then you see dreams as part of yourself. If you believe the dreams are meaningless you will see them as meaningless. So I am trying to go back before the culture makes its judgments, I´m trying to go back to the dream as it was being dreamed. Natasha Mitchell: Let´s just go back to your inspiration from the French philosopher and professor of Islamic studies, of all things, Henry Corbin. You met him and he had a sense that the west had come to misconstrue the imagination. Robert Bosnak: Yes, he always was talking about the great cataclysm that happened about 700, 800 years ago when we moved from a philosophy that was based on the fact that there were three realms of reality: the physical reality and the spiritual reality which now we would call the mental reality or the mathematical reality. There was a third reality in between and that was the reality of imagination. Then in about 700, 800 years ago that realm of the imagination as reality dropped out and it became just mind and matter. It moved from imagination being one form of reality into imagination being the opposite of reality—and that he found very tragic. Natasha Mitchell: You know, Sigmund Freud and Karl Jung certainly conceived of dreams as sort of sub-personalities. In Freud´s case I guess a whole bunch of repressed sub-personalities. Instead you describe dreams as forms of intelligence, and even alien intelligences, and I wonder if you´re taking us into the realms of gnomes and flying saucers here. Robert Bosnak: Absolutely not. They are alien to what I call the habitual self, what we habitually think about ourselves, so when I have certain feelings, certain responses, then I say that is my response. Now in dreaming you see that there is not only an intelligent I, the one that walks around, for instance, down the street, but when you see in dreams there are other people walking also on the street that display intelligence. And what I´m going from is, as Corbin did, from a radical form of phenomenology, I´m just trying to look at the phenomena. As I look at the phenomena the person who comes towards me in the street appears to be a carrier of a certain kind of consciousness. It´s not the consciousness that I'm identified with, it´s another kind of consciousness. And what I´m trying to do in my work is to see if we can partake of that consciousness and learn something about non-ego, non-habitual forms of consciousness. Natasha Mitchell: Now this really challenges are core sense that we are a singular self, a single identity contained within a singular skin. Robert Bosnak: Yes it does completely. Actually it is becoming more or less recognised within many sides and fields and schools of psychoanalysis that we are a very dissociable collection of states. This used to be seen as abnormal psychology but we begin to see more and more that that is more or less the norm. If it becomes extreme then you get people with what used to be called multiple-personality. So then the states are completely disassociated, they have no contact with each other. In the normal way the states are relatively independent and autonomous and there is contact between them, but it is not that I am a single self that over/during my life fractures. No, I am as far as I can see it, a multiplicity of states that is in a constant state of interaction. Natasha Mitchell: Your suggestion is that if we rehearse the images we encounter in dreams: the characters, the images, the landscapes, that may help grow our bodies into new ways of being in the world, as you put it. I mean can you unpack that for us with an example? Robert Bosnak: Yes, a man from Japan he had a dream in which he was sitting at a table in a restaurant and there were several other characters who were very different from him also sitting around the table. And as he began to identify with each of these characters and began to participate in their state, all these different intelligences at the table, he began to feel his body very different. His body was entirely different, he felt. He said, 'This body I don´t recognise, it´s like a rental body.' He was a very slim, thin kind of man and I said, 'Well keep on rehearsing this.' And as he was rehearsing this body, that was much bigger than his body was at the moment, he realised that he needed to expand his body and that he had to get into a bigger kind of body, and he started swimming. And a year afterwards his body was considerably larger because he had been swimming every day, and from a rental body, as he called it, it had become a permanent body. Natasha Mitchell: You often work in groups, and I´m interested in where you start, how does it work? Robert Bosnak: It begins with just regular conversation. And then somebody presents a dream or a memory—I now very frequently also work with memories—and we ask the person now tell us the dream as much from the moment that you were dreaming it as you can. So really get into the dream and when you´re fully in the dream start talking, tell us what is happening to you. So for instance this Japanese man says, 'I am going into a restaurant and I see a table, and the table is round, and there are chairs.' And then we ask, 'What´s the light like?' And he says, 'Well, it´s very bright inside and there are other people sitting at the table.' I ask, 'Are there any smells?' He says, 'Yes, there are smells of fish.' And after a while he begins to feel emotionally what is going on with him in the restaurant, and then we go from the emotions to the physical sensations. He says, 'I feel very tense,' for instance, 'and I can feel the tension in my stomach.' So we focus on the stomach, really stay with that stomach until he can fully feel the whole mood of that place. Then we move to the next moment, so on my left he says, 'There is sitting a man in a green suit and he´s very strong and he can take initiative, he´s very different from the way I am because the way I am is I cannot take any decision, I´ve graduated from my psychology masters four months ago and I have not been able to make any moves. This man has get up and go.' And so we begin to focus on how that looks. And in the meantime everybody in the group is beginning to ask him questions that will focus him on this man in the green suit. Then he begins to feel into that man in the green suit and suddenly he feels. oh, this man has really strong in the legs, and so he begins to feel into the legs of the man and then that´s how we move throughout the dream. Then in the end he will be able to hold a variety of states in the same time in his body and that creates a change. Natasha Mitchell: Now the key here is that you´re working with people in what you call a 'waking hypnagogic state'. They are not actually lucid dreaming, they are not in an actual dream, consciously narrating what´s going on, they are not wide awake either, are they? Robert Bosnak: They are in the state of consciousness that we pass through as we are falling asleep. What we are doing is we are artificially staying in that state between waking and sleeping which is called the hypnagogic state by the dream laboratory academics, and in this hypnagogic state there is waking consciousness present and also the image can once again be an environment. So the man can feel himself fully in the restaurant and at the same time he´s fully aware that he´s sitting in this room working on a dream. So that is what is called a dual consciousness, so we are in a dual consciousness in a hypnagogic state. Natasha Mitchell: On Radio National Robert Bosnak is my guest. A Dutch Jungian psychotherapist now based in Australia, Robert helps people work with the emotional and physical content of their dreams in very physical ways as we´re hearing. In fact, Robert Bosnak, you´ve especially worked with a lot of people over the years who are very ill, or have a terminal illness, I mean this is a very different sort of bodily experience that you´re negotiating here and you find some interesting universals in their dreams. Robert Bosnak: An unusual amount of animals, I find. That just maybe my way of seeing it, and I don `t know if the people who study dream content have the same experience and when you then in the work begin to identify with those animals you get a very strongly different experience of body. I´ll give you an example that also stems from my work in Japan: this is a man who has a tumour on his anus that is about as big as grapefruit and he cannot sit up anymore, he has to lie down, he´s in constant pain, he has decided that he doesn´t want to live anymore and doesn´t want to communicate with anybody. He´s very withdrawn and isolated. He has a dream about a cat and this I did with a colleague of mine, Dr Kishimoto in Shizuoka. We help him identify with that cat and begin to feel in his body the movement of the cat. And suddenly he´s in a body that is much more supple than his body. After we work and we help him get into that supple body of the cat his relationships begin to change: his relationship with his family changes, his relationships with the nurses on the palliative care ward change, he now is no longer stiffly frightened of death only. I don´t know if it made his life longer, he died about three months later, but he was much more elastic, much more supple. Natasha Mitchell: I can imagine though you´re dealing with people who could be quite resistant to suddenly trying to climb inside the bodies that populate their dreams when they are facing death. Robert Bosnak: Yes, and I am not in any way suggesting that this should be done with everybody. I learned to do this work in the 1980s when my practice was flooded with people with AIDS, so I found that they were very receptive to feeling into all these different elements of the dream that was being presented. And they got a great deal of solace from it. It suddenly changed from being a totally meaningless attack, and a meaningless suffering and a sense of intense guilt and all those kind of things, into something that they could make contact with. Something that was not so foreign, not so alien, they are in their body differently. Natasha Mitchell: In all this, this is still our imagination that you´re working with and you´re guiding your clients´ imagination with your own biases, your own training, your own templates, your own symbolism and even your own baggage, your own history. I guess is there a fine line here between cultivating a sort of true, fluid, imaginative process for someone and simply a sort of guided storytelling, an interpretive session. Robert Bosnak: Yes, so what we are trying to do is we are trying not to suggest anything. So we are asking questions that as much as possible don´t lead the witness. So when the Japanese man walks in to a restaurant we don´t say what is that restaurant for you, what does that restaurant mean for you, we ask what is the light like? When you sit on the chair what does your butt feel like? So we strive to stay as close to the phenomena as we can without as much as possible not making any interpretation. And as you do that the phenomena begin to reveal themselves, and I don´t think that that is a story that then we are making up. I think there is a significant difference between creative imagination and fabrication. Natasha Mitchell: What is that difference, because I guess the brain, we have a tendency to always be searching for meaning, to always be trying to attach meaning to an observation that we're making, whether it be a dream or a real life scene, and people are selecting the dreams that they decide to share with you in the very first place. Robert Bosnak: Yes, I´ll give you an example. This is a dream of a man who is a therapist and is working in a hospital, he´s in the nurses room and suddenly he is stumbling down the stairs and there is a huge bear that runs down the stairs, runs through the hall and out the door. We worked this dream in a group and somebody in the group, the person asked, what is the bear feeling. And the man says, 'Oh the bear is really curious, the bear is really curious to what is happening.' Now at this moment I feel absolutely nothing in my body, so I begin to assume that he´s talking very mentally, and that he is fabricating a story about the bear. So we stopped the work at that point, have him look at the bear again, look at what the front paws are like, begin to sense those front legs, and he begins to sense this enormous amount of power in the bear, this enormous amount of energy. And as he slowly begins to through a process of interior miming become like the bear, suddenly he´s identified with the bear and he feels this enormous thrust in the hindlegs and is pushed through the hall and out the door and out, out, out, this bear just wants to get out. This bear is totally claustrophobic and you can feel it throughout the body. Now that is embodied imagination, very different from fabrication. Natasha Mitchell: So what happens? Robert Bosnak: What happens is that this man is in contact with the claustrophobia of the bear, and in a body that is much more powerful than actually it´s allowed to be. The intelligence in this bear is an intense sense of claustrophobia and a need to get out, that is the meaning that is fully present in a visceral sense and he has now participated in that. What it then—from there on, what that physical sense is like in his life, where in his life he feels that kind of claustrophobia—it may be in his marriage, it may be in his work, it may be in his studies. That we can then explore, because we have a visceral sense of what it is like to be so claustrophobic. And then from that moment on a whole lot of questions begin to arise that are questions of psychotherapy. Natasha Mitchell: You work with clients who have all sorts of traumas in their lives, some very serious. And in effect dreams can sometimes rehearse those traumas. This is very delicate work, isn´t it, encouraging people to relive, re-experience traumas as they manifest in their dreams? This is dangerous, in fact. Robert Bosnak: You have to be really careful, because people are very easily re-traumatised. The way that I work with trauma is I don´t go to the traumatic experience directly. Like, for instance, a woman who has been raped, I don´t go to the memory of the rape directly, but maybe I might go to what the room was like in which it happened, or what the door was like that she entered through. So we don´t get directly to the direct experience of it but we stay in the periphery of it and feel the images in the periphery of the event and that then can bring up a whole new series of awarenesses that are not re-traumatising. So the danger of working with trauma is re-traumatisation. Natasha Mitchell: A big risk. Robert Bosnak: There are always risks in working with trauma, but what I have seen is the outcomes of working with trauma and dreams is a very positive one, because we have found in the research that dreams themselves are constantly integrating trauma. That was research done by Ernest Hartmann about how dreams integrate for instance the great fire in San Francisco, that you first see dreams of the fire and then you see dreams of floods and then you see dreams maybe of car accidents, so it becomes increasingly personal and slowly gets integrated through the dreaming into the general system. So the idea is that dreaming already is part of an integrative process of trauma. Natasha Mitchell: Well I must admit that over the last two weeks I´ve had a number of dreams involving fire and bushfires, given what´s happening in Victoria. Robert Bosnak: Absolutely, but I think that what you would find as you are aware of these dreams, that the content will become increasingly personal, because it moves out of this totally overwhelming collective event, it slowly becomes increasingly again a personal event. Natasha Mitchell: They were undoubtedly personal, actually, but fire, bushfire was part of it. Robert Bosnak: Yes, so Hartman would say that is a part already of the integration processes of this overwhelming experience that you´ve all gone through. Natasha Mitchell: You talk about this idea of sense memories; it´s interesting because other neuroscientists are investigating how dreams might in fact be a part of the brain´s way of consolidating new memories formed during the day. And I wonder if we were to bridge science and your psychoanalytic thinking about dreams—is this getting closer to your thinking about how dreams work in the body? Robert Bosnak: Much closer, they have done studies with rats in certain mazes that would run all day in the maze and then at night they find exactly the same thing happening in the brain ,so that the rat is integrating what they´ve learned from running through the maze at night. So there is some kind of a process of bringing something into the system of the embodied psychological system from the day, and I would say it also goes through a meaning process, especially for humans. And so you get a combination of learning the event that you´ve gone through and consolidating that, but there is a mixture of meaning because that event had a certain meaning to you. So yes, it becomes very similar to what we are talking about in psychoanalysis. Natasha Mitchell: And in fact I´ve got that research on the program next week. Robert Bosnak: Oh, interesting. Natasha Mitchell: In a sense, even though you are a Jungian psychoanalyst, I do get the sense that you don´t rely heavily on interpretive Jungian archetypes like the shadow, or the ego, in order to sort of interpret your client´s dreams. You are much more fluid, in fact you´ve described the landscape that you are trying to get them to occupy as an ecology. Are you abandoning your Jungian heritage In some ways? Robert Bosnak: Oh not at all, I´m trying to go back to the preconceptual Jung where Jung was a phenomenologist himself and he just looked at what he saw and what he experienced. Because, for instance, for me, it is crazy if a woman enters into my dream and in my dream she comes in the door and I say to her, 'You are my anima,' I hope she would slap me in the face, she´s not an anima, she´s a person that is entering the room. And so that is what I am trying to get back to, the visceral direct experience of the phenomenon. The difference in my work and Jung´s work is that I slow down the process of being inside the image environment to the point that it goes so slow that it suddenly jumps into the body and becomes an embodied experience. Natasha Mitchell: There are fracture lines, aren´t there, between neuroscientific approaches to dreams and psychoanalytic approaches to dreams? I wonder if they´re ever reconcilable. Robert Bosnak: Oh yes, I think they are being reconciled as we speak. For instance we´re finding in neuroscience that cognition and the neocortex is involved in dreaming and that therefore meaning can come from dreaming itself. I think that more of these connections are going to be found. You have to see that neuroscience is very, very young. MRIs started in 1993, so we´ve been doing MRIs for 16 years and the resolution on MRIs is about as good as photography in the 1820s, so it is just beginning. And I think neuroscience as it matures will find more and more connections between their field and ours. Natasha Mitchell: Robert Bosnak, thank you for joining me on ABC Radio National. Robert Bosnak: Thank you very much for having me. Natasha Mitchell: Dutch psychoanalyst Robert Bosnak, now based in Sydney. Details of his book called Embodiment: Creative Imagination in Medicine, Art and Travel on All in the Mind´s website. So, what do you think. It's a curious interpretation he offers of your dreaming mind, popp your comments or read others on my All in the Mind blog there too, now directly on the All in the Mind website too. Just look for the words 'add your comment'. All at the All in the Mind where you'll find transcripts, streaming audio. Thanks to coproducer Anita Barraud, studio engineer Tim Symonds, I´m Natasha Mitchell. Next week in our summr season of highlights, we´re dreaming just one neuron at a time.

Reading the minds of others can be darned hard. Are their intentions good, bad or indifferent? Whether we hold people accountable for their behaviour depends on the answer. Scientists probe questions like this through experiments. Philosophers traditionally appeal to intuition and argument. But now a young band of experimental philosophers are taking armchair philosophy to task, and digging for data. TRANSCRIPT: Natasha Mitchell: All in the Mind on Radio National Summer ... Natasha Mitchell joining you for our series of highlight shows from the year.... rich pickings from 2009, programs that really got you going.... And for those recovering from a full belly post-Christmas, here´s a program to help you turn to any New Year´s resolutions you might be contemplating....and the intentions you bring to those resolutions perhaps... My guests, two trailblazing youngish philosophers are trying to put human intentions under the microscope .... Because if we judge someone to have knowingly caused a bad thing to happen, we judge them quite differently don´t we, than if the outcome was unintentional? Or do we? It´s a question that goes to the heart of corporate responsibility...to the heart of a heated set of negotiations like those we witnessed in Copenhagen over climate change earlier this month too. Joshua Knobe: One thing that intentions are caught up in of course is our ability to predict what other people are going to do, but also the sort of moral significance of intention. The fact that if you are wondering what it is that I´ve done it helps you to figure out whether I did it intentionally in order to decide whether what I did was something I should deserve moral blame for, moral praise for, or whether it should just be interpreted as an accident. Eduoard Machery: If someone does something wrong by accident one is not going to blame him or her, but if someone does something wrong intentionally then of course one would blame that person. So this notion of intentional action in fact has implications for most of moral philosophy for most of ethics. Natasha Mitchell: For moral philosophy? Eduoard Machery: That´s right. Of course it has tremendous implications these days, just because corporations are you know making plans that have numerous side effects and they are aware sometimes at least of these side effects. Some of them are good, most of them are bad, and we want to be able to decide whether these side effects are intentional and if they are intentional we want to be able to blame corporations, or the leaders of these corporations. And so it is a difficult question which bears on everyday issues, on decisions which matter for all of us. Montage of news archive items: Bill Clinton: Well I want to say one thing to the American people I did not have sexual relations with that woman. News Item: A joint-venture Australian gold mining company in Romania is being held responsible for a massive cyanide spill. News Item: But now, in what amounts to the public trial of the building giant James Hardie the company´s accusers say they´ve already established motive and opportunity; now comes evidence about intention. News Items: As part of their campaign on the asbestos issue, building industry workers this morning occupied the offices of the headquarters of... News Item: There's now some evidence about what caused the oil tanker to run aground. News Item: ...at a news conference in Sydney today that the chemical company had proceeded to manufacture various toxic substances in such a negligent manner as to place at risk not only its workers but also the local residents and the environment. Joshua Knobe: And you see really interesting developmental trends, so young children will still blame you even if they see what you did as an accident. Then as you get older you´ll be more and more willing as you become more mature to forgive someone. And similarly we can see neuropsychological tests of this tendency so there´s a certain region of the brain, the temporal parietal junction, which is in charge of trying to sort of understand how other people´s minds work and if you temporarily disable that part of the brain, using what´s called repetitive trans-cranial magnetic stimulation, you can actually decrease people´s tendency to take intention into account; making them kind of more like children. Natasha Mitchell: Right, so what happens? Joshua Knobe: People actually tend to make moral judgments that are more based on just whether the outcome was good or bad and less based on what someone intended to do. Natasha Mitchell: Right, so as we grow older we are reading more into the nuance of someone´s actions? Joshua Knobe: Yes, exactly. Natasha Mitchell: You´ll meet a new breed of thinkers today. They call themselves experimental philosophers and one provocative symbol of their movement is a YouTube video featuring an armchair going up in flames with the belting anthem, 'Under this big wide sky there´s room for every school of thought, let´s take it to the streets and the parks, let´s take it back to the primary source and find out who we really are.' Traditionally of course philosophy has been done by appealing to intuition and argument. Well this crew are collecting data by doing experiments that make people think, yes, but are more thought experiments. Joshua Knobe: Well as you know instead of thinking of us as presenting a challenge to this ancient tradition, I would see us more as kind of going back to the way that philosophy has traditionally been done. So you look at older works of philosophy, say, in the 19th century, you go back and look at Nietzsche or Marx or Mill,, you find these people were really interested in human nature and thinking about questions about what human beings are really like. And then in the 20th century there was a kind of movement away from that, a movement toward thinking about the kind of questions one could just address from the armchair. Experimental philosophy really moves back to this earlier kind of traditional approach to philosophy, really thinking about human beings and how they actually think and feel in order to address those philosophical questions. Natasha Mitchell: That´s Joshua Knobe from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. So let´s start with one of the provocative scenarios he presents to people in his experiments—and what would you think? Joshua Knobe: So, suppose that a vice-president goes to the chairman of the board and says OK, we´ve got this new policy., It´s going to make huge amounts of money for our company but it´s also going to harm the environment. And the chairman says, look, I know this policy is going to harm the environment but I don´t care at all about that, I only care about making as much money as we possibly can. So let´s implement this new policy. Now the question is, did the chairman of the board harm the environment intentionally? So what would you say in that instance? Natasha Mitchell: So in fact they initiate the new policy and the environment is indeed harmed. Well I think I would have to say yes, they did. Joshua Knobe: Oh yes, so what we were curious about then was why people say that someone did it intentionally in this first case. And we were thinking it might actually be because people regard harming the environment as something that´s morally wrong—typically around 85% of people say that the person harmed the environment intentionally. Natasha Mitchell: Even though the harm to the environment was in effect a side effect of the main game. Joshua Knobe: You might see that as something kind of striking in itself: even though the person´s goal wasn´t to harm the environment, the person´s goal was just to increase profits. Still there´s this tendency to say since the person knew that he was going to harm the environment he ended up harming the environment intentionally. Natasha Mitchell: Then you developed another vignette. Tell us about that? Joshua Knobe: So this other vignette is very similar to the first one. What differs is just the moral status of what the person is doing. So suppose we keep everything exactly the same but we just change the word 'harm' to 'help'. So now suppose the vice president goes to the chairman of the board and says, OK, we´ve got this new policy, it´s going to make huge amounts of money for our company and it´s also going to help the environment. And the chairman of the board says, look, I know it´s going to help the environment but I don´t care at all about that, all I care about is just making as much money as we possibly can. So let´s implement the new policy. And sure enough it helps the environment. In this case did the chairman of the board help the environment intentionally? Natasha Mitchell: Well, I´d be inclined to say no, I gather most people agree with that. Joshua Knobe: Yes, in fact again more than 80% of people will say he helped the environment unintentionally. And yet it seems like the only thing that changed between that first case and the second is the thing about the moral status of what the person is doing. That in one case the person was harming the environment which seems morally bad, and in the second, helping the environment which seems morally good. Natasha Mitchell: So the mental state of the CEO was pretty much the same in each case. I mean the CEO ultimately wanted to make profits in both cases and didn´t really care what happened to the environment in either way. Cause this is a puzzling asymmetry this vignette presents isn´t it? Joshua Knobe: So I think what makes is seem so puzzling is that one would ordinarily have thought our way of understanding other people´s mental states, say, whether someone did something intentionally or unintentionally should be somehow independent of morality. It should be that just first figure out did he do it on purpose or did he not do it on purpose. Then once we´ve already figured that out we can use it to make a subsequent moral judgment. But what this is showing is that things aren´t as simple as they appear, instead it seems like our initial moral judgments are actually changing our very understanding of whether the person did it on purpose or not on purpose. Natasha Mitchell: What do you think is going on psychologically here? Joshua Knobe: Oh there are a whole variety of different theories that all different experimental philosophers have developed. So some suggest that what´s going on here might that our emotions are crowding our judgment, so that we feel this hatred for the CEO and think, that bastard, how can he do this to the environment. And then that changes our ability to sort of impartially decide whether he did it intentionally or unintentionally. And then others think maybe it just has something to do with language, when you hear the word 'intentionally' you try to get a sense of what the person´s really after, what the person really means. So instead of answering it literally you just answer based on a kind of pragmatic significance of what that person is saying. Natasha Mitchell: Yet all of this is quite interesting in the context of what we witnessed earlier this year in Australia earlier this year for example...the truly devastating fires that took 173 lives in Victoria. You know it makes one think that if—here´s a scenario, if someone throws a cigarette out a car window without thinking, they are oblivious, it´s a habit, they just do; it and as a result of that cigarette smouldering in the dry grass of a drought stricken country thousands of hectares go up with you know the resulting loss of life and bush and property. I guess we could then ask the question, was the bushfire intentional or not? Joshua Knobe: Oh maybe we should collaborate on a future study; to kind of examines this question. You know there was actually a recent study by our Alessandro Lanteri that addressed this very issue. So previous people had thought the effect would only come out if the person knew the behaviour they were performing was going to have a certain effect. But Lanteri (?) developed a different approach to it, he asked people to imagine that the chairman doesn´t even know what effect he's going to have on the environment and he just says I know it might help or it might harm and I don´t care at all about that, I just want to adopt a policy. When he adopts the policy and then it turns out to harm, over 50% of the people say that even though he didn´t know it would harm, he´s still doing it intentionally. So I think you´d get a bunch of people saying that those fires were brought about intentionally by the people who threw in the matches. Natasha Mitchell: There´s an interesting parallel scenario that unfolds if we think about someone achieving something despite the fact that they haven´t had much skill. Gives us some of the scenarios that you've tested there? Joshua Knobe: Suppose for example someone is hoping to win the lottery, so he decides, OK I´m trying to win the lottery, I guess what I´ll do is I´ll just go and buy a ticket, and in order to play the lottery he has to fill out certain numbers. So he has no idea what the right numbers are, he´s just decided to guess. So he thinks how about 6, 9, 4, 3, 1, 8 and then, oh my God, he´s incredibly lucky, he predicted all the right numbers correctly. Now did he win the lottery in that case intentionally? Natasha Mitchell: No, I´d say it was fairly random, actually. Joshua Knobe: So now suppose we consider a different case, a case that´s similar to that except for what that person is doing is something not morally acceptable like say winning a lottery but rather something morally wrong. So suppose in this case the agent is trying to blow up the entire Australian Broadcasting Company building, so he´s trying to create a nuclear meltdown, he´s going to destroy all the ABC. So he tries to log on to the local nuclear reactor facility and he discovers the only way he can log on is by guessing the secret password. But he has no idea what it is, I´ll just try typing in 9, 7, 3, 2, 1, 6, 4 and then, oh my God, he´s incredibly lucky, he successfully sets off the nuclear reactor meltdown and destroys the entire town. So did he then destroy ABC intentionally? Natasha Mitchell: Right, very interesting, yes, I´d be inclined to say yes even though in fact the scenario is effectively the same but he did a bad thing this time. Joshua Knobe: So it seems as though there´s a strange way in which when something just succeeds by pure luck we regard as unintentional if it´s good, but intentional if it´s bad. Natasha Mitchell: What do you take from all this? Joshua Knobe: Well you know here we´ve just been talking a great deal about one particular concept, the concept of doing something intentionally but I think what has been so exciting about this recent work in this area is it´s starting to explore all different concepts; the concept of freedom, the concept of causation, the concept of knowledge, the concept of valuing something and so forth. And in each of these different concepts we see that people´s moral considerations actually shape the way that they use it. So for example if you are wondering whether someone did something freely, or un-freely, or whether they caused something or didn´t cause it, there too, people´s moral judgments actually play a role. So what this seems to be telling us is that people´s whole way of understanding their world, the whole way of making sense of what´s going on in the world is somehow being shaped by their moral judgments. Natasha Mitchell: I mean this points to the conversation that´s being had about whether there are universal morals, whether we can appeal to a sort of universal framework of morals for all humans. What do you make of that effort? Joshua Knobe: So it´s a phenomenon that arises at very young ages. By the very first time children are even able to understand at all this idea of not caring about something: they understand if you don´t care about something and it´s bad, it´s intentional and good, unintentional. It´s a phenomenon also that seems to arise in all different cultures with people speaking very different languages. It seems like there´s some reason to think that this thing, the thing we´re talking about here, is not just something we happen to have learned in this culture, but it´s something that´s really built into us as human beings. It seems like some aspect of our moral sense is somehow just part of our kind of biological nature. Natasha Mitchell: So we have an innate moral sense, you argue. Let´s come to another of your very interesting mind-reading experiments, in fact another take on corporations and their intentions to some extent. In these experiments you´ve been probing the nature of consciousness and how we make an assessment about whether another being or object has consciousness or not. Tell us about that experiment? Joshua Knobe: So here we´re interested in certain kinds of corporations and whether these corporations could have various different kinds of mental states. So we started asking people, so what would you say if I said for example what do you think about this sentence say, 'Microsoft believes that Google is one of its main competitors.' Natasha Mitchell: I´d be inclined to say that makes sense, yes. Mind you I´m saying that a corporation thinks, which is interesting. Joshua Knobe: Or how about 'Microsoft intends to release a new project in July.' Natasha Mitchell: Sounds reasonable. Joshua Knobe: So what about 'Microsoft has been feeling a little depressed lately.' Natasha Mitchell: Totally unreasonable. Joshua Knobe: Right so there seems to be something very striking about people´s attributions of mental states to corporations, such that people think it sounds OK to say that corporations can intend things, believe things, decide things and so forth, but people somehow feel that a corporation can´t feel anything. Natasha Mitchell: They can´t experience great joy, or sadness for example. Joshua Knobe: So if you say that Microsoft is experiencing great joy, it seems crazy, so it seems as though these two different aspects of folk psychology: our capacity to think of people as having beliefs and intentions and so forth and our capacity to think of people as having feelings really differ in this way, that one is applicable to all sorts of different kinds of entities but one seems just applicable to entities like us, entities that have human bodies and so forth. Natasha Mitchell: And consciousness—that´s the key. Joshua Knobe: Right, so it seems as though conscious states seem only attributed to entities with bodies. If you look at for example entities like a robot, or a corporation, or even God, you find the very same pattern. The people are willing to say that robots, corporations and God, all of these corporations can intend things, believe things, but they can´t just right now be, say, feeling afraid. Natasha Mitchell: Well Joshua Knobe it´s fascinating work I have to say and good luck with the experiments. Joshua Knobe: Thank you so much Natasha. Natasha Mitchell: Joshua Knobe, a philosopher at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, and soon Yale, and I´ll pop his scenarios on the All in the Mind blog so you can try them on your friends at your next dinner party perhaps. On Radio National abc.net.au/rn this is All in the Mind, Natasha Mitchell with you going global on Radio Australia and as podcast. We´re reading other people´s intentions today, it´s a minefield and a new movement in philosophy is getting out of the armchair and using tools from psychology to do philosophical experiments on how it is we read the minds of others. Because when you can´t read other minds things can go majorly astray, as anyone diagnosed with Asperger´s syndrome can testify. One experiment conducted by Eduoard Machery, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh recently, caused a big stir on the net. Some people thought he´d come up with a deceptively simple test for Asperger´s, so let´s do that test ourselves—and this is it. Joe was feeling quite dehydrated so he stopped by the local smoothie shop to buy the largest sized drink available. Before ordering the cashier told him that if he bought a mega sized smoothie he would get it in a special commemorative cup. Joe replied, I don´t care about the commemorative cup; I just want the biggest smoothie you have. Sure enough Joe received the mega sized smoothie in a commemorative cup. Now the question is did Joe intentionally obtain the commemorative cup. What´s your reaction to that? Eduoard Machery: No, no. And the reason being that it was somehow an accident. What he wanted was to get a drink, the largest drink he could find. Most people for that specific scenario want to say that the individual does not get the cup intentionally. Natasha Mitchell: Really, his primary intention was just to get the biggest drink and the cup was just a sort of bonus extra, it just came along for the ride. OK, well let´s come to the second scenario you´ve posed to people. It´s called the extra dollar case and it goes like this. Joe was feeling quite dehydrated so he stopped by the local smoothie shop to buy the largest sized drink available. Before ordering this time the cashier told him that the mega sized smoothies were now $1 more than they used to be and Joe replies, I don´t care if I have to pay $1 more, I just want the biggest smoothie you have. And sure enough he received the mega sized smoothie and paid an extra $1 for it. So the question here is, again, did Joe intentionally pay $1 more? What´s the general reaction to that one? Eduoard Machery: That one must people say yes, the individual did intentionally pay $1 more. In that case people view paying $1 extra as a means to get something else. Natasha Mitchell: People intentionally forego a cost in order to get a benefit which is I´ll pay the $1 if I´m going to get the big cup. Eduoard Machery: Exactly, we do take costs intentionally right when we are aware of these costs we accept these costs in order to get what we want and it looks like most people agree with that judgment when they see only the second case. Natasha Mitchell: Now look in a recent study though you also presented the two scenarios to people who have been diagnosed with Asperger´s syndrome, and this is of course at the mild end of the autistic spectrum. Why did you want to do that? Eduoard Machery: The question should be very difficult for someone who has mind reading problems, some difficulties ascribing mental states to others and to oneself. Now it´s known that people with Asperger´s syndrome tend to have some difficulty in the ascription of beliefs and desires to others and to one´s self, and we thought you know to really understand why someone would be willing intentionally to pay and extra $1 to get something, you somehow have to put yourself in the shoes of that agent or to reconstruct his or her situation to see why. Of course she does not want to pay but in a sense she knows that she has to incur that cost in order to get what she wants. So you have to understand the frame of mind of Joe in a free cup case. Natasha Mitchell: People with Asperger´s syndrome can really have trouble picking up on what other people are thinking and feeling, of reading emotions and facial cues. So they´re not good at what´s called mind reading. Eduoard Machery: That´s right. Natasha Mitchell: Now what did you observe? Eduoard Machery: So here is the surprising finding. When we looked at controls, typical people, people say no to the first case right, the free cup case, and they say yes to the second case. By contrast people with Asperger's give a negative answer to both cases right, so they said that the individual in the first case did not get intentionally the cup. and they also said the individual in the second case did not intentionally pay an extra dollar, right. So they don´t distinguish between the two cases, which is exactly what we had expected. We believe that to really see why it´s intentional to pay an extra dollar you have to be able to put yourself in the shoes of the individuals doing the action and a prediction or an expectation was that that would be very difficult for people with Asperger´s syndrome. Natasha Mitchell: Now this really has raised the hackles of people on various psychology and philosophy blogs, hasn´t it? I mean you´ve got hundreds of comments from self described Aspies, those with Asperger´s syndrome. But also others who don´t have Asperger´s syndrome, because they got frustrated that your test is suggesting they might. I mean why do you think people got so cross with you? Eduoard Machery: You´re right, so I was actually surprised by the amount of reaction as elicited by this work. I think first there was some kind of misunderstanding, some people thought we were somehow developing a new way of testing whether you had Asperger's or not which is actually absolutely not the case right. What we are doing we are looking at people who have been diagnosed as Asperger's and then we are looking at how they think about intentional actions right. Now we certainly don´t want to suggest that we have anything like a new diagnosis. Some typical subject give the same answer as Asperger´s, it´s just a statistical difference. Natasha Mitchell: But many of them argued that they just simply couldn´t see how either case could be intentional, that in both cases Joe´s key intention was to get the biggest drink so both the dollar and the commemorative cup were sort of immaterial, they were just a side effect. Eduoard Machery: Most of the comments were somehow providing more evidence for our hypothesis because people with Asperger's were saying well look, the guy in both cases had the same intention, right, they just wanted to buy a big smoothie, everything else is somewhat accidental, it cannot be intentional. What was going on there was that we had a hard time to put themselves in the shoes of the individual making the choice of paying one extra dollar in order to get what he wants. I had a hard time to put them to adopt the right frame of mind to see what sort, or what beliefs and desires that individual might have. Natasha Mitchell: What do you conclude from all this, what does this tell you about how we interpret whether the actions of others are intentional or not? Eduoard Machery: One thing it tells us is that we are very sensitive to very subtle cues, right. So on superficial reading the two cases are fairly similar—on the one hand you get a free cup, on the other hand you have to pay an extra dollar. The difference between the two cases is in fact fairly subtle, it shows that on the one hand there is a choice which is involved, a choice to pay an extra dollar. So one thing we learn is that to decide whether something is intentional or not is in fact fairly subtle. Another thing we learned is that costs seem in fact to be thought of as being intentional. Natasha Mitchell: So if we have to pay something in order to get a benefit it must have been intentional in some way. Eduoard Machery: And of course the notion of cost can be applied much more broadly to a large number of situations, right. Just to give an example, there is warfare going somewhere and some general needs to get rid of some terrorists and he knows that if he does so he´s going to kill some innocent people because he´s going to bomb the place and to kill some innocent people. That´s a cost that he or she is willing to incur in order to get what he or she wants. And the idea is that in all these cases we would view the action—here bombing innocent people—as being intentional because we frame the action, we frame the decision of the agent as 'I am willing to pay the cost in order to get what I want.' Natasha Mitchell: You know there´s a YouTube video on the web doing the rounds dubbed the 'experimental philosophy anthem' and it´s essentially a music video of an armchair going up in flames. I mean the symbolism is obvious but certainly some people see it as a bit of an attack on the thought experiment that is so essential to philosophy. Joshua Knobe: But traditionally the way that people in the 20th century tried to address those thought experiments is that each philosopher would just think for his or herself, just his or her own armchair about the thought experiment. Whereas today what we´re seeing is a movement of people dubbed 'experimental philosophers' going out and actually asking other people how they think of these questions and doing systematic experimental studies to see what kind of factors affect people´s intuitions about these thought experiments. Edouard Machery: In a way, experimental philosophy is not that new because in a way experimental philosophers are going back to what philosophy was a century ago. So up to the end of the 19th century most philosophers were also scientists at the same time. What we are doing in a way is to argue that many of the most fundamental questions in philosophy are in fact empirical and involve matters of fact, and we need to have some knowledge about how the world really is in order to answer these questions. Natasha Mitchell: Edouard Machery and before him Joshua Knobe -- both part of a new guard of experimental philosophers catching the world´s attention. And we´ve linked to their websites from ours....including to some of their tests so you can have a go. And this program certainly got some of your riled....head to my All in the Mind blog to see some of the discussion...AND to add to it. Or you can now post your comments directly on the All in the Mind website too ...just head to the edition of the show of interest and then look for Add Your Comment. abc.net.au/rn/allinthemind. The transcript and the downloadable audio are there too...subscribe to the podcast...spread the word on twitter...my Twitter name is AllintheMind...it´s a social media frenzy I tell you. Thanks to co producer Anita Barraud and sound engineers Melissa May and Carey Dell, I´m Natasha Mitchell, catch you next week—intentionally.

His Holiness the Dalai Lama joins All in the Mind's Natasha Mitchell and leading scholars in a dialogue about science and the self. This week, founder of the field of positive psychology, Martin Seligman, and Buddhist scholar Alan Wallace consider with him what it takes to flourish...really flourish...individually and collectively. TRANSCRIPT: Natasha Mitchell (question to the Dalai Lama): We've focussed very much on individual brains and the plasticity of individual brains, measuring the positive outcomes for individuals, and I wonder if there might be scope for a collaboration between Buddhism and psychology to work out how we might measure the social plasticity of brains, the ability of, how individual minds might effectively collaborate, because it seems to me that we can understand individual brains but do we not want to better understand how brains work together... to respond to climate change, for example, or war? I wonder if that would be an interesting project for Buddhism and psychology? Dalai Lama:... I don't know! (Laughter) Natasha Mitchell: It's too big a question! I think it will come up today though; our other speakers might be able to share some wisdom on that one. And it sure will come up today—great to have your company here on ABC Radio National. Natasha Mitchell with All in the Mind, and with the final in our series of dialogues exploring connections between Western psychology and Buddhist psychology with His Holiness the Dalai Lama and eminent scientists, recorded at the Mind and Its Potential Conference this month. Today Martin Seligman, Fox Leadership Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and past president of the American Psychological Association engages the Dalai Lama with his efforts to spearhead what he calls the field of positive psychology. He's the author of Learned Optimism, and also Authentic Happiness. Also joining us is Buddhist scholar Alan Wallace, President of the Santa Barbara Institute of Consciousness Studies. Amongst his books are Buddhism and Science: Breaking New Ground and just out is Mind in the Balance. So let's kick off with Martin Seligman. Martin Seligman: It's a great honour to sit with you today your Holiness. More than a decade ago when I became President of the American Psychological Association it was my task to look at what psychologists did well and what they didn't do well. What they did well was misery and suffering, depression, and drug addiction, schizophrenia, post traumatic stress disorder. But what they didn't do well was what makes life worth living, the positive side of life. So it's been my mission through the last decade to do research, galvanise the social sciences to work on what people freely choose to do when they are not oppressed and this defines the field of positive psychology. So people said to me you want to work on happiness? And I said 'no, not exactly'—happiness has become over the centuries something that has very different meanings for different people and was scientifically unwieldy. And so we break into four different disciplines in positive psychology. So the first is about happiness, it's the study of positive emotion and so for example people interested in this look at the most catastrophic thoughts that people say when bad events happen, and how to find a realistic perspective on catastrophic thoughts. So we teach people to argue against the catastrophic and to see good possibilities; so one field is positive emotion. The second field is meaning. Human beings ineluctably want to be part of something bigger than they are, to belong to and serve something bigger than they are. So we asked people to identify their highest strengths, their highest virtues... humour, fairness, kindness and to learn to use them more particularly in difficult tasks and to use them to be part of something larger than they are. The third discipline that people in positive psychology work on is positive relationships, how to get along better with people. And so for example there have actually been discoveries that I didn't know ten years ago in this area in which, if you tell me something in traditional marital therapy, what you do is you teach people to argue better with each other. So you're trying to change insufferable marriages into being barely tolerable! But in positive psychology we teach people to celebrate together rather when something good happens. If you tell me something enormously good that happened to you the technique not of being destructive about it but of getting you to relive it and to elaborate it. So, the third discipline is positive relationships. And the fourth discipline is positive accomplishment—mastery, competence, achievement—and so we look for example of high grit, people who never give up, people with high self control and we ask 'how do you build that'? So those are the four things that positive psychologists do and work on. If you teach people early in life techniques of positive emotion, of engagement, of meaning, of good relationships, of accomplishment, can you prevent many of the ills of life; depression, anxiety, anger. And so one of the main things that we do now is we go to whole schools; this actually started a few years ago here in Victoria at Geelong Grammar. We took this entire school, we taught the 200 faculty members techniques that we knew about, among them meditation, positive emotion, meaning, relationships and achievement, and then the teachers spent two weeks learning these in their own lives. And, in 21 replications across the world we found that when we teach teachers these techniques they embed them in what they teach and the students are less depressed, less anxious and do better. So that's the main endeavour we're engaged in. Let me tell me what the great aim of positive psychology is, something that neither you nor I will be alive to see, but I call it '51'—I'll say the aim and then say why I think about it. That in the year 2051, 51 per cent of the world's population will be flourishing. Now let me say what I mean by flourishing. Since positive psychology says positive emotion, meaning, relationships, achievement—Felicia Huppert who is probably here today from Cambridge, an epidemiologist—went to 23 European Union nations; 2000 adults in each of the nations and measured the extent to which each of these adults had those four things in their life. And she found that 32 per cent of Danes were flourishing, 15 per cent of Brits were flourishing and 5 per cent of Russians. So you can measure the extent to which an entire nation is flourishing. Dalai Lama: Oh, the numbers. Martin Seligman: So the aim then becomes learning these techniques for increasing positive emotion, meaning, relationships, accomplishment. Can we by the year 2051 have 51 per cent of adults flourishing? Now part of the reason this is so important to me is the downstream effects of flourishing. So very often we try to tackle problems head on like depression, anxiety, peace but there's good reason to believe that when people are flourishing they're physically healthier, they live longer, they're more productive, they have less depression and anxiety and they are at peace. So that is the rationale for 51. Now a final thing I wanted to say which was touched off by your remarks on clarity and consciousness. The first great error of psychology for almost a century was to only think about the negatives and not to think about the positives. So positive psychology attempts to correct for that, but I think there's another great error, even deeper than that and it's about consciousness. So psychology in the social sciences have been sciences of the past, they've said we are driven by the past, we're creatures of the past. I don't think that's true and I think the findings have turned out to show that social science based on human beings being pushed by the past don't work very well. Rather I want to suggest that we are drawn by the future and that consciousness is not just about perceiving reality now, but what's going on in your consciousness now as I'm talking is that you're running simulations of the future—about how what I'm saying might impact what you do and say in the future. So I think one of the massive functions of our big brain is to run simulations of the future and then to choose among them and in this view consciousness is not just about the past and reality and the present, it's about the future and how we will be pulled into the future. Thank you. (Applause) Dalai Lama: I think the problem is that we don't know, we simply consider these destructive emotions or negative emotions as just a part of our mind —so we think it's just normal. Once we know, for example, anger, hatred, jealousy as something bad for my own health, then just awareness about that makes the difference. I think very convincing, very good. Natasha Mitchell: Your Holiness, Martin is working as he said very closely with Australia, an Australian school called Geelong Grammar... Dalai Lama:Very good. It's very good. Natasha Mitchell: ...Working with teachers and young people and Geelong Grammar is a very wealthy school and they've put a lot of investment into this collaboration. I wonder how you would see the positive psychology approach that Martin is researching, working for example in the Tibetan children's village in Dharamsala. Would you see a role for positive psychology in working with Tibetan children in that children's village? Dalai Lama: ... But anyway I think why not, more research work with Western psychology—dealing with day to day sort of problems—and all this. I think one difference is the Western school of knowledge is through experiment. So I think very, very useful. More synthesis of ideas or texts, then I think it can be very useful, not only (to) children of a young age but even to scholars, I think very, very good. So that's one field we can further develop scientifically definitely. (To Martin Seligman) So you also have the responsibility to do something! (Laughs). And also certainly these four points—very nice, very practical, very useful. And then you mentioned, I fully agree, that I think our brain not only just collects about the past as a memory, but we have a great ability, imagination, or vision about the future. That's really I think very, very helpful to lead forward. Just thinking about the past, in the past—the past (is) finished—so I totally agree with that. (Laughs). Natasha Mitchell: Martin. Martin Seligman: My comment also related to Natasha's question of you. I believe that if we redefine the goal of what a healthy mind is from psychology's traditional concern with a mind that's not suffering, not ill, not disordered—that that's the wrong question. But the right question is how to create minds that are flourishing? When minds are flourishing the suffering I believe is crowded out as a downstream. And to Natasha's comment about the relationship of Buddhism to modern science of this sort—the modern science I know is about single individuals. The goal of 51 that 51 per cent of the world's population should flourish is about large groups. So what are the magnifiers, what are the amplifiers? How can we go from individual knowledge to knowledge that will help change 51 per cent of the world? And that's why I think Buddhism and the modern religions and our schools are the great magnifiers that can take these ideas and move them from the individual to all of us. Natasha Mitchell: Martin you have a very ambitious goal there—51 per cent of the world by 2051, you want to see flourishing. And so I have a question. This year I chaired a forum on suicide prevention in Western Australia and we heard some very powerful stories about indigenous Aboriginal children in Australia taking their life this year. And so I wonder how you will apply your positive psychology investigations and work with the schools—how do we apply those principles—to those children and communities where they are born into a situation of despair and difficulty from the beginning? How do we work with those communities? Martin Seligman: Suicide and depression, I've spent my entire life working on depression, suicide and the negative emotions, and I don't mean to suggest for a moment that positive psychology should replace psychology as usual, that it should replace what we know about cognitive therapy, about psychopharmacology, about the prevention of depression. So I think we want to use all those tools, they're very imperfect, but I think we can also supplement those with the notion of the flourishing mind, because very often when the mind is flourishing depression, anxiety, anger disappear. Natasha Mitchell: How do we help though communities of particular need where they are not going to have access to psychologists, but they do perhaps have access to schools, but they're starting out from a level of facilities and resources that's very low. So I'm thinking of children in Baghdad as well at the moment, you know?.... Martin Seligman: I think there's quite a direct way of helping that and it's on the model in which if you think about what you most want for your children, happiness, lack of suffering, balance, being civilised but what schools teach is literacy, numeracy, discipline, conformity. So imagine that our schools and our teachers where the custodian not just workplace skills but of life satisfaction, positive emotion and how to deal with depression. Now that's what Australia has started to do, that was the Geelong Grammar program of positive education in which our teachers learn both sets of skills and then it turns out the students have less depression and the like. So I believe if we can change Australian education, world education, so that we teach the skills of the positive as well as the skills of the workplace, that 2051 will come sooner. Natasha Mitchell:Good luck. (Applause) You're in a dialogue with the Dalai Lama, leading psychologist Martin Seligman, Buddhist scholar Alan Wallace and me Natasha Mitchell here on All in the Mind on ABC Radio National, going global on Radio Australia and as podcast. Alan Wallace, join us now in this conversation I think that that's given you a lot of meat to work with. Alan Wallace: I sure that's not quite the noun I would choose Alan Wallace... but grist for the mill for sure. Natasha Mitchell:Yes! Welcome. Thanks. Alan Wallace: Your Holiness, you asked me this morning to contribute what I can to taking traditional Buddhist concepts and then bringing them into inter-relationship with modern concepts. And so that is what I would like to try to do this morning. Our colleague Martin Seligman has started an enormously important field of psychology, positive psychology where I think the underlying attitude is not being satisfied to be merely normal, say 'OK now we're finished, we're normal, we don't need psychiatric treatment'. Let us have some vision. In other words let us not just look into the past, 'am I as ordinary as everybody else?', but looking the future. How is it possible to be exceptional, how is it possible to live an exceptionally meaningful life? Well these questions of course have been raised in Buddhism all along, so what I would like now in a very short time would be to lay out some of the framework of Buddhist positive psychology. And the title for this short presentation 'Is Ethics as a Foundation for such Wellbeing or Human Flourishing?'. And I taken two definitions; I think these are representative of definitions from positive psychology, making a distinction between two types of happiness. And I think the distinction is enormously important. One we call hedonism which could just be called just mundane happiness, ordinary pleasure. From positive psychology there is hedonic or ordinary well being consists simply of pleasure or happiness. But now we go back to a Greek term 'Eudaimonia' and as Martin has been calling this flourishing, I think it is the best translation., Martin has also called it 'authentic happiness', I've called it genuine happiness—peas in the pod. So we call this 'eudaimonism' or genuine happiness—this again according to positive psychology is wellbeing that is more than just pleasure or happiness—for it lies in the actualisation or realisation of human potentials, fulfilling or realising one's true nature. I think that would be completely consistent with Buddhism but of course the essential point there is what are our potentials or inner resources, and what is our true nature? So an enormous amount hinges on that question and one sees a lot of resonance or compatibility between these definitions and Buddhism. Now I would like to draw from the Buddhist literature our own definitions of these two modes of happiness. Among the eight mundane concerns, attachment for pleasure is considered an obstacle to spiritual practice. But what kind of pleasure? Ordinary pleasure, mundane pleasure. And I would suggest in principle this type of mundane or hedonic pleasure is the pleasure we get, to put it very simply, the pleasure we get from the world. Something nice happens to me, I smell something very nice, I have a very nice friend that happens to me, I live in a lovely environment, I'm eating good food, I'm in good health. Something happens to me. I'm lucky, I'm fortunate or maybe I've also been very skilful to get good things to happen to me. And of course they come and they go. But of course in Buddhism, Buddhist practice is not really about that. Although this mundane pleasure is not bad, the pleasure from having enough food; that is not trivial, the pleasure from having clothing, shelter and medical care when you need it these are mundane and enormously important. But is that all there is? And of course this is where Buddhism really begins, once you do have enough what is genuine happiness? And I would say very simply genuine happiness in the Buddhist view is the happiness, the sense of wellbeing that we experience from what we bring to the world rather than what we get from the world. So the first one is like playing the lottery and hoping we get lucky. The second one is more of an investment, rather than gambling it's an investment, and again to draw an analogy from early civilisation when we moved from the hunter/gatherer phase to the cultivator phase—a smaller body of land but investing time and effort, tilling the soil, taking out the rocks, adding fertiliser and water and taking care of the land and then getting much more benefit from a small body of land than a hunter/gatherer. So I think this is actually quite compatible with the positive psychology. But now we go into specifics and I think this is of enormous importance and it's absolutely core Buddhism and I think this is Buddhist science. It is utterly essential to Buddhism but I do believe that it is also universal. And that is there is a foundation for the pursuit of eudaimonic or genuine happiness, there is a foundation and it is ethics. It is not an ethics though that necessarily has to come down from high. Ethics is the way we engage with others and if we engage with others that gives rise to harmony we can live together happily—a man and a woman, a family, a community, a nation, international relations—if we treat each other in such a way that we can enjoy being with each other and we can live in harmony—that is ethical. And so that's in our inter-relationship with our fellow human beings. But especially over the last 50 years I think it has become more and more apparent there is also such a thing as environmental ethics. It's not just enough to treat our fellow human beings well, we have to treat all the other species on the planet well and even the soil, and the air, and the water and we need to imagine ahead, not just look at the past. You were suggesting the year 2051—what are we doing now to the environment and how will the environment look like in 40 years? And for our great, great, great grandchildren what seeds are we sowing for the environment so that, as we wish to flourish in relation to the environment, they too can flourish? And so I think that is truly ethical, social ethics, environmental ethics so that we can flourish—and that is really one of my favourite verbs—that we can flourish together as human beings, flourish with other sentient beings and flourish with our environment. If we don't attend to that as a foundation then whatever meditations we're doing, or psychological interventions, they almost don't matter. So we call this in Buddhism The Golden Ground for all spiritual practice, but not just for Buddhists, it's the golden ground for living a happy life for anyone, I think it is universal. So on that basis and here really emphasising that we are social creatures but we're not just social creatures. I've lived with ...[Tibetan names] and other yogis, Tibetan yogis who spend 10, 20, 30 years in solitude. They are not very social, they are profoundly interconnected, very compassionate, they are not anti-social, but they are finding great happiness and great virtue in solitude. And this is also a great ideal in Buddhism, not just that we behave well with each other but that in this second phase built upon ethics, we call Samadhi, Samadhi in the small meaning of the term means single pointed attention. In the large sense of the term ..[Buddhist term].. it means more of mental balance or cultivating exceptional mental health I believe. So it includes love and kindness, compassion is in that category and not just single pointed attention, but through cultivating the mind—and now we would draw on positive psychology, and Buddhist teachings on Samadhi and Buddhist teachings on cultivating love and kindness, compassion, empathic joy, equanimity—cultivating such exceptional mental health and balance that you find you could be wonderfully happy, even in solitude, even if you're in solitary confinement. (Applause) Natasha Mitchell: Alan that you for that. Your Holiness I wonder if you have some comments to share? I know that you have said negative thoughts, destructive thoughts are what cause us to act unethically, but I wonder whether at their heart, destructive thoughts are actually a result of a moral conflict or an ethical conflict in ourselves. That we suffer because we feel violated by another or our past, or our parents or our workplace. I wonder if at the root of all suffering is in fact a moral conflict? Dalai Lama: Yes. It happens . One example. A few years ago one really good scholar, a monk, monk scholar and also a good practitioner—one day came to see me at Dharamsala, from South India—his face a very, very sort of a disturbed face—and he told me he had depression, a little bit of depression. And I asked 'what is wrong, what is the causes, cause of that?' And he told me he (was) meditating seriously about impermanence. So that brings more mental disturbances, I think, too much worry or too much fear! Yes, 'impermanence meditation', meditates on impermanence, (it) is one of the important practices. But at the same time as the suffering side also we have to concentrate , meditate on the positive side. So the mind, as I mentioned earlier, it works (as) many different minds inter-related. So when we deal with the mind we have to know the vast field and interconnections. So a more holistic approach is very essential. So therefore thinking only negative things—then demoralisation and depression and some physical trouble also there. So we have to work, you see, a balance. (Applause) Natasha Mitchell: His Holiness the Dalai Lama joining us on the stage in Sydney with the University of Pennsylvania's Martin Seligman, author of Authentic Happiness and Dr Alan Wallace, whose latest book is called Mind in the Balance: Meditation in Science, Buddhism and Christianity. You can find the transcripts and downloadable audio of all three shows in this series of dialogues with the Dalai Lama on the All in the Mindwebsite. abc.net.au/rn/allinthemind. And look for 'Add your Comment' there too if you got something to say, we love that, and you can also do that on my All in the Mindblog. Next week our summer season of highlight shows from 2009 kicks off, taking you through the month of January. Until then Happy Christmas, or whatever excuse you've got for a dollop of pudding, and have a safe time of it. I'm Natasha Mitchell, catch you next week.

His Holiness the Dalai Lama joins All in the Mind's Natasha Mitchell and leading scholars in a dialogue about science, wellbeing and our moral minds. This week Harvard evolutionary biologist and author of Moral Minds, Marc Hauser, asks - does biology constrain our mind´s potential and our moral capacity? Is there a place for moral outrage? Next week, founder of the field of positive psychology, Martin Seligman, and Buddhist scholar Alan Wallace join the fray. TRANSCRIPT: Marc Hauser:A society that didn't feel moral outrage would never function as a moral society. It's a virtue; it's a virtue like compassion is a virtue. Dalai Lama: There's no independent right or wrong, or absolute right or wrong. Right or wrong depends on the circumstances. Same action - sometimes the result bad, same action sometimes good; so we cannot say such action is an absolute right. Natasha Mitchell: All in the Mind with me Natasha Mitchell here on ABC Radio National, welcome. What limits or liberates our behaviour? Are some of us born missing a moral sense? Last week His Holiness the Dalai Lama joined me on stage in Sydney and we brought you part of that dialogue on the show, you can catch the audio and transcript on our website. Well, today Marc Hauser, Professor of Psychology and Director of the Cognitive Evolution Lab, and of the Mind and Behaviour program at Harvard is joining us. You might have caught his books Wild Minds: What Animals Really Think and more recently, Moral Minds: How Nature Designed our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong. And you'll also hear briefly from leading psychologist and founder of the field of positive psychology, Martin Seligman, and Buddhist and meditation scholar Alan Wallace. And you'll hear much more from them in next week's show. So let's kick off, as Marc Hauser engages the Dalai Lama in quite an exchange on nature, nurture and your moral mind. Marc Hauser: It's a great pleasure to have this chance to talk with you. I wanted to start out with something that I think has been less a part of the conversation today, which is how biology in some sense, our biology as human beings, constrains the range of possible options. And that independently of what the goodness can come out of improving the environment, some people are born with a set of cards that make things much more difficult. So I want to talk about two things and illustrate by example. And here's a very simple example, it's a beautiful study that was started almost 40 years ago with very young children, 2 and 3 years of age. The experiment was very simple, the experimenter walks into a room with a child and says 'here's a cookie, or a candy, you can have this candy now or you can wait until I come back and you can have five candies'. Now the experimenter doesn't say when he's coming back, just that he'll come back. So the question is not does the child want the candy, the question is how long will the child wait to take the one candy. So this comes back to the idea: can you foresee the future, what possible gratification can come from waiting, from being patient? Now here's the extraordinary result. The scientist who observed this phenomena Walter Mischel studied and followed these children until they were adults - so, 30 years of time. The number of seconds a child waits predicts how stable their marriage will be, the longer they wait, the greater marital stability. The longer they wait the better their college exam scores are. Those who wait less have much more probability of juvenile delinquency, violence. And for women who end up having disorders of eating, those that wait longer have anorexia, those who wait less have bulimia - two very different eating disorders. What this I think reveals is that at a very early age the biology is providing a channel that's very constrained that is the limits at which the environment can play with. So as we think about how the brain is plastic, it's plastic within very significant limits and for some more than others. I don't know if you have a response to that? That anything that you want to comment on that plasticity because given your interest in learning compassion and plasticity, here's a piece of information from the sciences that shows the constraining rule that our species provides, it limits what we can do. Dalai Lama: Of course I am not very clear, but I think that at a very young age that's very possible, because at that time, physically, the biological factor is much more dominant. Then - effect or influence of training of mind. But then, eventually, the capacity to think, the capacity of investigation and through investigation you get a different awareness, and different awareness bring different conviction, different conviction then eventually you see the effect on plasticity. Interpreter: Effects on your brain... and then there's the plasticity. Dalai Lama: So I believe at a young age certain behaviour (is) there but gradually training maybe can change (that). That's my view. Marc Hauser: So one way in which I think some of this work begins to show very interesting findings is now not only information on the brain's plasticity, but how the genetics that build brains are also constraining what the range of possibilities are. So, here's a second example - there's a particular gene that has two forms, two ways of expressing itself in the brain and that changes the chemistry of the brain. So either you get Form A or Form B. One form provides a lot of chemicals into the brain that have to do with reward and self control, specifically called dopamine and serotonin. Two different chemicals - so Form A you have a lot of expression in the brain and Form B, low expression. There was a study that was does with 500 young boys in the United States who had either a very good childhood, brought up by wonderful parents, caring, supportive. One group had a bit of abuse by their parents, but the third group, the most important, very significant abuse, violence, psychological abuse. When you followed these children later in life here's what you find. The children who had Form A, the big expression, who received violence were fine. The children with the low expression form; very serious problems later in life. So here we have a beautiful example of how the genetics sets up in one case a buffer, it binds you against the problems of the environment. The other one makes you very susceptible to it. So here again we have another way of thinking about plasticity. But here it comes from even a lower level of analysis - the genes. And you're handed those cards - you have no say over that - but it sets you up on a path where the environment can either really injure you or not. The third related example and this brings us to ethics, and this is where I'm very interested in your ideas; is the case of a psychopath, of moral monsters. What Hollywood does in the films of horrible people who kill, who are violent, are uncaring. It's long been thought that because psychopaths clinically don't feel certain things, they don't feel remorse, guilt, empathy, they just don't know right from wrong and so they do the wrong thing. And that's a view maybe consistent with some of your ideas, that knowing one's emotions and knowing the world is really crucial for living an ethical life, living a moral life. But what we're finding now with studies of psychopaths, using brain imaging to see which areas of the brains are most active and other techniques, is that although psychopaths have a very flat response emotionally to most of the things that we all respond to, horrible things, or beautiful things, their moral judgements, their knowing of right and wrong is no different from you or me, they're the same. They know right from wrong, they just don't care. This becomes very important thinking about the law for example because in many societies the law places most emphasis on 'did you do a crime knowingly? Was your mind knowledgeable or ignorant? Is there a defect of mind such that you didn't even know you were committing a crime?' But here's a change - the psychopath does it knowingly, but not caringly. And so how we have a new way of thinking about your question; your fundamental question of ignorance, of clarity of mind. The psychopath has an extraordinary clarity of mind but lacks the emotional switch onwhy it's important to have clarity of mind. So here again we are confronted with a third case of - these people were not tortured as children - they were born with a predisposition that set them on a path very early in childhood. Often we see with psychopaths that when they were children they would abuse pets because they could control them, and then that changes to abusing people. For me one of the questions is that I'm curious to hear your thoughts on is, when we think about an ethical life and living a moral life -and with your strong emphasis on knowing and a clarity that comes from that - some people are born and perhaps will never have that capacity. And so how can we deal with society with a multitude of people where some are just given a different view of life from the biology? So how do you think about the plurality in the individual variation where some of the variation is biologically given? Dalai Lama: I believe they can change. Now here much depends on mental strength, on mental force. Not just awareness alone, not sufficient. So essentially I believe through rigorous training and the time factor also very important. I think that you can change. But in some cases there is some damage in the brain which, simply, you cannot utilise this training of mind. Then really hopeless, difficult. Otherwise I think you can change. That may be too optimistic, unrealistically optimistic- I don't know. This also is again I think a field for investigation, some experiments. I think Alan you see carries some sort of program - training of mind. So, I think you should carry some experiment, so this person who is really very, very hard - give them some training. Then one year, two years, five years, even ten years, twenty years, thirty years, I think theoretically speaking, yes, they can change. Yes, I think. Then in some cases those Indian traditions which believe in a previous life then in some cases because the previous life has sort of strong influence. So, for example, the same parent, the same opportunity - but there are differences. So in such cases there are also possibilities of the influence of a previous life. (But for) the general public - no use to talk about that - forget that! (laughter). Natasha Mitchell:: I think they're more than a general public... Dalai Lama: Oh, OK, but of course I don't want to interfere- it's a different faith. This is their concept, the Buddhist or some of the Indian, or ancient Indian, or some religions who believe in rebirth. So I have the name of reincarnation so I have to speak of that. Marc Hauser:Fair enough. Just to pick up on that idea of training. One of the ways in which the new work in genetics and the brain sciences may feed into your idea of training is that now with some of these clinical cases like psychopaths and autism, that there are now earlier, and earlier diagnoses - so you can identify earlier in development. So the idea of training may have much more of a chance if the child can be identified sufficiently early in development so that the brain is sufficiently plastic to change. The problem that we're seeing now more and more is that as soon as you reach a certain age the possibility for plasticity, especially given the problems, becomes harder and harder. I think the last thing that I would like to touch upon with you which takes us to a higher philosophical level - so maybe now we are at Buddhist philosophy rather than Buddhist science - is how to think about the age old philosophical question which is: are there really any moral truths? Or is there a singular truth, a universal set of truths - or are there multiple possibilities? So I think what this provides as a challenge is that, as I understand it, a view that you would want to advance, is that through clarity of knowledge and compassion we can see a path to a moral life. But what about a different view? A view which says I see the world as having people with different interests, some of those interests are justifiable, people should have different interests. And in so far as there are different interests some people may pursue a path I don't like. Some people may violate a norm that society has. And so there's a view which may sound paradoxical which is that the feeling of vengeance or moral outrage, moral anger at someone who has violated a transgression is a good thing. It's a virtue, it's virtue like compassion is a virtue. And to push it one step further, that a society that didn't feel moral outrage would never function as a moral society. And so here's just one last little piece of scientific information. There have been some recent studies done with brain scans again, where people are put in a situation where someone has violated some norm of fairness, they've done something wrong, they've given an unfair offer. And the subject can actually pay to punish that individual, pay a cost. And when that person pays and punishes; the areas of the brain that are involved in reward and feeling good are activated. They feel good for having punished somebody. And that seems like a good thing, a virtue. So maybe the simple question is, or maybe the not so simple question is, how to entertain a plurality or moral systems, one that might be along your line of thinking - where compassion really fuels how the moral life is lived. And another which doesn't deny compassion but adds in some notion of vengeance or moral outrage when someone has violated. Dalai Lama: I think moral ethics , truth, I think there are many, many categories due to different levels or different concepts. So if we believe moral ethics must be based on religious faith, then moral ethics become very narrow. So the secular moral ethics, that's universal. So now I think the very basis of moral ethics is something that has a physical action, or verbal action, or mental thinking, it's something good for the society because we are social animals. So therefore any action which brings comfort or benefit, or at least not bring (discomfort), to others or to the community, and in the long run to one's self - that's moral, because we want that. Nothing to do with religion, whether it is God or not, whether there's a Buddha, or whether there's a next life or not. Don't care. Nobody can deny it we are social animals. Furthermore we are born from mother. Our life not start like some stories where some person is born from lotus! I prefer our way of (being) born, from mother. That brings affection. If you are born from lotus maybe more affection towards lotus, not human brothers and sisters. So our survival at the beginning of our life - compassion, love, affection, is immense for our survival, for our wellbeing. So our whole life - on a superficial sort of surface of the consciousness - sometimes you see anger as you mentioned, someone doing wrong and punished. People say 'bring to justice', so that means even a death sentence some people believe it's something good. But on a deeper level I think, sensible, compassionate person, even a criminal person with a death sentence, a sensible person really feels sad. It doesn't matter according to the law but he is still a human being, he or she is a human being just like myself. So that's the natural sort of response. So we are a social animal and came from mother, we survived with affection - so deep inside there's some kind of empathy there. Anger necessary, supposed to defend, but go extreme - basically harmful. Some scientists say anger, hatred actually eating our immune system. So I believe the secular moral ethics, simply any action animal or human which brings benefit, happiness, joyfulness to one's self and the community - that's ethics. Natasha Mitchell: His Holiness the Dalai Lama: joins Marc Hauser and I here on All in the Mind this week on ABC Radio National, going global on Radio Australia and as podcast. We're taking on your ethical mind, and of course the Dalai Lama is a strong advocate for a secular approach to ethics based on compassion for others. Natasha Mitchell to the Dalai Lama: I know that you have had concerns over the years that biologists paint us to be a competitive species.It's a dog eat dog world, we're all in competition which each other and if we're nice to each other it's really only to protect our own self interest and survival. Marc, your work is very interesting because you are looking for evidence for the possibility that we are born into the world with a core sense or a moral instinct, we come into the world instinctively understanding right from wrong. And do you think that could then mean that the driving force of that instinct, that moral instinct, could it be that in fact at our core we are empathetic, we are an altruistic species? Is this moral instinct an explanation for human empathy being just as important as Darwinian ideas about competition? Marc Hauser: I mean I think the increasing evidence from the scientific community is that we're born both. We're both born selfish and competitive and we're born empathetic. We're neither one nor the other - the devil and the angel are with us at all times. And some feed the bad side more and some feed the good side more. But the animal work, I think what's interesting and maybe links the two comments, is a comment by Charles Darwin which is that there are many social animals, we are just one. Chimpanzees, our closest living relatives, are social and they are both competitive and they're compassionate. But where we differ is I think this picks up on a comment you made earlier on is what Darwin pointed to. The only difference Darwin said between humans and other animals is one word - 'ought'. Only we can think about what ought to be. Said slightly differently without the word, only we can imagine different possibilities. So in the history of the United States we had slavery. For many people that was morally OK, people started thinking that's not morally OK, we don't have to have a world of slaves. So we have the unique capacity to imagine alternative possibilities, and that for Darwin was the essence of our moral life, it was to imagine alternatives. I would say that added on to compassion maybe it's just another way of saying it, is to imagine alternative ways of being and that can come through compassion, it can come through reasoning and reflection. And one of the problems I see today is that so many of the cases of violence throughout the world we see today are cases where 'the Other' is never entertained. The alternative way of being is not engaged. So we invite strong biases to our group and we want to eliminate the other group. And here is where I think the most dangerous emotion of all is disgust. If you look at so many of these speeches by great leaders who have been dictators, they've recruited disgust as the emotion to push away the out group, and that's where the warning has to become in. We should have alarm bells going off every time we see something that looks like disgust, because it will ultimately lead to removing 'the Other'. Martin Seligman: One more thought and it was about Marc's presentation. The psychopath, the impatient child, the damage they do to themselves in the world. Then the opposite question is what about the really patient child, and I'm sitting next to the world's great example - what about the opposite of psychopathology? What about the person who takes enormously seriously other people and the rest of the world? I think they do more good than the negatives damage the world. (Audience applause) Marc Hauser: I guess I wouldn't see it as an either/or; they're representatives of the population. You've got people who are different that's where I think the role of our teachings becomes so important is to recognise the differences so that we can teach to them rather than to ignore them. I think part of the problem with psychology has often been analyses at the group level right, rather than recognising the individual differences. I think what biology brings to the table is some surprises about how rigid some of the biology actually is, that we were not expecting to find. What I find interesting about this is, and your example illustrates this is, in the same way the completely impatient person cripples himself or herself and many others, the extraordinarily patient person can be crippling to himself or herself too. The lovely example in a non-social domain comes back to Charles Darwin who waited 20 years before he published his greatest work. Nowadays that's unheard of; people write books every two years. So I think what makes this interesting is that that variation in some sense has some adaptive value, that there are people who are impatient and they are often the ones who break with tradition, they break conformity. So I think it comes back in some sense to thinking about scientific revolutions. Scientific revolutions come from people rocking the boat, they want to see change, they are not patient, they push, they're not inhibited, they turn the world around. Change comes from that, change often comes from pushing very strongly I think with alternative views. I mean, you might want think of your movement in psychology as an example of that - a long tradition going one way and people not taking into account these other parts of the emotions, right. So I think here's a case where I think there's some good to impatience sometimes - people who push, get things done. Natasha Mitchell: Alan Wallace Alan Wallace: Marc I'd like to respond to you and a very provocative point you raised earlier whether there's any role for vengeance in a profoundly spiritual life, a life profoundly oriented towards good. There's a mental factor in Buddhist psychology -- which is very close to a vengeance and it's regarded as an affliction of the mind; something to be dispelled, right together with craving and jealousy and so on. At the same time in one of the most renowned widely studied and practiced texts in all Tibetan Buddhism, actually an Indian text, (Tibetan language) A Guide to the Buddhist Way of Life. The author who is quite universally renowned in that everybody loves him, everybody follows him, he is absolutely non-sectarian. I in this rather short text, especially in his chapter on patience, he is addressing the afflictions of his own mind, and he said - it's like he's dialoguing with them - in other words not the cognitive fusion 'I am angry, I am this', but recognising anger, face to face with anger and pettiness and selfishness and so forth. And he says 'you have tormented me for countless lifetimes. You have tormented me throughout my whole life, and now I've had it!'. I'm paraphrasing but it's a close paraphrase. 'I've had it with you, I will hunt you down, I will not let you dominate my mind any more, I'm fed up'! He's quite upset, he's intolerant. 'These afflictions of the mind I have been far too patient with you far too long!'. And this is considered a good thing. Now it's not just being impatient or being - how do you say- not complacent with one's own mental afflictions, but if one sees them elsewhere they are no better there than here. I think a crucial distinction here though, is not fusing one's own mental afflictions with one's self, and not fusing another person with that person's mental afflictions. We may do all we can to overcome and destroy another person's mental afflictions, and to alter their behaviour so they are no longer terrorising, harming other people - but like a surgeon who comes into the brain with a sharp knife and cuts out just the tumour and leaves the rest of the brain intact - the vengeance, the anger, the intolerance is directed just to the tumour, just to the act, just to the mental affliction and not to the person. If it's directed to the person then it just cycles and cycles and cycles. Natasha Mitchell: Buddhist scholar Alan Wallace. More from him next week and from Martin Seligman, well known for spearheading the field of positive psychology. In direct dialogue today with His Holiness the Dalai Lama: you heard from evolutionary biologist Professor Marc Hauser from Harvard, author of Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong. Centre stage of course, the Dalai Lama. You'll find the transcript of the show, the audio, lots of links and references on the All in the Mindwebsite abc.net.au/rn/allinthemind, add your comments there too. I'm Natasha Mitchell - next week what it means to really flourish.

From the stage of the 2009 Mind and Its Potential conference, His Holiness the Dalai Lama joins All in the Mind's Natasha Mitchell in an extended conversation about the mind, science and much else. And, joining the dialogue over coming weeks is the founder of the field of positive psychology, Martin Seligman, leading Harvard evolutionary biologist Marc Hauser, and Buddhist scholar Alan Wallace TRANSCRIPT: Natasha Mitchell: Hi, Natasha Mitchell on ABC Radio National, on air and online at abc.net.au/rn. His Holiness the Dalai Lama has been in Australia this week in the year that of course marks the 20th anniversary of his Nobel Peace Prize, and 50 years since his exile from China. And as well as meeting with a new incarnation of sorts, the Liberal leader Tony Abbott, the Dalai Lama also joined me on the stage at the Mind and Its Potential Conference for an extended dialogue this week. So today join us in that conversation which really continues the decades of exchange that the Dalai Lama has fostered with scientists. Sharing the stage was leading psychologist and founder of the field of positive psychology Martin Seligman, Harvard evolutionary biologist and psychologist Marc Hauser, and Buddhist and meditation scholar Alan Wallace. So, right throughout this month I'll be bringing you their shared conversations here on All in the Mind. Let's start then with His Holiness the Dalai Lama as he enters the stage with his translator the Buddhist scholar Geshe Dorji Damdul. (Applause) Natasha Mitchell: Thank you Your Holiness. I remember reading for you as a 9 year old boy, and we've seen those pictures of you as a 9 year old boy, your first lesson in Buddhist psychology was to learn that the definition of mental, the mental is 'that which is luminous and knowing'. And 65 years later, are you any clearer about what that means and what it could mean for the rest of us? The Dalai Lama: Oh, naturally, when I started learning this (about) mind, or the submind - or - I don't know - you see, there are different varieties of consciousness or mind. I had no enthusiasm, and actually no interest to learn! Then gradually of course more serious interest. Then particularly I think the last few decades when we engage biologists also. Some of these emotions is a biological factor. So very much related with that. And also we human beings and other animals are also common. Then of course our human brain is something really something special. As a result, the thinking about thinking is much, much greater. So then, sometimes I feel we also need more divisions in Buddhist texts. For almost 2000 years, until recently, the scriptures mentioned that. Now with the help of scientists who also study about emotions, and these different things, I feel it's very helpful to enrich our traditional knowledge. Natasha Mitchell: What does it mean to say that the mind or the mental is 'luminous and knowing?' The Dalai Lama: It is not physical, no form. I think the implication is it is formless but something very clear. Many things can reflect on it, and through that way - 'knowing'. So it's very basic nature is 'knowing'. I think mainly knowing, and after knowing, then feeling. I think that's the meaning . Natasha Mitchell: I understand on your desk in Dharamsala there's a plastic brain given to you, a model of a brain, given to you by the late Robert Livingston - your friend and scientist. And I guess science is very keen to define what it's talking about. And some would say that the mind is the hundred billion neurons in that brain, one hundred billion brain cells. Or they would say that the mind is a machine, some would say that it is a computer. But how do you visualise the mind? The Dalai Lama: . Now here we have to make distinction. Grosser level mind, or more subtle, more subtle. The grosser level of mind, of course, is a product of the brain or neurons; there's no question. But then more deeper, more subtler. Now for example we now already begin investigation, a person who clinically is dead, so that means brain dead but still there is something inside. Indication that the dead body still remains very fresh, sometimes for two weeks, four weeks they remain like that. It's not everybody, but those people who have some experience in meditation. I think in the last 50 years in India, as far as I notice.... 20. Natasha Mitchell: 20 people. His Holiness the The Dalai Lama: 20 people. So we have to find an explanation how it happened. Natasha Mitchell: So you're observing, you're sensing, the continuation of mind. I wonder how science could investigate that? The Dalai Lama: So you see, so then scientists are showing very, very keen interest and they make available some simple machine to examine that dead person, who is supposed to have some subtle mind still in the body. Some short electric... Natasha Mitchell: So they put an electroencephalogram on the head, measuring brain waves. The Dalai Lama: Usually, you see, after a few days after death it is impossible but it happens. Natasha Mitchell: Tricky. The Dalai Lama: So you see actually it is a dead body, remain fresh about three weeks. I mean the scientific way has not yet found explanation, and this is subject to further investigation. From the ancient Indian psychology, then it is this subtle mind, which is more independent from this body, so that mind is still in the body. So grosser level mind is dead, but the subtle mind still remains there, in that dead body, like that. So as soon as you see that the mind depart from the body then immediately, within a minutes, the body decays and some smell and some liquid come, that always happens. So this is one field for further investigation - jointly - the Buddhist psychologist explanation and modern scientist with this equipment. Then things may become clearer. But anyway, worthwhile to investigate! Natasha Mitchell: You pose an incredible challenge to science and I know in recent years, as you would know very well, there's been tremendous interest in the plasticity of our brain. It's a very hopeful view of the brain, I think the science is still very much being developed. But you would argue, I know, that Buddhism has long held a philosophy and an understanding of the plasticity of the brain. Can you explain that Buddhist interpretation of plasticity, and how that links with what you have read and understood about the neuroscience of plasticity... that our brain can change in response to behaviours, or environment, input, therapy, education? The Dalai Lama: As the result of new experiments like Dr Richard Davidson's. Through sheer meditation, through meditation. - so that means just mental activities - that actually can change the brain. Now they begin to see, through just sheer sort of mental work, some change in the brain...through meditation. (His Holiness the Dalai Lama turns to Alan Wallace) I think you should explain... Natasha Mitchell: And this is Richard Davidson's work isn't it? The Dalai Lama: Right. Natasha Mitchell: So he's working with meditators and observing what happens in their brain after they do a course of meditation. Alan Wallace. Alan Wallace: Sure, I'll be very brief but there was a very well known study that he published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science a few years ago. Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin had a fair number of monks from Butan, Tibet primarily as I recall, who had meditated anywhere between 10,000 and 60,000 hours. So these were truly, highly trained, very professional meditators. And what they found is, that as a result of, it seemed, correlated with a meditative experience was increased activity in the left prefrontal cortex, which Richard Davidson and other neuroscientists believe is correlated with positive effect, feeling good. And it was really quite exceptionally well developed and it was more developed among meditators who'd meditated 40,000, 50-60,000 as opposed to 10 or 20. So it seemed to be correlated with the extent of the meditative practice - that was one major finding. And another one was exceptional increase in gamma, so this is an EEG measurement - a certain frequency of the electromagnetic fields generated by the brain - and that too was really very exceptional. Exactly what that means is difficult to sort out, but what was quite unequivocally demonstrated in this study is that years and years of very intensive meditation do clearly have immeasurable impact on the brain. So more is to be seen and longitudinal studies clearly need to be done. Natasha Mitchell: Absolutely. I'm rather interested in this question of, we focus very much on individual brains and the plasticity of individual brains measuring the positive outcomes for individuals and I wonder if there might be scope for a collaboration between Buddhism and psychology to work out how we might measure the social plasticity of brains, the ability of how individual minds might effectively collaborate. Because it seems to me that we can understand individual brains but do we not want to better understand how brains work together to respond to climate change for example, or war. I wonder if that would be an interesting project for Buddhism and psychology? The Dalai Lama: I don't know. (Laughter) Natasha Mitchell: It's too big a question, I think that's a good answer. The Dalai Lama: Sometimes people use the word: 'some dialogue between Buddhism and modern science'. So then I feel it may create confusion. So to be more precise, I don't know the exact word, but according to my own limited vocabulary, I usually estimate like this. Buddhist science, and then Buddhist philosophy or Buddhist concept, then Buddhist religion. Three parts. So discussions with modern scientists, (are) nothing to do with the Buddhist religion. Nor, I think basically, not Buddhist concept. Some Buddhist's views like relativity, absence of absolute, or independence, these involve (Buddhist concepts). But basically, simply, Buddhist science. That means in Buddhism, you see there is a lot of explanation about mind, because the Buddhist method or way of approach is training mind. Through training of the mind, change our mind, transformation of our emotion - that's the way, not through some kind of blessing from outside, but within ourselves change. So therefore, the mind is (something) very important matter. So therefore we should have full knowledge about that. So the Buddhist psychology in the Buddhist science although some Buddhist literature mentions that in world geography in centre the world is in the middle (of the universe). That is outdated - I do not believe. At least for this planet. Some other planet, who knows? So Buddhists you see actually attach these things, but these has nothing to do with religion, but simply mentioned about the cosmology and how to start this whole universe....with five elements...like that. So, that's Buddhist science. So, we are discussing with modern scientists about modern science and Buddhist science. So this has nothing to do with some discussion about whether there's a next life or these things, or salvation or these things, or God. Nothing to do. That's something (at a) different level. So, that I want to make clear. Buddhist science not Buddhism. Natasha Mitchell: Excellent. Let's look at how Buddhist science views emotion. This has been a very interesting partnership between you in your dialogue with scientists. And to conceive that Buddhist science considers that there are 84,000 negative emotions is unimaginable to me, and I guess your great quest is to help us relieve ourselves of negative or destructive emotions - like craving, hostility, delusion. It still makes me wonder by those hostile emotions, those destructive emotions - if they are so bad for us - why do they persist? Why are they so pervasive? Destructive emotions seem to be essentially human, and I wonder if that means they have a purpose? The Dalai Lama: I believe these different emotions, each emotion I think (has at the) biological level some purpose. Anger, fear is for one's own survival, bring facility for survival. Extra anger, hatred - negative factor - and brings more effort. Jealousy - also in order to survive - sometimes jealousy also necessary. So that's a fact. Some scientist once told me that in anger, the blood circulation more in the arms in order to fight. And when fear develops, then the blood circulation goes more in leg, (so we are) ready to run away. So you see there is a close connection between emotions and biology. Certain sort of mental activities and physical activities are very close. So some, these emotions are very much related with biological factor mainly for survival and reproduction and defence. Then another level. Now at this moment we can't say 'this emotion is destructive', 'this emotion is constructive', we can't say that. Animals, also they have the same. Now we human beings because of this intelligence, we have the ability to think of long term interests not just temporary survival. So then in terms of long term interest, then some of these emotions are actually of no benefit, in fact, harmful. Some emotions are useful. Then the concept of destructive emotions, constructive emotions then develops according to the long term interest. So basically in Buddhism, firstly Buddhism is explaining the possibility of elimination of some of these emotions - emotions which are ultimately based on ignorance. That is possible to remove, because it's based on ignorance. A more enlightened view develops, and that sometimes we call 'wisdom'. And from knowledge or awareness which knows reality, that is based on valid mind. So valid mind and ignorance, contradict each other. Therefore, if valid mind trains or increases then ignorance can reduce. That's the Buddhist sort of philosophy, not only philosophy but that is the Buddhist concept, the Buddhist approach. So then, now there's a certain goal, a certain sort of purpose, or certain ultimate goal according that among these emotions - biological emotions - some are useful to achieve that (goal), and we can further strengthen them. Some emotion is no use for that goal. And not only that, if you think more deeper way, those emotions based on ignorance usually will ultimately bring some discomfort, or disaster. Such as anger. For immediate, anger is useful for defence, but anger creates some kind of blindness, too much anger and we can't see the reality. Similarly, (if there is) too much attachment there, you can't see the reality. In order to see the reality, our mind should be very calm and unbiased. Through an unbiased mental state, you can see objectively, we can look objectively. Then you can see the reality. So if just like an animal, just day to day life, feeding, shelter, sex and destructive or constructive emotions are not much relevant. We are human beings with this intelligence, long term interest - then some emotions are useful, some emotions are very negative, therefore now there is a demarcation between destructive emotion and positive emotion. Natasha Mitchell: So how would you view an experience like depression. You know the emphasis now is very much on investigating depression and its biochemical causes, so that people can develop biochemical treatments. And so in the context of this conversation about destructive emotion, how do you view depression? The Dalai Lama: Actually in Buddhist psychology depression has... (Discussion between translator, Alan Wallace and the Dalai Lama in Tibetan language). The Dalai Lama: .. No exact term 'depression', so I think we have to find the terminology. So depression, as far as I know, we can't divide.... (Further discussion between translator and the Dalai Lama in Tibetan language) Translator (Geshe Dorji Damdul): In fact as for depression, we cannot classify depression as one solid mental state, because it has various kinds. The Dalai Lama: ...Due to many causes and conditions. Some depression, you see, is due to this cause or that condition. And then a similar sort of level of depression, but essentially different cause. So therefore, I think treatment should deal with the real causes of that depression. Depression is something like symptom, so like illness - something, some pains here, and we say 'oh, I have this pain here'. And then some drugs to remove. That is not sufficient. This pain, what are the causes? And then, dealing with the causes, then the pain is relieved. So similarly depression, mental depression, mental illness - different causes. So we have to deal with causes of depression, so I think there may be a variety Natasha Mitchell: Your Holiness, in your book Ancient Wisdom Modern World you called for 'a radical reorientation from our habitual preoccupation with the self' especially in the West, and I wonder if you see a risk with the huge increase and interest in meditation, whether in the West we might risk an increase in that focus on the self, rather than an outward focus? The Dalai Lama: Now whether you accept religion or not, it is quite obvious those individuals who always think just of one's self and don't care about others' wellbeing, and even to some extent they exploit others in order to fulfil one's own interest, or bully another. So all these murders, thieves, sexual abuse and telling lies, deceiving - all these ultimately are self centred, extreme self centred and egoistic. So someone who indulges in killing, we cannot stop, 'oh, don't do killing'. We have to deal with them at the motivation level and then that action can stop. Something changes at the motivational level. I think the West, the Judeo-Christian background culture, or now like Christianity or Islam, or many other religions, or Judaism. I think the emphasis on faith, in order to increase faith the concept of Creator happened. So the total faith towards a Creator, that means total submission to God. So that actually (has the) same effect ... self centred, strong ego. Doesn't it? 'I'm just creation, part of creation of God, and total submit to God'. So Buddhism say it another way, 'there's no independent self - selflessness'. A two way of approach to reduce extreme ego, self centred egoism. So I think that is common everywhere. I think if in one family - say, five people in the family - someone who always thinks of just himself or herself, don't care about the rest of the four family members. Then I think eventually that family has more trouble. If five people in the family always have the spirit of sharing with each other, then that family much happier. Even dogs. Some individual dogs always fight then he or she always remains lonely. If one dog is friendly with every other dog, then they always remain very peaceful... sleep...and like that! So that's a fact. Natasha Mitchell: Which makes me wonder if this.... meditation has taken the West by storm, people are very interested in it, and yet many are practicing it separate from Buddhist philosophy and I wonder whether when you separate the two like that there is a risk that meditation makes people more self centred, more self obsessed, without that context. The Dalai Lama: I think meditation, historically, in India is common - Buddhism, non-Buddhism. Even if some other - Shamatha, Vipassana - both common - Buddhist, non-Buddhist. So some other philosophical viewpoints or certain sort of motivations, then due to these factors then meditation or Vipassana or some other make big differences. Otherwise, the same. So today, meditation, in the sense of training your mind, it is relevant to everybody, whether a believer or non-believer. Even those people who are very much against religion, if they, through training, their sort of method of controlling religion can become more effective and so better! Even I think the cruel person, concentration... Natasha Mitchell: ...can benefit? The Dalai Lama: ... can develop a sharp mind. And then also the one Buddhist concept - inter-dependency - the concept of inter-dependency, that makes them more holistic, and so then their destructive reaction becomes much more effective! (Laughter) Natasha Mitchell: Always laughing, definitely some challenges in there for us too. His Holiness the Dalai Lama and you also heard briefly from Buddhist scholar Alan Wallace, President of the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies. His latest book is called Mind in the Balance - you'll hear more from him in coming weeks. As ever you'll find the audio and transcript on the All in the Mind website where you can discuss the show directly on the web page now by the way as well as my blog, just look for add your comment all at abc.net.au/rn/allinthemind. Next week, the dialogue continues - the founder of the field of positive psychology and author of Learned Optimism and also Authentic Happiness, Martin Seligman will join the discussion with the Dalai Lama. I look forward to your company then, hope it's a good week for you as you hurtle head first into the silly season. I'm Natasha Mitchell. Thanks to sound engineer Jenny Parsonage - bye for now.

Evolution, mutation and transformation -- what do these themes evoke for you? Genes mutate, but so do bodies, brains and cultures. Celebrate the 150th anniversary of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, and dive into the Gene Pool. We invited you to upload sounds, stories, and images to Radio National's social media site, Pool (http://pool.org.au), and to mutate and remix those of others. Catch All in the Mind's remix of your remixes! TRANSCRIPT: Natasha Mitchell: All in the Mind on ABC Radio National and Natasha Mitchell emerging today from the curious depths of ABC's gene pool project, it's mighty interesting down here. I'm talking about the gene pool we asked you to contribute stories, sounds and images to earlier this year, exploring the themes of evolution, mutation and change in whatever way you wanted because of course genes mutate but so do bodies, brains and behaviours as do cultures, art forms, languages, relationships, everything is on the move. And we also asked you to have a go at mutating the contributions of others by remixing them and mashing them up. So to mark this week's 150th anniversary of Charles Darwin On the Origin of Species, today a bit of an audio experiment really on evolution. Evolution, it's a word originally derived from the Latin for an unrolling or an opening, so let's open the gene pool to share our remix of some of your pieces. And you can explore further and keep contributing over at our social media site pool.org.au so let's mutate. Cameron Semmons: In the beginning... Cameron Semmons Boris Glickman: I guess basically what I like to do is just change things upside down. When you turn things upside down you get a completely different perspective on things and things that evolve are not usually seen from the normal perspectives become visible. In such a way you can discover very deep secrets. For instance truth about existence, about the world, you don't usually see when you look at things from a normal perspective. So far I have found the right eternal questions. Steven Gould : Is natural selection of creative force? Richard Dawkins: You know it survived because its descendants are still with us but I wouldn't be surprised if it survived in that primeval sea only by the skin of its teeth. What matters is that not that it was good at surviving what interests us is its potential to evolve. ABC open archives Boris Glickman: Revelata Dysmorphologica: A Lyrical Transmogrification Boris Valerie Curtis: Stuff that's sticky and gooey and warm. ABC open archives Boris Glickman: Reading Revelata Dysmorphologica: A Lyrical Transmogrification Boris It started out inconspicuously, inauspiciously, a small pimple on the lower left of his back, something that no one would ever give a second glance at. It didn't even itch, so demanded no instinctive scratching. Valerie Curtis: It's much more likely to harbour pathogenic bacteria than stuff that's cold, or frozen, or stuff that's been cooked in a fire for example or stuff that's dry. ABC open archives Boris Glickman: Revelata Dysmorphologica: A Lyrical Transmogrification But it grew and grew, developing into a small cyst at first, then into a larger and larger one acquiring along the way the powers of perception, cognition, speech, reason. It became more and more dominant in the running of his life til there came a point when he realised he had become the boil. Valerie Curtis: We would tend to be because evolution has equipped us with if you like statistical process in the past of people who liked gooey, sticky stuff and liked putting their fingers in poo for example, they died out, they didn't have mates, they didn't pass on their genes. ABC open archives Music: AgedMusic Andrews Liver salts AgedMusic Boris Glickman: Reading Revelata Dysmorphologica: A Lyrical Transmogrification He now was the awkward ugly lump of shapeless, useless flesh that needed to be amputated at the soonest possible opportunity, discarded with other medical waste, or better still pickled and preserved for eternity as a freakish anatomical occurrence- a talking, reasoning pustule that apparently possessed all the features of a well developed human being. Valerie Curtis: People who were a bit more squeamish and a bit more careful tended not to get so sick, tended to as a result be better mate prospects and tended to have healthier kids. ABC open archives Boris Glickman: Reading Revelata Dysmorphologica: A Lyrical Transmogrification: He clearly saw how all this time he'd deluded himself into believing that he was a real person who deserved love, companionship, all the rights that every member of society should possess whereas he was just a cyst that somehow grew, assuming the proportions, the attributes of a person. Natasha Mitchell: Boris Glickman, welcome to All in the Mind. Boris Glickman: Thank you very much Natasha it's wonderful to be here. Natasha Mitchell: Now tell us about this poem, Revelata Dysmorphologica? Boris Glickman: Revelata Dysmorphologica like many of my poems and short stories came to me in a dream, a big influence of Kafka in particular Metamorphosis. Natasha Mitchell: What is the Kafka short story -- remind us? Boris Glickman: Well basically it's about a travelling salesman who wakes up one morning and finds that he's become a giant insect. The rest of the story deals with his way of trying to adjust to his new form and how his family reacts to him. You know he feels pretty bad about himself basically. I think this poem pretty much outdoes Kafka at his own game because it goes even further in a total annihilation of the protagonist ego, identity, and the amount of self loathing that is expressed by the protagonist in this poem I think. I guess one of the levels I'm exploring is the nature of identity, how all of us have the shadow present, our dark self, where most of our self-loathing and negative emotions come from and this poem materialises that nebulous shadow that we all possess. So yes, as you said on one level he actually becomes the ball. Natasha Mitchell: It's actually comical on one level isn't it, that it's profoundly despairing at another. Boris you say that this came to you in a dream, a dream or a nightmare? Boris Glickman: I guess I'm so used to all this weird and wonderful scenarios in my dream that it's no longer a nightmare. Usually I take it straight away as an inspiration and write them down. It is a frightening scenario but for me it's like a mother lode of inspiration. Natasha Mitchell: You know the gene pool project has been about collecting and is about collecting people's responses to the idea of change, to the idea or concept of evolution. These themes really speak in your work, especially this one. Boris Glickman: Yes, our chance trans-mutation, those are things that are important to me on the personal level, I'm always interested in growing and changing, reaching for the next layer. And I think that translates into my work. Cameron Semmons: Let us hypothesise. Cameron Semmens Martin Harrison:How crucial do you think this is for poetry that it incorporates I suppose not only biological evolutionary ecological discoveries but perhaps even the more intractable ones such as the daunting theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. ABC open archives Boris Glickman: Revalata, Subterranea. A poetic mutation. Boris Mark O'Connor: It perhaps could be argued that all these great 20th century theoretical and some would argue even mythological constructs should have a place in modern poetry and yet they very rarely do. ABC open archives Music: 'Things' by AgedMusic AgedMusic Boris Glickman: Reading Revalata, Subterranea: One night my friends and I descended into the sewers underneath the metropolis and discovered the most unusual eel like creatures lounging indolently on the concrete banks of the subterranean river. There they were lying close to the river's edge, only deigning to bestir, dip their heads languidly into the passing current, when a particularly choice morsel of human waste flowed by. Their appearance overpowered me with its repulsiveness. Richard Dawkins:Now presumably the first segmented ancestor of a centipede and the same goes for our own first segmented ancestor. Richard Dawkins :Segmented ancestor of a centipede. ABC open archives Music: Some thing...by Mandrillus mandrillus Richard Dawkins: Would have been a monstrous freak/ It had a double body or a triple body etc where its parents had a nice, tidy single body. ABC open archives Boris Glickman: Reading Revalata, SubterraneaHow could evolution ever come up with such a horrible abomination? I remember wondering to myself How could Nature ever allow such a glaring insult against Herself? to arise and flourish, such a travesty, such a betrayal, such a perversion of the very natural order. Yet, when I looked closer at these anathemas, a most astounding feature revealed itself to me. Somehow through some playful whim of the Goddess who directs and oversees their evolutionary process, these overgrown worms developed human faces, nay, not just human faces but visages of angelic beauty such that no earthly woman would ever dare to possess, lest the gods became spiteful and jealous. This discovery was so unexpected, the radiance of their mien so intense, I stood transfixed unable to take my gaze even for an instant away from these heavenly creatures. Their eyes looked at me with all the cognition of a person, their facial expressions were those of kindness, serenity, wisdom. There were two over to the left, holding their heads close to one another, gazing deeply, just like two lovers into each other's eyes. Suddenly I felt an odd sort of compassion for them Richard Dawkins : Now presumably, the first segmented ancestor of a centipede and the same goes for our own first segmented ancestor...would have been a monstrous freak. It had a double body or a triple body etc, where its parents had a nice tidy single body...Show and tell. ABC open archives Boris Glickman: And this little poem of mine actually has attracted more different interpretations than any other of my work. But for me my personal interpretation is that this is an allegory, the sewers is a clear symbol of the unconscious mind and the eels are the shadow self, the protagonists by seeing the beauty of these eels is actually able to accept his shadow self, accept himself in all of his different facets. That's the psychological interpretation of it. Natasha Mitchell: So there's a real process of acceptance. Boris Glickman: Acceptance of one's self, yes. Natasha Mitchell: So from self hatred you can evolve in a sense a self love. Boris Glickman: Yes, that's right, but then again this other interpretations have been in a sense of a spiritual journey, of finding beauty in everything, even in these horrible creatures, of seeing the beauty in all of evolution's creations. There's also been a humorous kind of interpretation where it's a story set in the future of genetic engineering that's gone horribly wrong. Natasha Mitchell: How so? Boris Glickman: Well basically they were working perhaps on these kind of creatures and somehow they were able to make them have human faces. Natasha Mitchell: Chimera? Boris Glickman: Chimera, chimera creatures. Natasha Mitchell: An eel with a human face that mirrors our own. Boris Glickman: That's right. Natasha Mitchell: Spooky. Boris Glickman: Also it can be seen as a satire on how we always put ourselves above the rest of the world, the animal world and how we always see ourselves as having the beauty that other creatures don't have. And here are these disgusting creatures that actually, their faces have more beauty to them than any earthly woman possesses. Natasha Mitchell: Interestingly, change is part of your own life because you were born in the Soviet Union. Boris Glickman: That's right. Natasha Mitchell: When did you come to Australia? Boris Glickman: I came in '81. Natasha Mitchell: As a kid? Boris Glickman: As a kid and obviously it's an enormous culture shock coming from a country with a communist government and I would say that I probably am still going through an adjustment process. You can never really adjust, you can gradually adapt to the new surroundings but you always have that past there behind you. Natasha Mitchell: And Boris Glickman is one of our contributors to Radio National's gene pool project this year on our social media site pool.org.au. This is All in the Mind with me Natasha Mitchell going global on Radio Australia and as podcast and today a playful remix of some of your contributions to our gene pool project to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Darwin's On the Origin of Species. Phillip Adams : Do you think it's really possible to reconcile evolution and the absolute of god? ABC open archives Gene Pool contribution: "Evolution + GOD =?" by Mandrillus mandrillus Emilia: I'm an atheist. DSI John Durant : Well there are still great steaming resources of ignorance in biology around. ABC open archives Stephen Jay Gould: Now if you want to overturn that I think that in its most radical sense that's exactly what Darwin was trying to do with the theory of natural selection, not to cause us to disbelieve in God but to get away from that argument that all apparent higher order harmony is the direct production of God's benevolence. Stephen Jay Gould: Evolution from cosmic stardust to human society is a comprehensive and continuous process. It transforms the world's stuff, it is creative in the sense that during the process new and more complex levels of organisation are progressively attained. It's not that natural selection is a creative force. Richard Dawkins: It is creative, evolved? ABC open archives Cameron Semmons: The Bible meets Origin of the Species in No Man's land for Peace Talks. Written and read by Cameron Simmons. Cameron Semmons In the beginning was a garden and an apple. In the beginning of religion Adam ate the apple from the tree resulting in The Fall. In the beginning of science Newton sat beneath a tree and was hit by a falling apple! Adam discovered the gravity of disobedience while Newton discovered the law of gravity. From Adam we carry original sin, from Newton we value original thought. Phillip Adams :Do you think it is really possible to recognise evolution and a belief in God? Cameron Semmons: Each episode, in its essence, is a collision with consequence, a comprehension of constants. the truth of the word of God and the truth of the laws of Nature. In the new beginnings was a birth in a town called Bethlehem and a berth on a boat called the Beagle. The Holy Spirit came down on Jesus like a dove while natural selection came to Darwin through the finch. Jesus defeated death on the Hill of Golgotha while Darwin deduced origins from the isle of the Galapagos. Jesus taught us revolution while Darwin thought up evolution. 'Intelligent design' by Kerry Ashwin Kerry Ashwin Richard Dawkins: In some senses we are shaved monkeys, we're much more than that but it's Darwin who taught us that. Kay Ashwin:Scientists today have found the answer to one of the mysteries of the universe. Does God have power tools? The unequivocal answer is yes. Are we DIY? Is our evolution a school project? But this reporter wants to know where is the power outlet? Julian Durant : If there is life elsewhere in the universe we so far know nothing about the details. It may be based on silicone chemistry rather than carbon chemistry, it may flourish near the centre of hot stars or it may flourish near the absolute zero temperature, it may be too small or too large for us to see or apprehend with our senses. But one thing I believe we can already be sure of it will have evolved by a form of Darwinian selection and this is why for me the most important thing Darwinism has to offer is his explanation of adaptation. ABC open archives Cameron Semmons : Reading The Bible Meets Origin of the Species in No Man's Land for Peace Talks Cameron Semmons But could evolution ever have evolved without the revolution that Jesus divulged? Does the Origin of the Species owe its origin to the Sermon on the Mount? Let us hypothesise that from the fruit of the spirit came the seeds of the fruit of science i.e. from love, joy and grace came the space to speculate. from faith, patience and peace came the room for research to increase; from kindness, goodness and gentleness came ethics, methodology and objectivity. Within Christendom's Fruit Salad of Virtues... Emilia:Always searching for an ultimate answer. DSI Boris Glickman: Up until a few years back I saw science as the way for me to find the truth that I was searching and I must admit I became disillusioned with science, with formal science. I thought it was the absolute truth but as I started science, specially physics further and further, I saw that there's a plethora of theories, ideas and I became quite disillusioned so for me writing became the new way of searching for truth that I used to search through in science. It might appear to be quite yet, there is a kind of disparity between say hard sciences like maths, physics and spirituality and there was always within me this tension. Natasha Mitchell: It's a friction almost isn't it? Boris Glickman: A friction pulling in two different directions. Natasha Mitchell: But your writing brings them together in a very interesting way. Boris Glickman: Even though inside myself I might not necessarily have been able to resolve those tensions. Richard Aedy :Did you know Darwin married his cousin? Gene Pool contribution: FiShHeaD - "Let's eat" by Aged Music AgedMusic Stephen Jay Gould: And the only thing that is really happening out there in nature is organisms struggling not for the higher order good but for their personal reproductive success. The most private personal thing and nothing else - now that's a radical argument. ABC open archives Geoffrey Miller: Why are people not getting happier showing off wealth and status to others a consumerist culture fosters widespread narcissism. Work and Shopping. Geoffrey Miller: Work and Shopping. The narcissist is very focussed on their self interest but they try to achieve their social and sexual goals through display, relentless, relentless display of their personal qualities to others combined with very little empathy for the interest of others. Socially popular, sexually attractive, social status, the unconscious motives that are driving consumption. Natasha Mitchell: So in a sense what we buy has become a proxy for what you consider to be a fundamentally human nature, this desire to display ourselves to others so that we may reproduce. Gene Pool contribution: Remix of ABC Radio National interview with Geoffrey Miller by Pip Shea pipshea Stephen Jay Gould : And that's all. Now if that sounds to you like Adam Smith's economics translated into nature -- it's no accident because one of those interesting conclusions of recent historical research has shown the tie of... Geoffrey Miller :Work and shopping. Stephen Jay Gould : ...Darwin's development of the Theory of Natural Selection in 1838, to his interest on the particular view of individuality in this thought of Adam Smith and the Scottish economists, it is the same argument. Geoffrey Miller :Work and shopping. Stephen Jay Gould : Namely that if you want the most rationally ordered economy you don't get all the smart people sitting around a table and pass laws for higher order, harmony of economies Adam Smith argued, you do something that seems paradoxically opposite, you let individuals struggle for profit. ABC open archives Geoffrey Miller :Work and shopping. Stephen Jay Gould: And the ones that do it well, knock out the others and balance each other out and you get the maximal system to the action of the invisible hand -- right. The analogue of profit in nature is reproductive success, it's the same argument. Geoffrey Miller: Consumerist culture fosters widespread narcissism -- work and shopping. Music: "Feel the sun in my sign" by Kaoskyane and Apollo kaoskyane Music Sweet jobs sport by AgedMusic Speaker :There are lots of different jobs to choose from. Many provide a chance to get ahead and there's the job for you for every alert and alive young Australian. AgedMusic Old Man:The world stands still as I coreen uncontrolled on down the hill, don't want to die - ain't ready to go, just another dent in some yuppies Volvo 'Princely Musings' by AgedMusic AgedMusic Natasha Mitchell: And we're diving into ABC Radio National's gene pool project on All in the Mind this week. As part of their course work this year third year media students from RMIT University also contributed a series of extraordinary projects to the gene pool exploring the theme of evolution they were brilliantly lateral - so let's hear part of a documentary produced by Elizabeth McCarthy, James Thompson and Marian Chan. It's called the Evolution of Y, it's a story of change and evolution really at its most personal. It explores the themes of gender, nature versus nurture and the evolution of the sexual and social identity of a transgender person they call Y who was born male. The Evolution of Y Y: I didn't have modern parents - and you know they didn't ...my father had four brothers and no sisters, my mother had four brothers and no sisters, I have two brothers and no sisters. There weren't a lot of feminine things going on in my world. In my late teens I was certainly cross dressing, actually I was cross dressing in my early teens, actually I was cross dressing probably before my teens but it was just something that I did without thinking about and then it was only later when I guess was exposed to the whole ideas of gender re-assignment that I decided that that might be the way to go. I wasn't thinking in the classic cliché talk show tranny terms of I'm trapped, you know I'm a cliché trapped in this stereo types body, I wasn't thinking in those terms. Sex was just sort of something that everything was vaguely defined by - Yes, once you start taking hormones you feel like you're on the road, you know it makes changes in your body that are good, you feel more at home so to speak. I sort of had you know the dreams of oh it's beautiful. I remember my psychiatrist referred to it as the honeymoon period where you think you know it's all possible and once in a while you can think oh yes, look I look fabulous today but yeah usually, I don't know, there's just something about, I became a bit weary of trying to live up to other people's ideals of what being a woman was. I'm satisfied in my own terms that I am as much of a woman as I can be because there's that sense, particularly now, where people don't like to be fooled. That's the big thing and I think that's where the hate comes from, people think that you're trying to fool them and the transgendered are actively encourage to blend in, to be mousey and demure and live in the suburbs and even to invent histories for themselves as growing up as girls etc. etc. Natasha Mitchell: And you can hear the full documentary The Evolution of Y by RMIT media students at pool.or.au or head to the All in the Mind website and we've linked to it directly. Speaker:There she goes, engine running smooth and sweet, sweet -- yeah there she goes smooth and sweet. Natasha Mitchell: And it seems fitting to wrap up our mash up with an excerpt from a piece by RMIT students Danica Revote, Hannah Valmadre and Meg Wettenhall, they explored the evolution of audio technology in their project and this mash up from it is called "Evolutionism for your Ears". DanicaR Female Speaker: Lots of different types of music, normally upbeat stuff if you're feeling in the mood a bit of Presets, Fleetwood Mac... Male Speaker: And the parents listen to it, the mothers John Jacobs :The thing that excites me is the collaborative nature and the fact that you can build new ideas out of old ideas. All culture is that way. Male :Who was Darwin anyway, was he just some guy who thought of a crazy idea that just happened to be accepted as science? Female:Many people have suggested that humanity is remaking itself through technology. Female : Audio sound was a natural evolution of the human race, we wanted to capture this sound and share it with others and transport it, sell it, repeat it and so recording audio evolved. Stephen Jay Gould :Now it was particularly while visiting the Galapagos Island that Darwin made the observation that each island contained a slightly different species of finch. Now he wondered if each species could have derived originally from a single ancestor which led to the idea of new species forming from existing populations. Female :The world has seen the creation of first the phonograph that evolved into gramophones, telegraphones, megaphones and microphones. From this evolved amplification, high and low fidelity and stereophonic. recording Natasha Mitchell: And today's All in the Mind mash up also featured sounds from Boris Glick, Aged Music, Kerry Ashwin, Pip Shea, Mandrillus, Cameron Semmons, Kaoskyane as well as gems from the ABC archives which we seeded into the gene pool for you to mutate and mash up. And our thanks to you for your fab contributions to this year's gene pool social media project. Stephen Jay Gould: Only those individuals who are best adapted to secure that food and reproduce would contribute offspring to the next generation. Eventually those individuals that were poorly adapted to their environment would be bred out of existence and only in the best adapted individual... Natasha Mitchell: Check out all the works at pool.org.au more details on the All in the Mind website where you can add your comments as ever, now direct on the website too by the way as the All in the Mind blog. Thanks to colleagues Anita Barraud, The Night Air's John Jacobs and Angie Grant. I'm Natasha Mitchell bringing over the next two shows the forum I'm hosting at the Mind and its Potential Conference next week with His Holiness the Dalai Lama and other guests -- not to be missed. Female:Striving for improvement is the human condition. Male:There's nothing that's been found that contradicts Darwin's basic theory. Female:We all need to be aware of the advances in technology that are directly affecting our greater humanity. Jonathan Marks:Happy birthday Charles Darwin, thanks for all your hard work. allinthemind Richard Dawkins:Would have been a monstrous freak. ABC open archives

In his new book, Why We Disagree About Climate Change, top British climate scientist Mike Hulme wants to understand climate change as a psychological and cultural force. Anthropologist Jonathan Marshall has just edited a provocative collection of Jungian perspectives on climate change. They join Natasha Mitchell to discuss mythology, mental ecology and a changing climate. TRANSCRIPT: Natasha Mitchell: Natasha Mitchell with you and a warm welcome to All in the Mind on ABC Radio National although hopefully not too warm. In two weeks from now negotiators are of course meeting in Copenhagen to forge a global agreement to respond to the challenge of climate change, cap and trade, carbon tax, carbon credits and offsets, the language has certainly shifted from science to one of commodification. But I think we have a uniquely All in the Mind take on the issue today. Mike Hulme: You couldn´t just sit in the library and contemplate for a few weeks and come up with a theory of global climate change so you need science clearly as part of the process of human enquiry and discovery. But having spent most of my career rubbing shoulders with scientists and doing science myself, but also reflecting on climate change, I´ve come to the very clear conclusion that science is deficient if we are going to find a way through this coming century of climate change. We need to understand human behaviour, human psychology, the way we interact with each other and importantly, maybe even most importantly how we as humans relate to the non-human, to the world. And that brings me into also the language of metaphor because we all have different ways of conceiving of what nature is. Natasha Mitchell: Leading climate scientist Mike Hulme is Professor of climate change at the University of East Anglia. He was founding director of the acclaimed Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in the UK, but as a major contributor to the scientific consensus on climate change his new book Why We Disagree About Climate Change really takes him into new and provocative terrain. He joins me today to discuss mythology, our mental ecology and a changing climate, as will Dr Jonathan Marshall an anthropologist and research fellow at the University of Technology, Sydney who´s just edited a collection of Jungian perspectives on climate change called Depth, Psychology, Disorder and Climate Change in which climate is cast as a struggle with ourselves as much as our physical world with a call to dig deeper into our psyche and our unconscious for new myths and motivations to respond to it. So, starting with Mike Hulme -- Mike, why do you argue climate is as much a phenomenon of the mind and culture? Mike Hulme: Yes, well this is where I start off the story, you see, because too often I think stories or books around climate change start off with oh what the scientists have discovered in the last 30 years. I start the story much further back in cultural history because of this ongoing and enduring relationship that humans have had with the weather around them or what we have called climate, which is simply the ensemble of weather experiences. And it´s very important to start there because to me this is what distinguishes climate change. Climate change is not like the hole in the ozone layer, the depletion of stratospheric ozone, because we´ve never had a cultural relationship with stratospheric ozone. Most people didn´t even know stratospheric ozone was there. But with climate we´ve had millennia of experience and relationships of storytelling and that´s actually why climate change can´t be placed into this box of a technical problem requiring a technical solution. It actually has to be approached through the lens of culture if we are actually going to really understand what it signifies for us and therefore what sort of responses we have to make to it. Natasha Mitchell: Are there historical stories of climate that particularly stood out for you in your investigations? Mike Hulme: Well I did a very brief survey of some of the different ways in which different cultures conceive of climate and of course there are indigenous cultures who see in the performance of weather the behaviour and the personality of the gods. The retribution of the gods for immoral behaviour, or the blessing of the gods through weather for good behaviour. And actually that trope is also present in early modern European societies as well. Climate gets endowed with this religious language, this morality, and that shows again how intimate this relationship is between how we see ourselves and our behaviour and our responsibilities and how we think of the performance of the weather. Natasha Mitchell: Jonathan Marshall, as an anthropologist with an interest in Jungian psychology, one of your interests is in enduring myths and symbols as they occupy our minds and cultures. Why do you describe our response to climate changes a mythical or archetypal process -- what do you mean by that? Jonathan Marshall: Well we are intimately connected with the symbols that the weather makes for us. You know storms, heat, deserts, fires, floods are emotional symbols for us, we dream them and so on, we can´t have a dispassionate relationship to them. And one of the things that myths do is essentially give us not only a set of meanings but a set of templates for living and a set of templates for understanding what´s happening to us. And one of the things that we argue in the book is that it is a struggle because in the west we don´t really have any creative mythology to deal with chaos and disorder. Essentially when God comes and makes the world it is an ordering process, in fact that idea is so firmly engrained in people that it becomes an argument for God, that the world must be ordered by some thing. Essentially good, virtue, and everything like that is tied up with ordering. Here we have a natural process which is disordering us, we have no idea really what to do with it, it´s very hard I think for us to take a positive, hopeful attitude towards it. Natasha Mitchell: You make the interesting suggestion too that a good myth joins our psyche and the world, and it has the potential to reconfigure the way we look at the world and act within the world. Jonathan Marshall: Yeah, absolutely. The book essentially calls for people to think about new ways of imagining the world and so the book gives a whole lot of different myths, different analyses of myths to help people have templates to relate to the world. Natasha Mitchell: This is a book about depth psychology in Jungian terms; just give us an entrée into what depth psychology is? Jonathan Marshall: Depth psychology grew out of psychoanalysis, it´s quite important that Jung and Freud split, but essentially what they split over was the meaning of symbols. Freud wanted to reduce symbols to childhood sexual traumas, castration complexes, Oedipus complexes and so on, and Jung said that when he worked with his patients, when he did that people would often get depressed. But if he actually took the symbol as a symbol in itself and asked where did the symbol lead, what was the symbol trying to communicate to the person, then they could go forward into a new form of life or the psychology would start moving in a particular dynamic which he gave the name of 'individuation'. Natasha Mitchell: So working with symbols rather than reducing them all to pathological expressions of childhood desires. Jonathan Marshall: Yes exactly and of course Freud couldn´t cope with that. It led Jung into some very weird places and he studied alchemy for a long time because he thought that alchemists were essentially engaging in a collective dream and that the dynamics of the symbols of alchemy showed us something about the dynamics of psychological processes. Natasha Mitchell: Well many would be surprised possibly to hear that you´ve pulled out the Oedipus myth, for example, and applied it to climate change. I mean just a reminder, you know Oedipus unknowingly came to fulfil a prophesy that he would kill his father king and marry his mother Queen Jocasta and the result was that that happened and the city of Thebes became overrun with plagues and failed crops. Isn´t that the story -- what´s that got to do with climate change? Jonathan Marshall: Well the myth does several different things: it talks about balance, it talks about the relationship between violence and knowledge. Oedipus does not want to know things, he does know certain things and he tries to avoid them from coming out. All the way through there are people trying to kill each other to avoid the consequences of their knowledge, like Laius tries to kill Oedipus when he´s a child. Natasha Mitchell: His father. Jonathan Marshall: His father, yes, but also the land itself rebels against the rulers and I think this is quite an important myth which we don´t talk about nowadays that in fact the quality of the land, the life of the land reflects the quality of the ruling class. Natasha Mitchell: You describe it as the land becomes our collective unconscious, if you like. Jonathan Marshall: Indeed, it reflects back to us what we put into it. All those things that we don´t want to know about: our garbage, our rubbish, the pollution from factories, the unsustainable lifestyles we live in, all go into the land and the land basically comes back and says to us you cannot keep doing this and that is what we´re seeing in climate change. That´s a mythic way of looking at it but essentially it´s what you get from looking at the science, too, because science is always attempting to listen to nature and the idea of Jungian psychology is basically that you are always attempting to listen to the non-ego, which can be dreams and myths and symbols that come up spontaneously from your unconscious. But also the world around you is a reflection of your unconscious, the way you see it. Natasha Mitchell: I´ll come back to that in more depth in a moment. Anthropologist Dr Jonathan Marshall and top British climate scientist Professor Mike Hulme are my guests on All in the Mind today here on ABC Radio National going global on Radio Australia and as podcast. We´re talking climate change and your psyche in the lead-up to the negotiations in Copenhagen. In fact it´s a timely topic with the recent release of a major report by the American Psychological Association on climate change. Mike you´ve also drawn out four enduring and interesting myths, myths in an anthropological sense, that you think were used to make sense of and to psychologise about the world and that you think are relevant to climate change. Why have you turned to mythology? Mike Hulme: Well, yes, that´s right. I´ve not come at this from a professional anthropologist or a psychologist but it just seemed to me as an amateur in this area that actually myths -- in the anthropological sense that Jonathan has just been describing -- can be very useful vehicles for helping us to understand why we seem to adopt different positions. And this is one of the things that´s been not concerning me but fascinating me as a researcher, to understand the many different ways we end up talking about climate change. It is not as simple as here is the science that´s telling us what the problem is, here are the policies that could attend to the problem, and let´s get the politicians to implement the policies. That´s a very naïve and linear model which is not adequate. But myths help us to understand that things are actually much more complicated than that and the four myths that I picked out from what I hear and listen and read in the way that climate change is talked about, is myths that emerge from our instincts, for nostalgia, for fear, of pride and of justice, and I attach labels to these using biblical and Greek mythology. So it's the myth of Eden which is this sense of having lost something that is innocent, humans are now changing not just their local environment but humans are actually rewriting the entire planetary nature and that concerns us because we feel that in doing so we have lost something that´s important to us. Natasha Mitchell: And that really casts I guess nature as something pristine and to be protected? Mike Hulme: Exactly, that it rather is something that is sacred and shouldn´t be contaminated by human activity. And to me that´s a mythical position but it is a very powerful one, I think, that appeals to quite a lot of the discourse that we hear around climate change. Natasha Mitchell: Well it´s certainly driven much of many environmental philosophies and activists over the decades. Mike Hulme: That´s right; it appeals to that instinct and is a lament for something that's been lost. But the second one is rather different although perversely one can hold the two together, the myth of the Apocalypse, this enduring fear of the future, because the future has always been unknown to humans and always will be unknown to humans. Something that gives us new cause for anxiety and worry it can be a very powerful myth -- the Apocalypse -- and the language that we do sometimes hear around climate change: eight years before the end of the world, catastrophe or tipping points are around the corner. It´s a very powerful way that people do engage with the idea of climate. Natasha Mitchell: And it´s become a very powerful rhetorical device, again, hasn´t it? Mike Hulme: It has and we´ve seen it certainly in the run-up to this big international meeting in Copenhagen in a few weeks time. The rhetorical language of expectation for that meeting plays very often to this Apocalyptic myth, that if we don´t get a deal in Copenhagen then we've signed a suicide pact -- basically all is lost. But I think for many others it can have the opposite reaction in fact, that it is a trope, a mode of a discourse, that is actually disempowering and fatalising that people think well if it really is this bad there´s nothing I can do about it so I may as well just live, drink and be happy. And some of the social behavioural psychology work that we´ve done in the UK suggests that that actually does seem to be quite often the reaction to overplaying this fear of the impending Apocalypse, it doesn´t really engage in behavioural change. Natasha Mitchell: Well Mike Hulme, one of the myths that you nominate that is about behavioural change is perhaps the Promethean myth. What are you nominating there? Mike Hulme: Yes, well this is the Greek deity who stole fire from Zeus and gave it to the mortals but in the process lost his way. But it´s trying to get this idea that humans have this desire for mastery and control and we´ve seen it again emerging in many, many episodes of human history and it´s an enduring instinct and enduring desire. And with climate change it plays in the sense that we want to reassert our control, to re-engineer the climate to bring stability back. It´s a little bit like what Jonathan was saying earlier on about the ordering of the world around us, and if we see that there is some chaos or disorder our instinct is to want to try to put order back and we become the masters. And particularly I feel that this is the instinct that is driving some of the new language of climate engineering, these... Natasha Mitchell: The big geo-engineering efforts... Mike Hulme: The big geo-engineering efforts to put mirrors in space and aerosols into the stratosphere to create a thermostat for the planet, so we just have to change the thermostat to get the climate that we want. That to me is the ultimate sort of hubris of humans that we can somehow produce that intricate level of control over the natural world. I just don´t -- personally I don´t believe that but I do think it´s an important mythic position and I think it does help to explain some of the arguments and language that we hear around climate change. Natasha Mitchell: What´s your last myth that you nominate? You do nominate a fourth which I find very interesting. Mike Hulme: Yes, the fourth one is again a very frequently used mythic position when talking about climate change. It´s the myth of Themisius the Greek goddess of natural law and order or justice and quite often we approach climate change and we quite quickly move into the arguments around inequality that the rich and northern nations have been causing the problem but it´s the poorer southern nations who are most exposed to the consequences of it. And that quite quickly leads to a very powerful, a very morally driven language and discourse of justice and equity. And for some people this myth, the myth of Themisius is actually really what climate change is about. It´s not about physically trying to stop climate change per se, but it´s about using climate change to attend to the injustices and the inequalities and inequities that trouble our world. And again for me this is very important to recognise this trope of communication. Natasha Mitchell: I mean as a climate scientist it´s interesting then to read you when you say the ultimate significance of climate change is ideological and symbolic rather than physical and substantive. Is this the basis upon which you nominate these four myths? Mike Hulme: Yes, I think this is a position that I´ve come to. Ten years ago I probably wouldn´t have understood myself what I was taking about. But you know after these last three or four years I´ve read much more widely, I´ve appreciated what anthropology, psychology, sociology, philosophy can offer here. And to me this actually now is where we have to take climate change, we have to understand its symbolic significance and use climate change to look back on ourselves, on our own behaviour, on our own values and attitudes, and find ways of mobilising not in a way that will get global agreement, because I don´t believe that we can ever fully reconcile all of these different mythic positions. So I´m not proposing in some sense that we can get a global agreement that will somehow bring in climate change to an end. But I think if we´re going to use the idea of climate change in any creative way, we´ve got to turn this back into understanding ourselves, our behaviour and what drives our different types of behaviours. Natasha Mitchell: Jonathan Marshall, what do you make of these four myths that Mike Hulme uses to consider how we psychologically frame...? Jonathan Marshall: I think they are really neat summaries, I´d say it will actually be more complicated because different cultures will have different myths so we´ll all be talking to each other through these mythic frameworks and not actually probably realising that we´re using mythic frameworks, and thus misunderstand each other, especially if we all think it´s about rational discourse, about economics and you know saving money or whatever. But I´d also say that all of these myths, they also have another counter position to them so the Edenic myth posits a world in which nature is pristine, but at the same time there is also a position -- very much in Australia -- where nature is out to get us, it´s hostile, that´s very much kind of our myth, so it´s the myth of original nature contains both this sort of pristine beauty in this pristine hostility. As Mike was saying, the Apocalyptic myth contains both the sense of well yes we´ve got to make a big change here and also the sense of paralysis -- well it´s God that´s doing it, you know, and all the good people survive anyway. Natasha Mitchell: I mean in some sense the Apocalyptic myth is that one that westerners, perhaps all cultures can relate to because many cultures have a sort of last judgment type kind of burden overhanging their faith structures, don´t they? Jonathan Marshall: Well when I was last talking about this to a group of anthropologists they were pointing out there are many cultures in the world where time is completely cyclic. So OK, the end of the world is coming -- big deal, you know we´ll start again. So in those cultures there may be very little incentive to worry about climate change. Natasha Mitchell: What do you think of the Promethean myth? Jonathan Marshall: Well the Promethean myth also has the counter position that science and technology have caused our problems, you know, as well as can be the way out. And I think one of the problems that science has faced is that it doesn´t actually talk about climate change in a way that´s very exciting. Boring lists of things, logical, rigorous argumentation piling up. Natasha Mitchell: I love it. Jonathan Marshall: Yeah, yeah but there´s lots of people who cannot get motivated by that. Anti-climate change people have a really great rhetorical advantage because they can say we are thinking for ourselves, you know we´re standing up for the right of people´s self determination, we are not going along with the mob. That really appeals to the western Promethean thing of stealing fire from the gods and so on; you know we are independent thinkers. And for some strange reason scientists are not prepared to say, well actually we´re the really independent thinkers, so people in the book argue that science needs to be able to recapture the poetry that actually inspires scientists to get into work in the first place. They need to have a poetry of science which will actually appeal to people and motivate them. It´s no good throwing facts at people because as we´ve been saying all through this discussion, basically it´s the myths that make the facts do anything for us. Natasha Mitchell: Interesting, Mike what do you think of that? Mike Hulme: Yeah, I think that´s digging beneath simply the superficiality which I think a lot of science is dealing with. Science is great at talking about physical realities but it´s not good at actually talking about how we animate those physical realities and intuitively and emotionally engage with them. And I think this language of myth, of metaphor and of symbol can allow us to use more creative engaging ways of deliberating and communicating with our publics. I´m very keen to explore in the different ways in which we can engage with the human psyche. And in the end it´s our publics that really matter here, we've just had in the UK a poll just a couple of days ago that says only 40% of the British population believe that humans have got anything to do with climate change and 30% just don´t think it´s happening at all. So there's clearly something that´s not working. Natasha Mitchell: Jonathan. Jonathan Marshall: Well I was just going to say that I think one of the things also the way that science conducts itself in this position it is basically very depressing and people´s reactions to depression -- and again in our society to the sense that they will have to give things up -- is very negative. Basically our identities are built upon having possessions and here we have people coming along and saying well you´ve got to give up these possessions, you´ve got to give up this lifestyle in order to change the world. And we don´t have a myth that guides us into giving things up as being something that is strengthening or that leads us to a place which is worth having. Natasha Mitchell: Well what would a myth like that look like? I mean you suggest that we do need new and powerful myths to live by when it comes to climate change. Jonathan Marshall: I would say that myths cannot be consciously constructed. Myths have to emerge from the unconscious itself for it to have this kind of grab and appeal. That is why we have to pay attention to our own images, to our own dreams, and they will start building the myths that we need. We can´t just sit down and write them off. We´ll end up with really sterile myths like they invented after the French revolution, you know, when they renamed the air and they started worshipping justice and things like that. It didn´t mean anything to anybody, you actually have to have myths that emerge from us so I can´t tell you what they are, all I can hope is that you think about what it is that motivates you, that allows you to think about the world in such a way that you can deal with the reality of climate change whether it´s created by humans or not. Natasha Mitchell: But we´re on the cusp of an incredible negotiation challenge, we´re on the cusp of the 15th conference of parties at Copenhagen. Does this conversation about myths and symbols and climate change risk distracting ourselves from the veracity of the science and the very real physical risks climate change presents to us in the short and long term. I mean how do we bring this conversation to the table at Copenhagen? Mike. Mike Hulme: Well I wouldn´t perhaps start exactly with this conversation; I think there´s probably some groundwork to be done before we could reach this level of insight. But I do think we have to start because I feel that whatever comes out of Copenhagen is not going to be as substantial as many people thought it would do, or many people think it should do. And I think what we will discover subsequently also is that trying to get watertight and politically binding agreements across the whole panoply of issues that climate change is raising is probably unachievable. Natasha Mitchell: Are you giving up? Mike Hulme: I´m not giving up on climate change, I´m just giving up that perhaps we´ve locked ourselves into just one mode of negotiating and thinking about climate change and this mode seemingly is not working very well. I think we need a greater diversity of approaches; we don´t have to put everything into one package and try to negotiate it. There are many different things that we can be doing locally, sectorially, and at community level, at an individual level, it´s back to this idea of using climate change as a resource of the imagination, as a rhetorical resource to drive forward projects where we can make substantial progress without having to wait for this wonderful Utopian agreement that will probably never arise. And I think in the process of doing that we can then open up some of these conversations that we´ve been having here, getting some more creative and cultural thinking going on around climate change will give us new avenues, new voices, new symbolic forms in which we can communicate climate change. Jonathan Marshall: The myths are present at Copenhagen anyway: they are economic myths about the economy works. The economy is slightly less complex perhaps than climate but nevertheless it´s a really complicated thing that we summarise by a whole heap of myths about free markets and about fairness and about whether we should spend money on other people in other countries and so on. There are myths there about what the nature of nature is -- you know I suspect that a lot of them think that nature is a kind of magic pudding, you know, where it will provide for us forever and we can just keep taking from it and it will grow back. And if it doesn´t grow back then you´ve got to be the person who takes the last thing. The people at Copenhagen will have a whole set of myths about order, about how you have to proceed and you can´t go first you have to wait for everybody, you have to negotiate. Whereas in fact we could take a much more chaotic approach to things and say OK, well we feel like doing this and let´s do it because we think it´s right. Natasha Mitchell: And there´s your challenge for us. Jonathan Marshall: Yes, absolutely. Natasha Mitchell: Well look much to consider and think about there, Mike Hulme and Jonathan Marshall thank you for joining me on the program this week for what I think is a very rich discussion. Mike Hulme: Thank you. Jonathan Marshall: Thank you for the invitation. Natasha Mitchell: And Professor Mike Hulme´s provocative new book is called Why We Disagree About Climate Change published by Cambridge University Press and Jonathan Marshall has edited Depth Psychology Disorder and Climate Change just published by Jung Down Under books. And an extended version of this discussion is up on the All in the Mind blog so do dig deeper. And what do you think, because I´d really like to continue with this theme of psychology and climate change into the New Year post Copenhagen. So any leads, research ideas, musings, do send them our way and as well as adding your comments at my blog you can now also add comments to each week´s story from the All in the Mind webpage at abc.net.au/rn/allinthemind. Simply click on the heading of the show you are interested in and look for add your comments and that´s where you´ll find transcripts and audio. Thanks to co-producer Anita Barraud, studio engineers Alex Stinson and Carey Dell, I´m Natasha Mitchell. Next week on the 150th anniversary of Charles Darwin´s On The Origin of Species your contributions to our gene pool project.

Beyond the hype of left brain versus right brain lies the work of acclaimed neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga. His career was forged in the lab of Nobel laureate Roger Sperry, and together their trailblazing experiments have illuminated the differences between the brain´s two hemispheres. Today he´s on the US President´s Bioethics Council, heads up a major project on neuroscience and the law, and is a prolific writer of popular neuroscience. TRANSCRIPT: Natasha Mitchell: This is All in the Mind on ABC Radio National, your weekly excavation of the wilderness inside. Welcome. Michael Gazzaniga: Even though you know my brain is talking to you and that your brain is listening to me, we have this thing where no, I´m talking to Natasha and you´re talking to Mike. I don´t sit here and say, boy she has a cerebellum, wow, her left cortex is unbelievable, you know. You immediately treat the other entity as a person, we are all dualists, we immediately convert the biological reality of ourselves to personhood, to the fact that we´re talking to people, not brains. Natasha Mitchell: The meeting of minds not brains. Michael Gazzaniga: That´s right, that´s exactly right. Natasha Mitchell: How does your brain give rise to your mind, are there really left-brained people and right-brained people, and do brain scans have a legitimate role in the legal arena? Michael Gazzaniga is one of the big names of 21st century neuroscience, professor of psychology and director of the Sage Centre for the Study of the Mind at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He´s well known for his many popular science books including The Ethical Brain, the Mind's Past, and The Social Brain, among others. He sits on the US president´s bioethics council and heads up a major new law and neuroscience project too. But it´s his work with so-called split brain patients that many folk know him for, it really changed our understanding of how our brain's two hemispheres, left and right, work differently. In Australia for the International Human Brain Mapping Conference this week, he´s my feature guest on the show today. Welcome to Australia. Michael Gazzaniga: Thank you, it´s been grand. Natasha Mitchell: Take us back to 1960. You were a young man, a very young scientist in Roger Sperry´s lab at Caltech. Roger Sperry, of course, went on to win the Nobel prize...heady days, really the foundations of split brain research. Michael Gazzaniga: Absolutely, and it´s funny, when you´re doing it you don´t know how heady they are. Natasha Mitchell: What do we make of the two hemispheres of the brain, this sort of split structure, this mirrored structure in this special organ of ours? Michael Gazzaniga: I think if you roll back the clock there was good knowledge that there was lateralisation and this came from the literature of people with stroke or people with tumour or people who had some bifocal disease or even diffuse disease. They could deduce which part of the brain was largely responsible for certain kinds of activities—in the sense that we knew language was on the left and we knew there were certain perceptual disabilities if the right side was lesioned. Now all the many subtle tests now that are revealed through brain imaging were not part of the thought process, it was 'Gee, left-hemisphere stroke; the patient´s probably going to be aphasic.' Natasha Mitchell: But just at that time, just to pick you up on that, I mean the right hemisphere really got short shrift then, didn´t it? I mean Karl Popper and John Eccles called it the minor brain, some people didn´t even think the right hemisphere was conscious, I gather. Michael Gazzaniga: An argument was born between Sperry and Popper and Eccles, I think Popper and Eccles were more correct, as we look back on it. What was shocking at the time was that there were these two systems that could respond independently—one not knowing what the other was doing. That is as true today as it was then; an extremely dramatic finding, as can be witnessed by the following of these patients. But the question was were they really co-equal. We knew from the start that there were differences, obviously: the left hemisphere spoke, the right hemisphere did not, and then over the years differences began to emerge that one side was really quite different from the other. Natasha Mitchell: Introduce us, then, to a patient called WJ. He was a WWII veteran and he really gave you quite a revelation. Michael Gazzaniga: Oh WJ was the very first case we tested, I tested him as normal pre-operatively and we tested all his integrative functions; information flow between hemispheres, between the hands, between the visual fields etc. He was completely and utterly normal with respect to that; couldn´t tell the difference between WJ and anybody else. The day of reckoning came when we finally were able to test him after his surgery. Natasha Mitchell: Why did he have surgery—remind us of who these patients are? Michael Gazzaniga: The patients were epileptics, with epilepsy one first tries to treat them with drugs, with pharmacological agents that reduce their seizure activity and, in a certain percentage of them, it doesn´t work. They are really stuck with their seizures, especially in cases that had a seizure clearly defined to one side, but maybe very close to language areas. You´re not going to remove the tissue, the pathologic tissue. So the idea was to split the brain, and the hope was that if they went into a seizure on one side the other hemisphere would remain seizure free, and overall the person wouldn´t lose consciousness, and not fall to the ground and injure themselves and so forth. And it worked. It seemed to work. With new drugs there´s not much of it going on now. Natasha Mitchell: So how did WJ go with this surgery, you gave him a series of tests? Michael Gazzaniga: So WJ was the first moment of excitement, he made a slow recovery from surgery, he was about 50 when he was operated on so I remember him visiting Caltech, coming up in a wheelchair in a protective helmet and all kinds of gear. Anyway we rolled him in to our testing room and these were really first days so it was very crude, we had the pipes that sent the water to the various labs and everything were open and exposed in the ceiling and so we literally threw a rope over them and hung this screen that you could back-project on, and then using a little gadget we could flash pictures to one side of a fixation point and accordingly, if you know how the visual system is hooked up, if you flashed it to the left of the fixation point that went exclusively to your right hemisphere, and if you flashed it to the right it went exclusively to your left hemisphere. It´s just the way we´re wired up. Natasha Mitchell: The left visual field is processed by the right hemisphere and the right visual field is processed by the left hemisphere and, interestingly, our left hemisphere controls the right side of our body so movement with our right hand and vice versa. Michael Gazzaniga: Exactly. And touch information. So touch information from the right hand is processed in the left hemisphere, from the left hemisphere is processed in the right. So the listener there as they listen can fixate a point and just sit there and ponder the fact that everything to the left of where they are looking right now is going to their right brain and if they´re talking about it somehow miraculously that information gets over to their left speech centre. Natasha Mitchell: Because the right brain isn´t much of a talker, so actually all that information needs to transfer across to the left for us to articulate what we are seeing... Michael Gazzaniga: Exactly. So what happened was the patient's sitting there in his wheelchair, he´s looking at our jerry rigged screen, we flash a picture of an apple to his right visual field which means his left brain and he says, 'I saw an apple'—so everything is working. So then we´ve flashed the picture of an apple to the left visual field going to the right hemisphere and he says, 'I didn´t see anything.' And it´s startling. We quickly realise that even though he says he couldn´t see the apple or he didn´t see anything, his left hand could go into a paper sack full of objects, one of which was an apple, and pull out the apple. Natasha Mitchell: So his right hemisphere couldn´t actually articulate what he´d seen but it could instruct his left hand to reach for what he had seen. Michael Gazzaniga: Exactly and then holding the apple, as long as he didn´t see it, because if he looked at it then the left hemisphere would have been cued —oh, it must be an apple because he´s holding this apple in his hand. So if you prevent that, and it´s easy to do, then even though he´s holding the apple in his hand and you say well, what do you have? He would say, I don´t know and that´s because it´s the left hemisphere talking, the left hemisphere doesn´t know, it doesn´t have any of the information; it´s the right. So that was really the birth of the idea that there are two conscious systems can be created with the slice of a knife. Natasha Mitchell: Give us a sense of how much of a revelation this was in the scheme of our understanding of the brain? Michael Gazzaniga: No-one was prepared that you could divide conscious experience in this simple way. The views of consciousness were, and in many cases still are, so vague. At their core people believe you go through some conscious activation centre. It´s just hard to think that you could have two separate, completely separate systems in one head. And yet there it was, as clear as a bell. So the argument became—to go back to your point—the argument became are they really co-equal in their capacities, is the left brain really the same as the right or are there differences, is there a hierarchy, is the nature of the consciousness between the two sides different? And I think modern thinking is that they are quite different. Natasha Mitchell: Yes, all this led you to propose that the left hemisphere was what you called the brain´s interpreter—what did you mean by that? Michael Gazzaniga: Well what we did—and it´s amazing when you look back on it how long it took you to figure this out, some 20 years the research—we were kind of were sitting around saying I wonder what the patients think about the facts that we can put a piece of information in their right hemisphere that directs their left hand to do something. The left hemisphere, looking at the left hand doing something, it really doesn´t know why it´s doing that, it just doesn´t know, because we slipped the information into their right hemisphere. Natasha Mitchell: You were playing tricks on them, I can imagine that was rather bewildering, even unhinging, for them. Michael Gazzaniga: Seemingly it was bewildering. It´s like someone grabbing your left hand and picking up lima beans and you hate lima beans but there you were picking them up and eating them. What´s going on here? Anyway we did the experiments, we just finally asked the patients after they did one of these things that was really the result of the right hemisphere directing it, we were basically asking their left hemisphere why did you do that? What we discovered was that the patient immediately comes up with an explanation that´s consistent with what they are thinking about in the left hemisphere. They tie it in to their ongoing story, their ongoing narrative. And so we call this capacity that the left hemisphere seems to have, the interpreter, it´s always interpreting our behaviours, our fluctuating moods, what they mean. But it´s also kind of doing it after the fact. So even in the normal brain our intentions are probably formed and made and done by the time we are consciously aware of them, but we instantly refer that event forward in time to thinking it´s going on simultaneously and that we are in charge. Natasha Mitchell: It´s interesting because we think of the brain ostensibly as a set of sort of functional modules, we have this idea of the modular brain, and if we confuse things a bit we can think of it as a network of neurons as well. And yet here we have two hemispheres that work sort of quite independently of each other, but we still feel like one human being, there´s still one sense of unified, complete, coherent self inside. Is that the left hemisphere's job? Michael Gazzaniga:I certainly think it probably is, and it´s probably very closely related to this interpretive function, because we know from studies that we don´t seem to see this interpretive function in the right hemisphere. The disconnected right hemisphere does not have this system. So there is a system in our brain that tries to tell the story, that basically asks the question why, why does it work this way, how come from the cave man's point of view, how come there´s no—I put meat out here in front of my cave last night and it´s gone this morning—what happened? Well maybe that guy next door...and so forth, you´re off to the races, once the human brain had developed the capacity to ask why are things the way they are—and we´re fabulous theory generators, as you know. And it´s in that generation of theory and that 'gist' capacity where we want to get the gist of something so that we don´t have to remember the details and go through the whole process, by which we think about something again. We just want oh, that´s another lecture on Milton, or that´s your typical lecture on the hypothalamus, or there´s that politician saying his bit about health care. We don´t want to listen to it again so we gist it out, we develop a little theory about it. So it´s a very useful capacity we have and sometimes we get it wrong, obviously, and then these hypotheses become nonetheless part of our narrative, our self, they become false beliefs and frequently they become false memories and so forth. So we can all see how it happens by that instantaneous generation of an idea. Natasha Mitchell: We try to make meaning of things even when the meaning isn´t there? Michael Gazzaniga: Absolutely. You can reduce this down to a simple test which we did. I give you a game to play and I say look, I want you to bet whether a light comes on above or below a fixation point Okay—just bet. But I actually manipulate whether the light´s coming above or below. In fact 70%, 80% of the time it comes on above and 20% it comes on below. Well the smart way to play this if you were getting money for each time you got it right would be to always guess above, right? That´s not what we do, the normal brain tries to figure out the pattern, and in doing that you lose money. So you give this test to a rat; the rat maximises, he just goes to the top and sits there and gets 80% of the reward and there´s the human sitting there... Natasha Mitchell: We´re just too smart for our own good. Michael Gazzaniga: That´s right, so we did this with split brain patients and it´s the left hemisphere that tries to guess the pattern and the right hemisphere acts like a big rat. Natasha Mitchell: Some people might not be pleased to hear you say that you think yes, they are both conscious, left and right hemispheres of our brain, but not all consciousnesses are equal, and you say that the left brain's consciousness well surpasses the right. Michael Gazzaniga: Yes, but you have to remember that all of these are studies that are trying to get at the question of how brain enables consciousness, and the split brain story is a medical event that allows you an insight maybe into how it works. It´s not a way of thinking about how the normal brain actually functions, so if you put the full picture together, I think what you´re looking at is the fact that we have a gazillion mental structures that are represented in the brain, that are distributed throughout the brain, and they all somehow become part of our conscious awareness, and how does that work? And so you get out of the left brain/right brain thing and just say okay, well how does it work in the normal brain that´s connected? Where we´re going with this is that it's widely distributed, and that there are local circuits throughout the brain that enable a specific capacity to become conscious. Natasha Mitchell: So rather than thinking of consciousness as this sort of global phenomenon, it´s actually quite localised at any point in time, is that your argument? Michael Gazzaniga: Right, it´s like a pipe organ, the music is being played by all these individual pipes when they all have their time that´s when you hear the note and yet the whole thing makes this concert which comes out as consciousness. Natasha Mitchell: And the father of cognitive neuroscience, Michael Gazzaniga, is my guest on All in the Mind here on ABC Radio National, I´m Natasha Mitchell and a virtual wave to our international listeners on Radio Australia in podcast land—left brains, right brains and more on the show today. Some could argue, some would make the argument that you, Michael Gazzaniga, are responsible for the whole right brain/left brain industry that has emerged over the last 20 to 30 years, and I wonder if the dichotomy is as strong as all those popular notions make out. I mean given the right hemisphere, if we think it doesn´t talk, but it is involved in language in some way, isn´t it? I gather it´s involved in what´s called prosody, which is a sort of melody of language. Michael Gazzaniga: In some of the patients there was right hemisphere language in addition to their left, robust language, for sure. But in fact the right hemisphere´s language system, when it has it, is extremely limited. For instance it does not have a syntax, it can't tell the difference between playing the field and the playing field. It can´t tell the difference between a venetian blind and a blind Venetian. You couldn´t get it to spell backwards. Natasha Mitchell: It´s a bit of a deficit model of the right hemisphere, though, isn´t it, given that we place so much primacy on language. Michael Gazzaniga: That´s right and what arose from the popular literature was the notion that in fact it was the creative hemisphere, that´s just not the way it is. Natasha Mitchell: How is it then, if it´s not our creative hemisphere? Michael Gazzaniga: Well it´s doing a lot of things: it is very important in what we call a perceptual grouping. You open up your kitchen drawer that has all the utensils in it and you somehow see the parmesan grater at the bottom, even though there´s a gazillion things on top of it but you go right for it. You see it, your brain puts together the elements into the picture's perceptual grouping. You can think of a forest, a dense forest, and then you see the deer walking by, how do you know it´s a deer? Well you´re getting little glimpses of its parts and your brain puts it together, that´s the deer. And you find out that the right hemisphere is the one that´s doing that. It´s playing a very important role in our lives. Furthermore we think probably at one point in evolution both hemispheres could do that. And then what happened, through evolutionary pressures, the system figured out, well, we don´t really need two of these things because the brain is connected. So why don´t we remodel one of these things and use it for something else? Natasha Mitchell: A sort of executive management got in and made it a more lean, keen machine...MBAs have a purpose. Michael Gazzaniga: Yep, but it would be terrible to take that metaphor and to think that there was a design going on here, it´s all done by natural selection and that kind of thing. So the notion is that the huge explosion of lateralisation and specialisation was just the realisation that we can get more into this cortex by just having one side be specialised at it and so forth. Natasha Mitchell: One of your great interests is of course how the mind arises from the brain, it´s the great conundrum of human consciousness. And if we assume that the mind arises from the brain and the brain is this fixed-in-space, very definite object that operates in a very definite sort of way—where does that leave the mind and free will? It´s one of the great battlegrounds of the moment isn´t it: are we actually in control of ourselves—is our mind or our brain the beast that does all the work? Michael Gazzaniga: Everybody in science says the brain somehow enables the mind—what else, right? It´s the biologic tissue that is responsible for us thinking. But one of the things—the deepest mystery is that even though you know my brain is talking to you and that your brain is listening to me, we have this thing where...no I´m talking to Natasha and you´re talking to Mike, I don´t sit here and saying boy, does she have a cerebellum, wow, her left cortex is unbelievable, you know. You immediately treat the other entity as a person. We are all dualists, we immediately convert the biological reality of ourselves to personhood, to the fact that we´re talking to people not brains. Natasha Mitchell: It´s a meeting of minds not brains. Michael Gazzaniga: That´s right, that´s exactly right. Okay so we all know that brains enable minds. And this then gives rise, I think erroneously, to the notion, well, therefore we are not to be possibly held responsible for our actions because our brains are doing it, there´s lots of information, so by the time you and I do something the brain´s already done it. So how can we be, how can we hold people responsible for their actions etc, etc. In fact we´re running a large project in the United States on neuroscience and the law that is examining this very question—is having a brain lesion a reason for exculpability in a crime because you´re diminishing the system. Or also the other side of the determinism story is what is the rationale for retribution, if the person couldn´t help in anyway is it not immoral to blame them? Natasha Mitchell: You´ve actually got some quite good money, for the McArthur Foundation, neuroscience and law project. To what extent really, beyond rhetoric, is neuroscience having an impact in the courts and the question of culpability? Michael Gazzaniga: Right now I would say it´s low, that it should be even less. The neuroscientists are very cautious about this because they know what a brain scan means and what it doesn´t mean, and we don´t want it to be overplayed in the courtroom. The general public takes maybe too seriously a brain scan and what it means, and they say, oh well if it´s on a brain scan then we can reason one way or the other. I did want to come back to the one point on the free will thing because I just think it´s a kind of a red herring. People talk about free will, you should return the question and say free from what, what are you talking about? I mean what we all are, are information gathering organisms that have learned through a life´s experience what to do, what not to do, what´s good, what´s bad, does this payoff versus that payoff? And when a new situation presents itself we call upon our knowledge of the world from past experience to decide what to do. And that decision goes on through mechanisms of the brain, and once the brain decides, based on all your past experience, to do something, you want it to do it right. It´s not clear to me what free will means in that way of knowing that we have all these automatic processes that are going on in the brain that we´ve trained through time. I think how you think about it is that personal responsibility, which is a key concept in our culture, is alive and well because it really isn´t in your brain, it´s in the social rules of a group. So think of it this way, if you´re the only person in the world, the concept of personal responsibility means nothing. Who are you responsible to? If there are two people to six billion, all of a sudden the rules develop. If we are going to socially interact, which is crucial for the human condition, we are going to have these rules. Almost everybody—you'd have to be extremely neurologically compromised—almost everybody can follow a rule. Natasha Mitchell: You put it like this, which I found quite interesting, people are free and therefore responsible for their actions; brains are not responsible. Now isn´t that a sort of dualism there, aren´t you a neuroscientist who believes the mind arises from the brain? Michael Gazzaniga: Yes, what I was trying to say there is people become real in a social group, I have a theory about you, you have a theory about me. I have a theory about others and I have a theory about self, so at that level we have our rules and that´s what I meant by people, but it´s not well stated. Natasha Mitchell: You´re getting out of it now. Michael Gazzaniga: I´m not suggesting that dualism...but it could be and here´s an idea to play with...it could be that I´m more conscious of your consciousness than I am of my own because I work hard as a human to figure out what your deal is, right? What your intentions are. While we all introspect on ourselves I think we spend most of our time thinking about the conscious state and nature of others and not so much ourself. Natasha Mitchell: I got the impression almost in your book The Ethical Brain you saw no role for neuroscience in the courts—is that still the case or have you softened your touch there a bit? Michael Gazzaniga: Well I did say that, I think ultimately neuroscience will be in the courts. One of our fellows put it the other day, neuroscience isn´t junk science, it´s a baby science. And we just don´t want the baby in the court room, we want it to be a mature, solid representation. And I think this project we´re on is trying to pick our way through to that point. Natasha Mitchell: Meanwhile there´s people on death row who are co-opting neuroscience, you can understand their desire to do so, to say look, it was my brain that made me do it, judge, not me. Michael Gazzaniga: Yes, overall the judges aren´t having any of that, nor is the public. The public´s pretty tough, and they actually really don´t care about exculpability, about whether the person was insane, about this or that or the other thing, they want them off the street—real simple. I mean one of the arguments now is maybe we should consider psychopathy as an exculpable...well 20%, 30% of the prisoners are psychopaths by some measures and their recidivism rate is huge, so if you make it exculpable they are defiantly different by some new, to-be-learned brain criteria. What´s going on here? Natasha Mitchell: And yet it has to be argued though that there are people who can rightly appeal, by reason of insanity, that they weren´t culpable. Michael Gazzaniga: Of course, but it´s exceedingly rare that it works, only 1% of criminal defences are insanity defence and only a quarter of 1% have any chance of actually succeeding. The statistics are powerful, 97% of criminal cases in the United States are pled out, they never go to trial. The real problem, is the deep problem in America about the number of people that are incarcerated—2.3 million Americans are behind bars, in Australia it´s 27,000. It´s striking the difference between the two countries. And what is that and what are we going to do about it? It´s a big problem in America and we´re worried about it. Natasha Mitchell: Yes, well to many they´ve become the psychiatric institutions of our contemporary world. Michael Gazzaniga: That´s a very major concern, that we did away with the psychiatric hospitals, we just re-institutionalised them in our jails, so it´s a problem, but most of American crime is actually drug related so there´s a huge addiction rate in the population, a huge minority. Eighty per cent of the population of American prisoners, are people of colour—this is just unacceptable at every level. Why is that? What´s structurally wrong in the outside culture that´s producing this problem? Natasha Mitchell: Forty-five years of split-brain research to your name, is there such a thing as a right brained person and a left brained person? Michael Gazzaniga: Well there may well be that, but I just don´t think it´s tied to that neurology, I mean there are the super analytic types, there are seemingly creative types, I mean one look at the Sydney Opera House which we just had dinner at a few days ago, and you sit there and you think, who came up with this thing? You marvel at it, I think it´s a spectacular thing. What was their way of thinking? People have these different perspectives and so are they right brain? Maybe. I certainly use the metaphor. They´re different. Natasha Mitchell: That dichotomy, though, has made people an awful lot of money. Michael Gazzaniga: That is your answer, I wish I had a nickel for every time it was used. Natasha Mitchell: Michael Gazzaniga, thank you for joining me on All in the Mind on ABC Radio National this week. Michael Gazzaniga: Thank you, it´s been a lot of fun, thank you. Natasha Mitchell: Michael Gazzaniga, director of the Sage Center for the Study of the Mind at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and he gave the 2008 Kenneth Myer Lecture last week in Melbourne. His last book is well worth a read, The Ethical Brain, and his new book about to be released is called Human: the science behind what makes us unique. Keep an eye out for it. And I´ll link to the details of the split brain experiments on All in the Mind´s website abc.net.au/rn/allinthemind. Podcast and transcripts there too. And don´t be shy, head to the All in the Mind blog, where you´ll find me—share your thoughts. My thanks to producer Anita Barraud, studio engineer Carey Dell. I´m Natasha Mitchell—left or right, may your brain hang together as one.

We can´t survive without them -- and we´ve long underestimated their prowess. Controversially, bacteria could even have cognitive talents that rival our own. Predatory behaviour, cooperation, memory -- Jules Verne eat your heart out -- Natasha Mitchell takes you on a strange adventure into the secret world of microbial mentality. TRANSCRIPT: [Reading]: On this day tradition allots To taking stock of our lives My greetings to all of you, Yeasts, Bacteria, Viruses Aerobics and Anaerobics: A very happy New Year To all for whom my ectoderm Is as Middle Earth to me For creatures your size I offer A free choice of habitat So settle yourselves in the zone That suits you best, in the pools Of my pores or the tropical Forests of arm-pit and crotch, In the deserts of my forearms, Or the cool woods of my scalp. Build colonies: I will supply Adequate warmth and moisture, The sebum and lipids you need, On condition you never Do me annoy with your presence, But behave as good guests should Not rioting into acne, athlete´s foot or a boil. A New Year Greeting - WH Auden May 1969 Natasha Mitchell: An unsettling revelation; you´re not quite who you think you are. Hello, Natasha Mitchell with you on Radio National with All in the Mind. It turns out you are possibly only 1% human and 99% microbial if you were to do a cell count. So inspired by the likes of literary adventurer Jules Verne today on the show an excursion into the bewildering world of bacteria. En masse these single cell critters manage to do staggering things without a head or a heart, they co-operate with each other, coalesce in vast, intricate patterns, biofilms and swarms; sense and respond to the world around them, hunt and kill in coordinated packs; they even possess a form of memory. But does all this mean bacterial colonies are cognitive? Even conscious? And might their behaviour reveal something about our own? Far fetched suggestions for some, not so for others. Pamela Lyon: I don´t know that you´re conscious, Natasha, I am taking it for granted because you´re a human being, you have a brain like mine and the fact that you´re speaking to me that I assume that you´re conscious. In philosophy it´s called the problem of other minds. So when you start talking about other creatures, you´re basing your estimation entirely on behaviour. And then it becomes a question of how charitable you want to be, how inclusive you want to be -- and cognition does seem to be sort of the last beachhead, because in the Judaeo Christian tradition we have this idea of humankind being made in God´s image that separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom. Now Darwin blasted that to shreds. You know Darwin had a very liberal view of where emotions started. I mean like you know he was talking about emotions in earthworms for heavens sake and HS Jennings for example thought that single celled organisms were going to be excellent models of behaviour and that you could see rudimentary things like memory and decision making and perception and that sort of stuff. Margaret Floyd Washburn who wrote an extraordinarily influential text on animal behaviour, it went into four editions, you know she thought amoebas could tell us quite a lot about the origin of certain cognitive capacities in 'higher organisms'. James Shapiro: Everywhere, they are in the air, in the water, they are in the soil, they are in the inside of rocks, in glaciers, bacteria are all around us. Most of the living material on planet Earth is microbial and they are carrying out so many of the important chemical processes, they are maintaining the mixture of gases in the atmosphere, they are cycling the carbon and nitrogen and sulphur wastes that are produced -- they are doing all kinds of really important jobs. They can do very well without us but we can´t exist without them. Jeffry Stock: They preceded Metazoans by about two or three billion years and clearly they developed intelligent behaviours. The whole concept of the living system is an organism or a community of organisms that react to their environment and then modify their environment in what we would call intelligent ways. So I don´t think that´s amazing. It turns out that they are at least an order or magnitude more bacteria in our bodies than are animal cells. It´s not dust to dust, it´s bacteria to bacteria actually because when we leave the earth we get consumed by bacteria. So the bacteria are kind of in control much more than we are. People say, well, no bacteria went to the moon but that´s not true, something like 10 to the 14th bacteria went to the moon. Pamela Lyon: William Costerton who´s one of the leading biofilm experts in America, and he said if you were in a biofilm, if you were travelling in a little boat you would be like the canals of Venice and on either side of you there would be slime towers made of different types of bacteria, and that like in the division of labour of a city there would be some that would be generating food, others carrying waste away -- and it´s very much like a city in 3D. [Reading]: While I was talking to an old man (who leads a sober life and never drinks brandy or tobacco and very seldom any wine) my eye fell upon his teeth, which were all coated over. So I asked him when he had last cleaned his mouth? And I got for an answer that he had never washed his mouth in his life. So I took some of the matter that was lodged between and against his teeth, and mixing it with his own spit and also with fair water, I found an unbelievably great company of living animalcules swimming more nimbly than I had ever seen up to this time. The biggest sort bent their body into curves in going forward. Moreover the other animalcules were in such enormous numbers that all the water seemed to be alive. Antonie van Leeuwenhoek - September 17, 1683. Natasha Mitchell: And Antonie van Leeuwenhoek is credited with the discovery of bacteria in the 17th century -- or animalcules as he called them. Dr Pamela Lyon, a post-doc fellow in philosophy at the University of Adelaide describes herself as an idiosyncratic, mature-age student with a chequered past including as a newspaper journalist. She´s now part of a multi-disciplinary effort of heavyweights probing cognitive phenomena across the diversity of living things -- bacteria, nematodes, flies, rodents, apes and yes, humans. But her PhD began as a comparison of Buddhist and Western philosophies. Pamela Lyon: I was looking at okay, well where on the western side does western philosophy and science seem to think that cognition starts, and it was all over the shop. Philosophers and scientists -- I could find them on both sides -- would insist that you know it´s primates maybe and humans, because language seemed to be very important. And then there were other people who said no, no, no at least it includes mammals and then you´d find other people who would say no, there are certain aspects of fruit flies that seem to be cognitive -- it was all over the shop. So my decision was I will go right to the bottom, the bottom being bacteria or single-cell creatures. So I thought I´d take a look there -- to rule them out basically, unfortunately I just stayed there because it was so fascinating. [Reading]: The microbe serenade. A lovelorn microbe met by chance At a swagger bacteroidal dance A proud bacillian belle, and she Was first of the animaculae Of organism saccharine She was the protoplasmic queen. The microscopical pride and pet Of the biological smartest set, And so this infinitesimal swain Evolved a pleading low refrain: 'Oh lovely metamorphic germ, What futile scientific term Can well describe your many charms? Come to these embryonic arms Then hie away to my cellular home, And be my little diatom!' His epithelium burned with love He swore by molecules above She´d be his own gregarious mate, Or else he would disintegrate. This amorous mite of a parasite Pursued the germ both day and night, And `neath her window often played This Darwin-Huxley serenade He´d warble to her every day This rhizopodical roundelay: 'Oh most primordial of spore I never met your like before And though a microbe has no heart, From you, sweet germ, I´ll never part. We´ll sit beneath some fungus growth Till dissolution claims us both!' George Ade 1906. Natasha Mitchell: I mean many would argue that even a basic nervous system is a prerequisite for cognition, and it´s been a controversial suggestion, hasn´t it, that bacteria are somehow cognitive. Why the controversy? James Shapiro: Large organisms chauvinism, so we like to think that only we can do things in a cognitive way. Natasha Mitchell: Professor James Shapiro is a pioneering bacterial geneticist at the University of Chicago. He´s spent his long career researching and scrutinising bacterial behaviour. James Shapiro: And we´ve also learned a great deal about how bacteria communicate with each other. Groups of cells can do lots of things that individual cells can´t do, they communicate with each other by sending out chemical signals just like people do, we emit pheromones, other organisms do that, flowers do it, bees do it, educated fleas do it. There´s also a lot of touchy/feely that goes on among bacteria, they have specialised structures which attach to other cells, they can organise themselves spatially. Jeffry Stock: They can learn, they have memory, they adapt. Natasha Mitchell: Microbiologist Professor Jeffry Stock is from Princeton University. Jeffry Stock: They behave intelligently with respect to their environment and change themselves in response to environmental stimuli. What else is intelligence? Natasha Mitchell: Couldn't it be argued that this sort of behaviour that you´ve spent a career measuring in bacteria is simply a case of chemistry in action, they detect their chemical environment and act accordingly? Jeffry Stock: Absolutely, that´s what they do. I think it´s been established, at least for biochemists, that that´s what neurobiology at some level is all about. The same thing happens with bacteria, the real question is why they wouldn´t be the most sophisticated intelligent organism on earth because they´ve been around a lot longer than animals, and they have evolved extremely rapidly, and they are very, very competitive with one another. So why wouldn´t they be as intelligent as an organism could possibly be? There´s an incredible selection pressure for intelligence. Pamela Lyon: Bacterial memory has been established since the 1970s. Let´s use an example: you are in a grocery store and you´re comparing prices of a can of asparagus, say, and you go down a couple of brands and you realise that the first one you saw was the best value for money. Okay, that´s an example of very simple memory in us. Well the same sort of thing happens with bacteria that are moving toward an attractant like a food source, and it used to be thought that it was sort of like pinball behaviour, like they´d just go ding, ding, wherever they happened to hear that that was the direction they would go in. But it doesn´t work like that at all. There is a kind of computation that goes on within the cell of what was the gradient at this time and what is the gradient now. And for an E-coli, you know there´s 30, 34 different sensory systems. It´s just not food sources, it´s oxygen, it´s light, it´s pressure, the presence or absence of others of your kind. They have a very rich sensory world, you know they are having to remember what was happening at this point relative to what´s happening now, and apparently they have different lengths of memory. Natasha Mitchell: But human cognition emerged from a sort of complex soup of sex and the demands of cooperative living, and for bacteria what´s the drive for a mental life, the drive for cognition? Pamela Lyon: Just making a living and they also have sex and a social life; they engage in something called conjugation that looks very familiar to those of us who have engaged in conjugation. They are more social than they are clonal loners, they prefer living in company for the same reasons we do. You have protection against predators, there´s more chance for genetic exchange -- we now believe that´s how we got antibiotic resistance so very quickly was through the exchange of plasmids and also through drawing up DNA in the environment. Natasha Mitchell: And yet this idea that bacteria might display cognitive talents, that they might come to know the world as you describe it rather than bump into it, is deeply controversial and for some very kooky. Pamela Lyon: Absolutely, because of this notion that became extraordinarily powerful in the 20th century that living creatures are essentially machines. We can say it´s all chemistry, we are all chemistry too, that hormones can have profound cognitive effects on us. [Reading]: We must assume that there was something corresponding to mind in the first living creatures, just as is true of the first stages in the making of the individual man. It was part of the philosophical teaching of Aristotle that there is nothing in the end which was not also in kind in the beginning. Therefore, as we are sure that there is mind in the end, we may also, as evolutionists say -- In the beginning was mind. 1926 Professor J Arthur Thomson: The Gospel of Evolution. Pamela Lyon: People can always say well what do you mean by cognition, if you draw it broad enough a thermostat is cognitive. Natasha Mitchell: Is it thinking, is it being conscious, is it making decisions -- what do you think of cognition as? Pamela Lyon: What do all of those things mean: what does thinking mean, does it mean a particular pattern of activation under a functional magnetic resonance imaging procedure? Does it mean that you have to be able to be aware that something is going through your mind? On the property list of things that cognition has to include you have perception, decision making, some ability to value states of affairs in the world -- like this is good for me, this is bad for me. You have to take cues from a number of different places and make a decision under uncertainty because your environment is uncertain -- and you have to be able to anticipate states of affairs. James Shapiro: I think the equation nervous system equals cognition is perhaps confusing us more than it´s enlightening us. There are many, many cells which have all kinds of sensory receptors and ways of picking up information and then making use of it. And many of them don´t have a differentiated nervous system. I mean look at plants which follow the sun, they don´t have a nervous system and yet they are cognitive in the sense that they are sensing where the sun is coming from and how it´s moving through the sky and they´re adjusting themselves. Natasha Mitchell: Certainly though -- could we go as far as to say that a colony of bacteria possess self awareness? James Shapiro: I find that a hard question to answer, we don´t yet know a great deal about self awareness. We know that there are interactions between bacterial colonies, and they can sometimes discriminate self from non-self. Take antagonistic actions from one colony to another. I think we need to investigate that more with an open mind. You know I think the concept of self awareness is probably essential to life, certainly no system in a living cell is perfect and mistakes and errors are happening all the time as they do in DNA replication within the cell and so forth. So the cell has sensory systems to pick up information about when mistakes are made and transmit that information so the cell can then undertake the appropriate action to continue its growth or to survive or to stop replicating its DNA while it´s being repaired. And if that isn´t self awareness I don´t know what is. Natasha Mitchell: Microbiologist James Shapiro from the University of Chicago. All in the Mind on ABC Radio National with me Natasha Mitchell, going global on Radio Australia and as podcast etc. This week, emergent minds and the cognitive power of bacteria, yes indeed. Dr Pamela Lyon, a philosopher at the University of Adelaide, makes the strong argument that bacteria have for too long been neglected by cognitive scientists. Bacteria like E Coli have been used as a model organism in research for decades, especially in genetics. But she thinks they also have a place in helping us investigate what it means to be a thinking, cognitive being. Many people would argue aren´t bacteria just mindless automatons, you know, responding to the world in a programmed sort of way. Pamela Lyon: How the nervous system developed basically was not to facilitate cognition but to organise the movement of sheets of tissue, large numbers of cells, and in fact there may be more complexity in some organisms on the non neural side. For example myxococcus xanthus, which is a soil bacterium, if the honey bee is the primate of the insect world then myxococcus xanthus has got to be the primate of the bacterial world. They hunt in packs, secrete a substance that will bring E coli in closer, basically they lure them in so they can eat them. Natasha Mitchell: So they are predatory little beasts. Pamela Lyon: They are predatory and they are extraordinarily territorial, if two mobs of myxococcus xanthus meet they will move through each other and there will be casualties on both sides. Natasha Mitchell: But they keep to their own, so if there´s different varieties of myxococcus xanthus pass through each other they hang together in their own little clans. Pamela Lyon: They don´t mix and they have this extraordinary social behaviour that they engage in in times of scarcity. They come together, they´ve been likened to the great herd migrations of Africa, they will form fruiting bodies and only a few of them will sporulate to live another day and great numbers of them die. They break open their cell wall and there seems to be a particular type of cell that lives on the periphery of this potential feast and it´s believed to keep other kinds of unicellular kinds of creatures out. They are believed to be something like a sentinel. Natasha Mitchell: It´s a wilderness out there, we are talking about single cell organisms. Pamela Lyon: As instruments have got more and more sensitive the life world of the very small has become much, much more complex. We can now observe single bacterium coming up to a biofilm which is a community and sort of check out a location and then leave and then check out another location and then leave, and then check out another location and then stay. That´s fairly deliberate, and then they also make 'decisions' to leave. Natasha Mitchell: We anthropomorphise about cats and dogs having cognitive ability. Are you at risk of doing the same when you look at a colony of bacteria? Pamela Lyon: Very possibly. But microbiologists use words like 'memory', 'decision making' you know they even talk about bacteria 'talking' to one another. Now press an individual microbiologist, they might say it´s just a manner of speaking. But others find it very, very useful to describe behaviour in these terms. Jeffry Stock: Most of the major universities in the United States at Harvard, at Yale, at Berkeley, at Princeton have really begun to delve into these organisms as models for understanding cognition without all the trappings that come with our human-centric view of intelligence. Natasha Mitchell: Well that´s interesting because certainly up till now a lot of the effort to probe the workings of human cognition has focused on trying to replicate it in artificial intelligences. I mean what do bacteria give us that the artificial intelligence approach can´t? Jeffry Stock: That´s a good point. People have a lot of problem imagining that bacteria have intelligence, that you know germs are thinking, cognizant, sentient organisms. But they have no problem at all in making that leap in terms of machines. But of course we put our brand of intelligence into the machines. Natasha Mitchell: Professor Jeffry Stock is a microbiologist at Princeton University, where his lab researches a phenomenon called chemotaxis, bacteria directing their own movements. He worked closely with an icon in the field who died just last year, Daniel Koshland, a former editor of the journal Science, who headed the first team to demonstrate in the 1970s that bacteria have a form of memory. They move towards nutrient rich environments and away from toxic spots and `remember´ by using their molecular machinery these past concentrations of good and bad stuff -- they learn too. Jeffry Stock: So the idea of bacteria being primitive is really a fairly primitive concept. Natasha Mitchell: And you´ve even gone as far as to propose that bacteria have a nanobrain. Jeffry Stock, what is a nanobrain? Jeffry Stock: Yes, all bacteria, it´s very interesting, have a highly conserved system to take sensory information from their environment and regulate their motility and it doesn´t really matter how they move, there´s some bacteria that move by different mechanisms that don´t have flagella. Natasha Mitchell: Flagella being like the little tail, like a little paddle. Jeffry Stock: Yes it´s a tail that´s like a propeller in fact they rotate and drives them through. But there are other bacteria that work by other mechanisms like throwing out an anchor that hooks on to something in their environment, pulling themselves along, there are all different ways that they swim but they all have the same apparatus for processing information. And that apparatus consists of thousands of protein fibres so the structure of the protein is similar to hair, and I originally called it a hairbrain -- but the fibres are made in E coli there are about 10,000 of these fibres and at one end of each fibre is a little glob of protein that binds a spectrum of chemicals in the environment. And at the other end is a glob of protein that produces a signal that controls the motor and in between there´s this bundle of interacting hairs, sort of, that do the information processing. The amount of information encoded in that fibre network is impossibly complex to actually work out for any particular network. One of the reasons I thought it was like a brain was because you´ll never really figure out how one works. Natasha Mitchell: You suggest that these nano brains can process up to 10 to the 8, that´s 10 with eight zeros after it bits of information per second. Information like temperature and the nutrients in the environment; salts, Ph, measure the Ph, that sort of thing. But should we be calling it a brain, isn´t that going one step too far? Jeffry Stock: Maybe. Well it´s a brain in that it functions like a brain, it takes information like our brains do from our various sensory inputs and then it makes decisions that control motor activity. So that´s what a brain does, if you don´t move, you're a plant and you don´t have a brain. And bacteria that don´t move don´t have this apparatus. It´s specialised for bacteria that move, which is what brains do. What do we mean by intelligence? It isn´t really all about another organism communicating with us, that´s not what intelligence is about. Intelligence is about taking information in the environment and making decisions that are advantageous to the organism. Koshland said that there´s no question that bacteria are the most intelligent organisms on earth, at least on a per gram weight basis because they are so small. Natasha Mitchell: You say this, we see ourselves, if we see ourselves in a bacterium, the world becomes a very different place -- how? Pamela Lyon: I think that we become more aware of the continuum along which we evolved, that we are intrinsically related to every living thing on this planet. I think that if people were raised with the idea that we would treat it differently; our stance towards other living creatures would be modified. Natasha Mitchell: Even bacteria? Pamela Lyon: Even bacteria, but of course if they endanger our lives we have to take issue with them. But at the same time we are like small universes, we are like galaxies, we have billions of bacteria on our skin and in our bodies, and they are chugging along and helping to keep us healthy and the question is why do bacteria go bad. But we owe them a great deal, we owe them a great deal. Natasha Mitchell: Dr Pamela Lyon from the University of Adelaide, and before her microbiologists Professor Jeffry Stock from Princeton and Jim Shapiro from the University of Chicago. Whimsy, and serious science too -- bacterial brains -- hope that cranked your imagination. More details and the show´s podcast and transcript at abc.net.au/rn/allinthemind and what do you think. Head to my All in the Mind blog from there too, it´s dead easy to post. Special thanks to ABC librarian Katrena Mitchell, Garry Havrillay and Roger Broadbent for their performances, to studio engineer Melissa May and to Kyla Brettle. I´m Natasha Mitchell, next week future minds, are computers fundamentally changing the way we think? Catch you then.

Some call the eyes the window on the soul. Trevor Lamb has been gazing into the eyes of living fossil 'fishy' beings, and deep into evolutionary time to unravel the beginnings of our incredible seeing organ. And what about its future? A myopia explosion in East Asian cities has folk worried, and there's good evidence for a surprising cause. TRANSCRIPT: Natasha Mitchell: And the eyes have it on this edition of All in the Mind. Welcome, Natasha Mitchell on board. Yes, we´ve got your ears and eyes covered here on ABC Radio National for the next half hour. Krisztina Valter: Oh look, I love the eye, I think it's the most beautiful organ in the whole body. Although it's very small it is fascinating. Natasha Mitchell: Fascinating perhaps, but are the eyes the window to the soul? Krisztina Valter: Yes, I think there is something in there. First of all, the eye and the retina actually is the window to your body, to your brain. Actually an ophthalmologist or an optometrist, when they look into your eyes and look at your retinas they can actually tell you how the vessels look like in your brain as well. So that's one window there. The other one is...yes, I think if you look at someone's eyes you can tell a lot about that person. So yes, the eyes are the centre of everything. Trevor Lamb: Whether you can consider it to be a window to the soul, I'm not so sure about, but looking into somebody's eyes can certainly tell you a lot about them. Natasha Mitchell: Like what, for example? Trevor Lamb: Now you're taking me too far. [laughs] Natasha Mitchell: Okay stretching the limits of science there talking about souls and the like. Up top there, eye researcher Krisztina Volter who we'll hear more from in another edition of the show. But an extraordinary yarn today about how this most precious sensory organ of ours, the vertebrate eye, evolved and how it´s changing today, because myopia rates have exploded across East Asia in just a generation or so. Professor Trevor Lamb is research director of the ARC Centre for Excellence in Vision Science based at the Australian National University, and he argues that the development of the ancestral eye changed the course of history as we know it. Trevor Lamb: Well, if our ancestors hadn't evolved the eye of the kind that we still have, we wouldn´t be here and perhaps the world would be dominated by an entirely different class of animals, like the common invertebrates, the flies and the ants and the crabs and spiders and so on. It's just the fact that our ancestors were able to evolve an eye that allowed us and all of the vertebrates to exist. And if you look at something like 95% of all animals have eyes of some kind or other, so it's incredibly important to the survival of many animals to be able to see spatially. Natasha Mitchell: And yet the vertebrate eye, our eye, is held up as a bit of a banner item by creationists, the creationist movement, because they argue that how could something so complex come about through natural selection, it had to be the work of an 'intelligent designer'. The eye is a sticking point, isn't it. Trevor Lamb: That was seen by Darwin to be quite an issue to be tackled by his theory, and in his chapter on organs of extreme perfection he tackled this. Reading: To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree. Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist...and if any variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life...then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real. — Charles Darwin Trevor Lamb: Basically what he said was that we need to be able to describe a series of gradual transitions in order to be sure that the eye really did evolve, and the problem is that it has been very difficult to find the evidence for the series of gradual transitions. But now with the information that we have available from studying extant animals, that is animals that are alive today, and also by looking at their genes and by mapping back to the kind of genes that there must have been in the past, we can see clear evidence for a gradual transition. It is not as if our eyes suddenly appeared as a perfect organ, a whole series of underlying gradual changes which led eventually and something over 500 million years ago to our eye. Natasha Mitchell: One challenge, though, has been traditionally that there is no real fossil record because the eye is a soft tissue organ, so it just doesn't pop up in history in a physical way, does it. Trevor Lamb: Absolutely, but there's another issue too and that is that the animals that have survived through to the present have been those with the better eyes, so any intermediate forms will not have survived. Natasha Mitchell: Incredibly there are two living fossils with us today that you've turned to for clues about the evolution of the eye that were around when some semblance of an eye was first starting to appear. How old is the vertebrate eye as we know it? Trevor Lamb: It appears to be more than 500 million years ago, and certainly there are two living species around that we think provide clues to the evolution of the eye. Strictly speaking they are not the animals that were around in those days because they have evolved over 500 million years. The two animals of great interest to us are, first of all, the lamprey, and second of all the hagfish. These are both jawless animals... Natasha Mitchell: Not fish? Trevor Lamb: Fish as they're generally understood are jawed vertebrates that evolved in the order of 420 million years ago, something like that, but the lampreys and hagfish or certainly their ancestors diverged from our line, from the line of fish, prior to that. Natasha Mitchell: Introduce us to these two living fossils that you think hold a lens, literally, onto the evolution of our own eyes. There's the hagfish, which a version of was kicking around 500 million years ago. This is an extraordinary creature, it looks eel-like, and even though we can see it, it can't see us. Trevor Lamb: That's right, it is a very primitive-looking eel-shaped creature. It's pretty disgusting... Natasha Mitchell: But people eat it as a delicacy, I gather the Koreans do. Trevor Lamb: I can't imagine eating it, they really do look pretty disgusting. And they have found themselves a niche in the very deep waters. They are essentially blind. They have something that looks vaguely like an eye, they have an eye patch, pale skin at the front on each side of the head and deeply embedded beneath that a primitive organ that has been called an eye. One of the ways that they've managed to survive is to have evolved a sliming mechanism. They exude enormous quantities of a really disgusting slime which can clog up the gills of predators and has protected them. So there are a number of reasons for thinking that hagfish may have been pretty much unchanged for something like 500 million years, that they don't need to see, and they just feed on carrion, on animals that have sunk to the bottom of the sea. Natasha Mitchell: There's another living fossil, the lamprey, that you suggest provides another jigsaw piece to this puzzle that you're trying to unravel that is the evolution of the eye. Trevor Lamb: Yes, the lamprey is much more fish-like, it is still eel-shaped but it is jawless. Many lampreys latch onto other fish, have a sucker-like mouth and they just digest away the flesh of fish. Natasha Mitchell: We really have to give people a sense of this though. This is like an eel-like looking creature with this sort of suction cap of a mouth, with fangs. I mean, it's gruesome. Trevor Lamb: Yes, the mouth of the lamprey really is pretty horrible, and it has hundreds of these teeth that enable the animal to latch on. Pretty horrendous, and you wouldn't want one of them latching onto your arm. Natasha Mitchell: Why the hagfish and why the lamprey? Why have they been so useful to you in finding some of the pieces in the jigsaw of the evolution of the vertebrate eye, our own eye? Trevor Lamb: Basically because they appear to be the only surviving descendents of some very important stages in eye evolution. The lamprey interests us because the eye of the lamprey is incredibly similar to ours. it has a camera style eye just like we have, a lens, it has extra ocular muscles that move the eye, very similar to ours, and if you look inside the eye, the retina, this light sensitive layer at the back of the eye, is fundamentally the same as ours. It has photoreceptors that are extremely similar to our rods and cones, the pigments, the rhodopsin pigments, light absorbing pigments which are very closely related to ours, its genes are very similar. And the parallels are so close that we can say that this eye is not a matter of convergence, there are so many similarities that we're left with the inescapable conclusion that the last common ancestor that we shared with the lamprey around 500 million years ago already had fundamentally our eye. Natasha Mitchell: So you suggest that the lamprey perhaps is a sort of missing link between the hagfish and us. Trevor Lamb: Yes, the lamprey allows us to go back 500 million years and say that the vertebrate style eye is already there. The difficulty is in going back further than that, and we think that the hagfish is a clue to evolution at a stage somewhat earlier than that, perhaps 30 million years or so earlier than that. And so there's this 30 million year window from around about 530 million years ago to 500 million years ago, and that's right in the Cambrian period, in the period of the Cambrian explosion, that we think is extremely important in regard to the evolution of our eye. And our view is that the hagfish does provide clues to this earlier form that our ancestors had got their eye too in those days. Natasha Mitchell: The interesting thing about the lamprey is it sort of starts out in life with an eye...or not really an eye but just a little sensory film on the surface of its skin, like the hagfish. So it starts out in life without an eye, and then as it matures it undergoes this phenomenal metamorphosis and an eye pops out which is uncannily like ours. Trevor Lamb: That's right, and it is entirely plausible that that represents the kind of evolutionary steps that occurred from the ancestor of hagfish through to the ancestor of lampreys and that we inherited. Natasha Mitchell: So you think what we see in an individual lamprey from birth until about five years when an eye pops out might parallel what happened to the evolution of our own vertebrate eye sort of compressed into one life form. And what intrigues me is that we've managed to get by...our eye hasn't changed for something like 400 million years essentially. I mean, surely it could have been optimised over 400 million years. Trevor Lamb: Well, it looks as though by the time that fish had evolved and the camera style eye of fish was in existence, that it was such a perfect organ already that it has been hard, through natural selection, to improve on it in the last 400 million years. Certainly there have been some changes, and as animals emerged onto the land then changes needed to be made to deal with the fact that the eye was operating in air rather than in water. But when you look at the retina where the processing of the neural signals occurs, there has been relatively little change. Where the changes have occurred are in the brain. Natasha Mitchell: But still, our eye is a sort of back-to-front organ, isn't it. The light has to get all the way through the eyeball to the very, very back of the eye where the photosensitive receptors are. Why is it all back to front? Surely that's not perfect. Trevor Lamb: You're right, it's not perfect, and you can consider it as a design flaw. And the steps that underlay that have led to this inside out organisation and have also led to the blind spot, the region at the back of our eye where the fibres of the optic nerve exit the eye. These are, if you like, design flaws in our eye that have arisen from the way that our eye evolved. The eye was only able to evolve from what was already there. You can only, during evolution, move on from where you're at. Natasha Mitchell: Trevor Lamb, thank you for joining me on the program, and good luck with scouting for the evolutionary history of our eye. Trevor Lamb: Thank you very much, Natasha, and it's been a pleasure. Natasha Mitchell: And now eye biologist Professor Trevor Lamb and colleagues have to, of course, test their hypothesis, but it's interesting though, isn´t it, to think that two living aquatic fossils could hold the clues to how our own eye came to be. But what will it become? Certainly the environment our modern eye encounters is so radically different from what it was. We´re exposed to light 24/7, many of us spend hours in front of screens, which makes me want to speculate on the future evolution of our seeing organ. Ian Morgan: Well, I wouldn´t speculate about the future of the eye. I think one of the things that civilisation has done is it's probably made us even more eye dependent. So I don't think we run any risk of the eye become a vestigial organ or anything like that. But I think there's a real social challenge. We've seen this massive emergence of a pandemic of myopia in East Asia. The prevalence of myopia in a place like Singapore has gone from 20% to 25% in the 1960s to a situation where now something like 90% of children are leaving school short sighted, and about 15% to 20% of them would be in this high myopia category which exposes them to later risk of uncorrectable loss of vision. Natasha Mitchell: A staggering increase in just a generation or so which, in partnership with researchers in Guangzhou in China, Professor Ian Morgan is trying to get to the bottom of. He heads up a lab with the ARC Centre for Excellence in Vision Science at the ANU. Myopia is of course short-sightedness, and it´s caused by your eye growing too long, which means the image of far away objects falls in front of the retina rather than smack bang on it, making them out focus. High myopia, as it´s called, increases your risk of retinal degeneration later in life, visual impairment and even blindness. So what´s causing this radical increase in East Asia? Increased education is a definite factor, but some also point to changes in diet (more fat), more close work with computers, or is that East Asian children are inheriting myopia from their parents? Ian Morgan: I think the evidence no longer supports that. There are several reasons for that. The prevalence of myopia varies from place to place. There is significant city/rural differences. East Asian populations which don't get educated tend not to show high prevalence of myopia et cetera. So it's not an inevitable characteristic of being East Asian. A second point is that if we look at children of East Asian origin in Australia, and we've done that in the Sydney myopia study, then they have a very much lower prevalence of myopia. So that shows that without the environmental exposures they're not going to become myopic. It's not something that's specific to East Asians, and the best data we have on that is from Singapore. In Singapore, Indians are almost as myopic as the Chinese, not quite, but internationally an extremely high prevalence of myopia, and that contrasts with virtually no myopia, 5% to 10% myopia in young adults in India. What that tells you is that it's the environment of Singapore that is causing the myopia. So the evidence for genetic factors accounting for these big differences that we see internationally is really very, very slight, and I would say the evidence just doesn't stack up. There is a 1% to 2% of the population who will have clearly genetic forms of myopia, they do exist. Let me give you some figures from Guangzhou where we do a lot of work with Chinese colleagues. The prevalence of myopia in 15-year-olds is now around about 70%. That's gone up enormously from about 20% in the 1960s, so it's a huge increase and it keeps going, so that by the time the children are leaving school at the age of 17 or 18 it's closer to 90%. All children, irrespective of whether they have no myopic parents or one myopic parent or two myopic parents become very myopic in Guangzhou. Having myopic parents there makes about a 10% difference, but most of the myopia is induced by the living environment in Guangzhou rather than the parental myopic status. Natasha Mitchell: You've got quite an interesting partnership going with Guangzhou. Take us to that city and what has changed since the 1960s that might deliver us a hypothesis about why myopia rates have exploded. Ian Morgan: The population of Guangzhou for example, has something like doubled in the last 20 years. Now you go to a city which is a high-rise city, fast on track to rivalling Hong Kong, you pass through almost a continuous zone of urbanisation for the 150 kilometres to Guangzhou. People are better fed, there's no doubt about that, whereas back in the '60s in the Cultural Revolution they didn't have all that much. But you've got to think about biological plausibility, social plausibility and look for biological causal chains... Natasha Mitchell: In other words, what could have contributed to a generation of eyes growing too fast. Ian Morgan: Absolutely. In that respect we've got 200 years of data which tells us that better educated people tend to be more myopic. 150 years ago professors of ophthalmology liked to believe that they were genetically smarter than the rest of the world, they were myopic, they liked to believe that that applied to their children et cetera. But now we know that when you develop a mass education system, as you have in China (their retention rates to the end of year 12 are now better than Australia's) then you induce a veritable epidemic of myopia. The best guess that we have is that it's got something to do with the fact that education involves lots of near work. You mentioned near work previously. The evidence that near work is important is, I have to say, much weaker now than it used to be. Natasha Mitchell: So what has really focused you on the idea, the question of whether time spent outdoors might be the critical factor? Ian Morgan: The original trigger was looking at the prevalence data around the world, and while we can see the same trend in Australia, the prevalence of myopia is nothing like what we would have predicted from the educational level of Australia alone. We have, by international standards, very, very little myopia. So that started us thinking that maybe it was the other characteristic of Australia, a lifestyle that is oriented to time outside, and also (and we don't know how important a factor this is yet) light levels in Australia are spectacularly bright compared to many other parts of the world. Natasha Mitchell: You really feel that when you come back from an overseas trip, don't you, this sort of visceral sharp brightness of our skies. Ian Morgan: Absolutely, and so that made us start suspecting that maybe that complex of things—more time outside and very bright light outside—might be the reason that we had much less myopia. And we've now gone ahead and collected a lot of data in Australia. Other people have collected data in Singapore. An American group has collected very similar data, and in Guangzhou we're collecting data of that kind. And that so far tells you that our guess was pretty much correct; children who spend more time outside are less likely to become myopic, even if they have myopic parents or even if they do enormous mounts of study and achieve. Natasha Mitchell: And to give a sense of comparison, in Singapore 6-year-olds spend around just half an hour a day outdoors, outside of school hours, and that´s compared to around three hours a day for Australian kids. And it´s not physical activity that´s a factor here as you might be thinking because indoor sport doesn´t improve the rates of myopia. Ian Morgan: The hypothesis we put forward was that we know that increased light intensity increases the release of a retinal transmitter, dopamine, and we know that dopamine is capable in certain circumstances (because the literature is complex)...but it's capable of blocking eye growth, which is just what you need to prevent myopia. So we put that up as a hypothesis. The first part of testing it was to show that by increasing light intensities inside that we could start to block myopia. That bit has been done. The other part of the hypothesis then involved taking animals inside, increasing the light intensity and using a dopamine antagonist to block the effects of dopamine and block the block. Then the animals developed myopia as they would have in lower lighting tests. Natasha Mitchell: So their eyes are actually growing too fast, too soon. Ian Morgan: That's right. Natasha Mitchell: You're already working on interventions based on these early findings. What are you up to? Ian Morgan: Obviously this is very attractive because if all you have to do to prevent myopia...and it does look as though Australia is a bit of a natural experiment in this...but if all you have to do is to get kids to get outside more, then it's a very non-invasive form of treatment. We don´t need to worry about special glasses costing $1,000 a pair, we don't need to worry about drugs, let's get the kids outside. So in principle it's very simple. It's not as easy in practice because everywhere, including in China, kids have pretty charged days. And the classic pattern in China now, in Singapore, is the children go to school, they go home, they do their homework and then they watch television. But they're inside all the time. Natasha Mitchell: Nevertheless the Central Committee of the Communist Party in China have in fact acknowledged the problem and a trial is currently underway to increase the amount of time children spend outdoors in Guangzhou. Ian Morgan: It´s quite a powerful project, because in Chinese schools roughly 10% of children in any class become myopic over the course of a year. With those sorts of numbers you can see after, say, three years if getting kids outside more has had a real impact. Natasha Mitchell: Ian Morgan, does all this lead you to speculate on the future of the eye, given that we've seen so much critical change in response to short term environmental changes, just within a generation or two? Ian Morgan: From an evolutionary perspective the question that is posed is, I think, more 'Why haven't we developed a mechanism for preventing the development of myopia?' And the answer, once again, is, well, we probably did have that, pretty much, as long as we were living outside a lot. We had a natural protection so you didn't need to evolve more sophisticated mechanisms. Natasha Mitchell: So the environment in which our eye evolved in has changed so much, in some sense our eye is longer optimum for our environment but, more importantly, our environment isn't optimum for our eye. Ian Morgan: That's the critical piece of understanding. The thing that's going to happen is as other countries in the world start to develop economically, they're going to want to emphasise the same things, educational success, they're going to urbanise, the level of outdoor activity is going to start decreasing. If we're right, and I think the evidence is very strong, all over the world as we go down a path which everybody seems committed to, we're going to see this emergence of a pandemic of myopia. Fortunately I think (although we've got to wait for at least three years for the evidence) we do seem to have a simple approach to preventing these lifestyle changes turning into a pandemic of myopia, provided we keep up levels of outdoor activity. Natasha Mitchell: Ian Morgan, very interesting work, and good luck with the results from Guangzhou. Thanks for joining us on the program. Ian Morgan: We've got our fingers crossed. Natasha Mitchell: Professor Ian Morgan there from the ANU So, light exposure early on is key to preventing school myopia it seems, but too much light over a lifetime does mean strife for our eyes. Any vision scientist will tell you; wear those sunnies. And I´ll have more on eye health in a later show for you. Catch the downloadable audio, more info, transcript and a link to my All in the Mind blog and Twitter feed via the website. Great to have your feedback and your company as ever. Thanks to studio engineer Joel Church. I´m Natasha Mitchell, heading out in search of some bright light.

Heard the one about the psychiatrist, the Supreme Court judge and the philosopher who walked in to a radio studio...? Join Natasha Mitchell and guests in a roundtable interrogation of how the brain sciences are changing our understanding of addiction, and the powerful consequences for notions of free will, responsibility and culpability. TRANSCRIPT: Natasha Mitchell: So have you heard the one about a psychiatrist, a supreme court judge and a moral philosopher? Well, they walked into a radio studio—and the rest is for today's listening. Natasha Mitchell, on board for All in the Mind on ABC Radio National. Thanks for tuning in. A unique roundtable today, on the nature of addiction. Jeanette Kennett: There's two sorts of identities, public identities that addicts are allowed to have. And one's the sort of medical identity—that they've got an illness or a disease—and that carries with it the risk that they'll be seen as incapable of making decisions and incapable of taking responsibility, and that's got clear ethical implications. And the other publicly available identity is that they're just bad. Addiction: the term itself carries a lot of moral implications. So it looks like there's two ways we can go: we can go the disease model, we can go the moral model, and there's not much in between. My hope is that the neuroscience can actually encourage us into a conversation where we get, you know, a more enriched and subtle picture about what's going on. The fear is that the neuroscience will leave the person out of the picture. [Music] Natasha Mitchell: Professor Jeanette Kennett, author of Agency and responsibility: a common-sense moral psychology. She's with the Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science and the philosophy department at Macquarie University, who with the University of Melbourne this week hosted a symposium called 'Addiction, Identity and Responsibility'. The journal Lancet has just reported that one in 25 of us worldwide between the age of 15 and 64 use cannabis, for example, and that around nine per cent of us who've used will become dependent. And as neuroscience cracks apace to understand addiction, how should we think about the addicted brain? Hijacked by drugs, or a maker of choices? Is it ever that clear-cut? What about questions of individual culpability, responsibility and self-control? Joining Jeanette today is David Hodgson, a Judge of Appeal of the Supreme Court of New South Wales, and a philosopher by night. His books include The mind matters and Consequences of utilitarianism. And Associate Professor Dan Lubman is an addiction psychiatrist and clinical researcher with Orygen youth health research centre in Melbourne. And thanks to you all for joining me on ABC Radio National. Look, addiction certainly has become a massive focus for the neurosciences, for psychiatry. I had Nora Volkow on the show a while back, she's the neuroscientist who heads up the institute on drug abuse in the US and whose research has been really key in framing addiction as a brain disease. And I imagine that for each of you in your very different domains of work, to call addiction a disease raises some quite distinct questions. Can I come to you Dan Lubman? As a clinical researcher and psychiatrist working with young people who are addicted, what does it mean to call addiction a brain disease, for you? Dan Lubman: I think that's a really important question. Certainly where we come from in terms of looking at people who develop problems with alcohol and drugs, we're talking about a particular type of pattern behaviour where repeated drug use, repeated drinking, leads to significant harms, despite knowledge that that's actually causing them a lot of problems and a lot of impairment in areas of their life, such as their family, friends, work, financially, or legally. There's also a recognition that they need to do something about it, that they actually want to cut down or stop using, but despite doing that, they find that they fail to do that. So it's repeated failed attempts to actually reduce or stop using. And associated with that there's sort of a preoccupation with that behaviour, so everything else in their life becomes less important, and there's a focus on taking the drug and using the drug, and everything else sort of loses significance. Natasha Mitchell: David Hodgson, is the description of addiction as a brain disease already having a tangible impact in the courts? Certainly we've seen the development of drug courts, of specialist medical health courts, recognising that people have different degrees of capability when it comes to their ability to assess their own actions and the criminality of those actions. David Hodgson: Yes. I think that view of addiction is having an impact. My own view is, when addiction is associated with criminal conduct, one mustn't regard it as just a disease. I think one still has to keep in mind the moral aspect of what's been done and I think it is important to generally regard them as having responsibility for criminal conduct, but then in deciding what is the best way to respond to criminal conduct, have regard to the fact that degrees of responsibility may be reduced and also have regard to the fact that if someone who's committed a crime because of addiction is willing to undergo treatment and undergo programs to overcome addiction, that can be a very good reason for not punishing in the same way as other people—perhaps postponing the question of whether there's to be punishment, leaving that to see if they are able to address their addiction in a good way. Natasha Mitchell: Dan, I think you want to come in here. Dan Lubman: I mean, I think it raises the issues, if we think of addiction as some sort of health problem, then we need to sort of examine the way in which, the legal frameworks in which we consider the disorder, and whether we criminalise or decriminalise certain types of behaviour. And obviously David's in the position where he has to enforce the law, based on how it's constructed, but certainly we can think about how we might put an argument to policymakers about how the law should be put together when we think about addiction as a health problem. Natasha Mitchell: David, this is interesting for you, because a central question for you here focuses on the retributive nature of our criminal law system, which considers that people are punished because they deserve to be held accountable for the actions they're responsible for. David Hodgson: And my contention is that that's generally a good thing, because if we don't punish people because they deserve it, then there's less reason to refrain from punishing people who don't deserve it. And it seems to me the retributive view of punishment is really an essential limitation on the application of punishment. If we regard punishment as purely to achieve good ends and not depending on proving that someone's done something to deserve it, then one's heading in a bad direction, towards, say, putting people in prison because you think their ideas are dangerous. Natasha Mitchell: Jeanette Kennett. Jeanette Kennett: It's a double-edged sword, isn't it, because if we classify it as a disease and say, 'Well, it reduces responsibility to a certain point where treatment is the appropriate action rather than punishment,' which seems much more humane, you do also bring up other issues about compulsory treatment, about the capacity of addicts to consent to treatment, and you would have to be very careful about what kind of system you institute, that it's not worse in terms of infringing the rights of those individuals. So I think there really is a big issue there. Another issue for policymakers, the challenge that was thrown down yesterday by Alex Wodak of St Vincent's Hospital, who pointed out that addiction problems differentially affect people in socially disadvantaged situations, who are also the people that we find in prison. Natasha Mitchell: So it's not just about individual brains here, is it? We're talking about a whole context, within which our individual brains operate. Jeanette Kennett: That's right. And the interesting question for us is what can neuroscience add to our understanding that the other, social sciences haven't already provided us with. Natasha Mitchell: Well, before we come to the neuroscience, Jeanette Kennett, as a moral philosopher, certainly to call a chronic addiction a disease is to imply that it's organic, that in effect it happens to us—we might be involved in that happening, but certainly we eventually ultimately become a victim or a sufferer of the disease. And I wonder for you, as a philosopher, does that raise fundamental questions about the contingent nature of our agency, our autonomy? So stepping into the philosophical realm here. Jeanette Kennett: Oh gosh! I think that we have to accept that our autonomy is not just an individual achievement, that all of us depend on other people to allow us to express our own agency to do the things that we want to do. If you think about your goals in life, what you value, autonomy is about being able to make progress towards those goals, and illnesses of various sorts can undermine your capacity to do so in various ways. But if you think about those goals, you realise that of course they're subject to all sorts of contingencies, not just the contingencies of accident or illness, but social contingencies. So it does make you think about how much you need other people in order to do what you want to do. I think that there have been in the past in philosophy fairly crude conceptions of autonomy that see it as all up to you, all, as it were, inside the head and not outside the head. Natasha Mitchell: And you've got it or you haven't. Jeanette Kennett: Yes. You know, there might be something like and on-off switch. But autonomy too, like responsibility, comes in degrees and it very much relies on social support, social scaffolding. So what I hope to see, in the sort of social-neurosciences, is a lot of attention paid to the ways in which the social gets inside the head, as it were. Natasha Mitchell: This notion of agency, which has preoccupied philosophers for centuries, and I perhaps linked in some way to the concept of volition and that sense of control that we have as an agent over the consequences of our actions, I mean, why is it so crucial to this conversation about addiction? Jeanette Kennett: It's crucial if people with drug problems experience a sense of loss of control, if they—either due to the cravings that they're experiencing or other things that are going on in their life—feel that they cannot make their lives go the way that they would want them to go. And if you feel that you can't achieve the things that you value, you might lose a lot of hope. So then you focus on what is available to you, and often the one good thing that might be available to you, the one old reliable that will make you feel good right here and now, is going to be drugs. So you become, I guess, a different sort of agent. Our agency in general, we've got a picture of ourselves as existing across time, of being this kind of person doing this kind of thing with this kind of goals, and I think that chronic drug use can kind of shrink that picture back and make you into a very short-term kind of individual, in part because maybe you think you can't achieve those longer term goods. Natasha Mitchell: And we're talking agency, addiction and the law on All in the Mind today. Philosopher Jeanette Kennett, New South Wales Supreme Court judge David Hodgson, and addiction psychiatrist Dan Lubman are my guests here on ABC Radio National, globally on Radio Australia, and as podcast. Dan Lubman, your research I think is reflecting very interestingly on this conversation about agency and how people perhaps lose a degree of agency when they're swallowed up by an addiction. So neuroscience is making some interesting head roads here, isn't it? One model of the findings is that addictive drugs hijack the system in our brain that responds to rewards—like drugs, like chocolate, like sex—and our behaviour is biased towards further drug use. Tell us, what does it mean to say that the brain's reward system has been hijacked—interesting language there. Dan Lubman: It certainly is, and certainly it's been very exciting in the neuroscience field over the past... particularly over the last 20 years, to see our understanding of how drugs impact on the brain and how regular drug use changes the brain in specific ways. What you're talking about is there's a key part of the brain that we know, that is important for highlighting really significant things in our environment that we need to pay attention to, and that system that the brain's reward system fires off and fires off a chemical called dopamine, when there's something important that we need to pay attention to. And certainly things that are key behaviours for survival—like eating, drinking, procreating, nurturing our young—those behaviours certainly fire off that system and ensure that we survive as individuals and as species. And this system links very closely to the emotional part of the brain, it's very much linked to learning and memories, and it's also closely linked as well to the frontal parts of the brain involved in sort of those notions of goals, in terms of motivation, weighing up the future, where you want to go, how you want to regulate, sort of the things you want to aim for in life. Natasha Mitchell: And importantly, that region, the whole sort of front, executive part of the brain, is about controlling our behaviour too. Dan Lubman: Definitely. It's about really informed decision-making. And so what we now know, is that all the drugs that we use in our society, all the drugs of abuse, including alcohol... Natasha Mitchell: Or drugs of `use´, depending on your point of view. Dan Lubman: That's right, but what's common to all those drugs is they cause a huge increase in the level of dopamine within that system, and so we find... Natasha Mitchell: Dopamine overdrive... Dan Lubman: That's right. Natasha Mitchell: But the consequences are lasting: this has been more recent work, that's been very interesting. Dan Lubman: I suppose the question is what happens when you start taking that drug on a regular basis. Certainly we all experience dopamine release every day, for a variety of reasons... Natasha Mitchell: We need it. Dan Lubman: Exactly. It's part of why we find life interesting. But if we continue to use certain drugs on a regular heavy pattern over a long period of time, what we see is major changes within this part of the brain. Situations, places, people that remind us of drugs, they become much more important and are able to drive this system. So the motivation to use drugs becomes much more important. At the same time, what we find is that this system becomes sort of less sensitive to natural rewards, natural reinforcers, things that you and I would find pleasant and pleasurable. Natasha Mitchell: And some people refer to that as a sort of... the set point for the rewards system in the brain is sort of reconfigured, it's shifted to the right. Dan Lubman: That's right. And there's some fundamental questions we still don't know, we still don't know to what degree does that change with long-term abstinence, to what degree does recovery occur in those brain systems. Natasha Mitchell: Another aspect of your work is also focusing on the brain's so-called inhibitory control mechanisms. So again, regions at the front, executive part of the brain are also affected, and this is quite key, this might explain why people keep searching for a hit, even though the consequences become absolutely dire, life-threatening. Dan Lubman: What we consistently find, over a whole range of people who have alcohol and drug problems, is that this frontal part of the brain, the part of the brain involved in regulating behaviour, involved in making decisions about short-term versus long-term goals, what we find consistently is that part of the brain is impaired. That's not to say, though, that in the experiments that we've done, that sort of in the cold light of day, people with long-term addictions make and are able to inhibit their behaviour and make good choices. Natasha Mitchell: So they're not total automatons, you're not inferring that? Dan Lubman: Certainly not. Natasha Mitchell: Because the implication could be taken that we're just beholden to our brain, our impaired brain. Dan Lubman: Exactly, and I think the notion of loss in control could be sort of overemphasised. I think in some ways what we describe is more of a relative loss of control in certain situations. Natasha Mitchell: Do you see self-control purely in terms of individual brain function? Dan Lubman: Well, I mean, I think that's a really important issue that Jeanette's touched on, the issue of social-neuroscience. So now we're starting to ask much more sophisticated questions around, well, how does the brain change in the context of a social group or social situation, how do environmental situations change that brain and influence that brain, and how does that then lead to decisions around drugs and drug-taking. Natasha Mitchell: Yeah. David Hodgson, can I come to you? I guess you don't think in your courtroom of a mass of brains, mass of individual brains, standing before you, you're thinking of them in their entirety. David Hodgson: That's right, we view people as whole persons and I think the categories the law uses are all, as it were, folk-psychological categories, categories like beliefs, intentions, and motives, and wishes, desires, et cetera. But ultimately, the courts have to decide, in accordance with categories like 'was this an intentional action, was this person able to control himself or herself?', which are not the categories that are used by neuroscientists. Natasha Mitchell: Certainly you suggest that some see neuroscience sounding a death knell for notions of freewill and responsibility, and particularly in the context of the legal system, I would imagine. So what lies at the heart of that concern? David Hodgson: I'm thinking of some philosophers and psychologists who say that neuroscience is demonstrating that the brain is just a machine and any idea of freewill is just an illusion and that ultimately you've got to do away with these ideas of responsibility and desert, and just approach a question of criminal conduct from a purely consequentialist point of view, what action in relation to people who engage in such conduct will have the best consequences, without really worrying whether they were actually responsible for what they did. Natasha Mitchell: What do you think? I mean, do you think neuroscience poses a real threat to notions of individual freewill and responsibility—in your philosophical life, but also in the setting in which you work as a Supreme Court judge? David Hodgson: I think not. I think opposing views are sufficiently robust to resist this sort of argument from neuroscientists and psychologists and some philosophers. I think the most prominent philosophical view, that it's quite consistent with a deterministic view of the brain, that persons as whole people can have freewill, in the sense of having the capacity to recognise and respond to good reasons for conduct and to control their conduct accordingly, and that's all quite consistent with determinism, that's a very robustly held view by perhaps a majority of philosophers. I don't wholly support that view, I am one person who disagrees with determinism; I think we do have a freewill that can transcend determinism. Natasha Mitchell: The assumption here, though, is that most of us make decisions with reason and with clear conscious intention all the time and with a sense of our own agency. Is that really the case? David Hodgson: Well, I think it is. I mean, undoubtedly an awful lot of our decision-making does happen unconsciously, but I think in our conscious thinking and action there is a sense in which people are in control of what they think and what they do. Natasha Mitchell: Even if they are chronically addicted to a substance that has—we used this expression before—hijacked their brain? David Hodgson: Well, I think that this control and ability to reason does come in degrees and certainly addiction and other problems can considerably reduce the degree of capacity to reason well and to control actions. Natasha Mitchell: Jeanette Kennett, looking at addiction, I mean historically addiction has been cast as a sign of a weak character, as a sort of defect of will, and that somehow a person has somehow lost an internal battle between reason and desire, they've lost control and succumbed to the desire for a high. Tease that out for us in terms of how we then judge whether they are responsible for what they do under the influence. Jeanette Kennett: I think that certainly, as Dan's pointed out, there are cases in which your capacity for reflection and to control your action gets sort of worn down by repeated cravings. It could be true that for some people, they've got just as much willpower as you or I, maybe more, but they've got more to fight against. Natasha Mitchell: It's interesting you say that, 'cos that's certainly the thinking of a lot of philosophers and cognitive psychologists now, isn't it, that... to see self-control not as a sort of black or white thing—you've got it or you haven't—but rather as a sort of cognitive resource, to be depleted or replenished depending their circumstances. Jeanette Kennett: Yes, that's right. It's a sort of a muscle metaphor. I mean, there's been work done in social psychology that indicates that if somebody's already done a kind of a task in a lab which requires a bit of self-control—you know, resisting freshly baked cookies and just eating radishes, or something like that—then on your next self-control task, you'll perform worse than somebody who didn't have to restrain themselves earlier. So that suggests that there's this resource that gets depleted if there are repeated demands made on the person. There's also the idea there though—maybe more hopeful—that if it is like a muscle, you can build it up with repeated practice and you can replenish it by resting, for example. So that 's a metaphor that is in use and sort of fits with certain folk-psychological notions and philosophical notions about self-control and about the will. Natasha Mitchell: That's a metaphor. Dan Lubman, what do you think of that clinically, when you're working with young people who are facing the sort of onslaught of drug use that they're experiencing? Dan Lubman: I mean, I think there's a lot of similarities between what Jeanette talks about and what we find, both clinically and in our research studies. Certainly we know it's this, I suppose, concept of cold cognition, so in the cold light of day when we have to make decisions, when we have to think about everything—the impact the drugs are having on us, how it impacts on our goals and where we want to go—the people I see are really quite adamant about the fact they're sick and tired of their drug use and they want to make changes and they want to work towards all these other important goals in their life. The issue then [be]comes the issue of hot cognition, so what happens at times when there's a lot of other emotions or stressors or other things going on in their life. And some of the imaging studies that we've done quite clearly show that when we ask people who are long-term addicted to actually inhibit their response on certain quite complicated tasks, they perform at the same level as other people in the community; but when we look within their brains, they're actually having to sort of recruit much more of their brain to be able to function at the same level. There's not enough cognitive capacity to be able sometimes to inhibit those urges and desires, and that at times can lead to sort of relapse to drug-taking. Working with people is about explaining about how these things impact on their decision-making and impact on their behaviour. So effectively what we do already in treatment is in some ways act as this sort of external frontal lobe, where we sort of work with people to increase their ability to sort of regulate their behaviour. So we work at building that part of the brain. They themselves are able to build up that part of their ability to cope in those situations. Natasha Mitchell: So you're directly working with their own sense of agency and control, implicit in the therapy is that belief. Dan Lubman: Definitely, definitely. That's right. Natasha Mitchell: David Hodgson, you suggest that this sort of research, and neuroscience more broadly, shouldn't result in us abandoning notions of criminal responsibility. But you do still see some use for neuroscience in the courts, don't you? David Hodgson: Undoubtedly. It may be that in some respects, neuroscience may enable us to improve some of the categories we use, like the insanity defence. It may be that neuroscience could help us define these things a bit more clearly, although certainly neuroscientific evidence will be important, but it won't displace the need to make commonsense judgements about responsibility. And of course I think neuroscience will also be important in increasing understanding of what can be done to help people rehabilitate. Natasha Mitchell: Dan, what do you think of that? Dan Lubman: At the moment we're at the stage of really trying to work out what is going on in addiction and often we do lump everyone together in saying, you know, everyone who's addicted is the same. Certainly that's not the case clinically when you work with people, people can come into addiction from a whole range of different reasons. And understanding pathways into addiction is critically important, because sometimes we're so focussed on the addiction, we're not focussed on the fact that there's some underlying trauma, some underlying mental health problems, issues with head injuries, or other issues that are going on that are driving people into addiction. And it's the combination of those that is making things much more difficult and affecting the way in which they make decisions. Natasha Mitchell: So we've got to think of the brain in its social context but also in a lifelong context... Dan Lubman: That's right. Natasha Mitchell: ... the continuum of time. Jeanette, how can this conversation—just to wrap—inform and guide policy decisions around addiction? Jeanette Kennett: Look, I really think that we have to look at the legal framework and the criminalisation of this behaviour, because it seems to me that that is unhelpful. I mean, I want to distinguish here between criminal conduct that might be associated with drug taking and the drug taking itself here, but I think that we have to look at this in a different light and think about how we can help the person become more whole, become more autonomous. And one of our speakers pointed out yesterday that the definition of addiction in the DSM IV... Natasha Mitchell: The key diagnostic manual used by psychiatrists... Jeanette Kennett: ...is that the drug-taking behaviour continues despite the person's knowledge of the bad consequences. Now the point was made that if you then go and punish people for this behaviour, it's not going to act as a deterrent. They've already showed that they will continue using despite the bad consequences. Dan Lubman: What's interesting at the moment in the work that's happening in the neuroscience field is looking at what type of manipulations we can make to change the way in which the reward system operates. And certainly that has policy implications, because once somebody becomes addicted, putting them in environments where they're repeatedly punished doesn´t really seem to change that addictive behaviour. What does change dopamine is putting people in enriched environments, putting them in situations where there's more opportunities and that's a much more likely... that what we're learning from the neuroscience field in terms of both protecting people from developing addictive problems, but also in terms of moving towards recovery. Natasha Mitchell: Well, so much there to think about. Thank you very much Professor Jeanette Kennett, Associate Professor Dan Lubman, and Justice David Hodgson, thank you for joining us on ABC Radio National. And Dan Lubman is an addiction psychiatrist with Orygen Youth Health Research Centre in Melbourne; Jeanette Kennett is at Macquarie University's philosophy department and the Centre for Cognitive Science; David Hodgson is a judge of the Supreme Court of Appeal in New South Wales, and a philosopher by night. Thanks to co-producer Anita Barraud, studio engineer Andrew Grant. I'm Natasha Mitchell.