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.