- Victorian Italy.
1504.
Tuesday.
4:00 p.m.
Renowned hairstylist, and up and coming painter,
Leonardo Michelangelo da Vinci, toils away in his workshop
in desperate need of inspiration.
Lorenzo Lefty de'Medici,
head of Italy's most powerful banking family,
has commissioned a painting from da Vinci,
which is due in 20 minutes.
Leonardo's most recent work, The Octopus Man,
has been widely condemned by critics,
who claim it is, quote, too naked.
Making matters worse,
da Vinci's hairstyle has also come under fire
in recent weeks,
receiving harsh criticism
from Italy's strict fashion police.
Da Vinci can't afford another embarrassment, not today.
Leonardo looks at his wife, Mona, a modest, ugly woman,
known for her enigmatic hands, witch wig hair,
and missing eyebrows,
which had been accidentally removed by da Vinci
during an earlier attempt to style her facial hair.
As da Vinci gazes at his wife's now hairless forehead,
somewhere in the recesses of his brain,
inspiration strikes.
Has he found his muse?
Could a simple painting of this simple woman
be his salvation?
Would Leonardo da Vinci paint the Mona Lisa?
The answer
is fascinating.
(intense orchestral music)
Close, but completely wrong.
Keep typing, you'll get it.
Imagine a computer that can imagine a computer.
You just used one.
Congratulations,
for the most magnificent computational device
in human history isn't found encased in metal,
(metal rattles)
or plastic, (computer rattles)
but in bone.
In the bone of our own heads.
It's called the brain.
An unreasonably complex network
of blood soaked organic wires
and electronic folds of tissue
that determines what we like,
and how we like it,
if we breathe, when we die, and other processes.
But as we explore the recesses of our own thoughts
we're left to wonder whether we think with the brain
or if the brain thinks with us,
or, some other third, interesting option.
Are humans truly conscious beings in control
of our own destinies,
or are we just machines ourselves?
(cup rattles)
This fascinating question
is just one in a long line of questions
that our brains have asked ourselves for centuries.
Questions like, what are thoughts?
What is thinking?
Who's thinking what?
And what was I thinking when I thought to sit here?
The earliest theories of the brain come from ancient Egypt,
and before that, pre-ancient Egypt, Pre-Gypt.
The Egyptians and the Pre-Gyptians believed
that inside our heads were smaller, smarter versions of us
driving every decision of our larger selves,
know as, ourselves.
While in Renaissance Japan,
Samurai poets wrote of the brain as a, quote,
benevolent monster, which controlled the, quote,
fearful body.
Later, Medieval doctors saw the brain as a wizard fetus,
living inside the skull and moving throughout the body,
and treated the skull and body accordingly.
Later, philosophers like, Plato Kierkegaard,
and Karl Groucho Marx,
posited that the brain was nothing more
than a soup of ideas and the skull its thinking bowl.
While cannibal societies of the Amazon
saw the brain as more a literal soup,
and its skull, not so much as a thinking bowl,
but as just a plain bowl.
Today we know that each of these theories is wrong
in their own laughable ways.
And thanks to medical science,
we also know so much more about our brains
than even the smartest thinkers of yesterday
could have imagined.
We know there's enough electricity in the brain
to paralyze a small raccoon.
We know the brain has a consistency of yogurt
that's been placed in a plastic bag.
And experiments have shown that the brain,
when placed in a jar,
will think almost exclusively of jars.
If you could hear the sound of a brain thinking
it would make sort of a wet, squishing, ticking noise.
We know that when the brain is overheated it smokes,
and when it is frozen it cracks.
And like the human sexual organs,
we know the brain shrinks when it is scared
and expands when it is aroused.
And we know there is about as much blood in the brain
as you would find in a seven pound bag of blood.
But, of course,
the brain behaves much less like a bag of blood
and much more like a supercomputer.
But how exactly does this marvelous supercomputer
within each of us function?
To answer that question we must look at the structure
of the brain.
The brain grows from a stem.
When young, the brain is smooth
and it's most impressionable.
As we age the brain soaks up information
as well as surrounding fluids.
And as it gets older it develops wrinkles,
leaving less space for new information
and more space for judgment, orders, and nightmares.
The brain has three main sections,
the fore-brain, the mid-brain,
and the posterior sub-mid-fore brain.
The fore-brain is the largest,
most confident section of the brain.
Of course, we know it can be enhanced with magnets
or disabled with darts.
But despite all we've learned about it.
- There are incredible dangers to this
which people don't even understand.
Whereas, many cases I've heard of students,
in the middle of a final, studying very hard,
and suddenly, bam, a little lightning storm in the brain
killed them.
- This is because the brain is shifty, suspicious organ.
When we ask it questions it responds much like magician,
by deceiving us.
And when we try to dissect it,
its two halves quarrel and confuse us,
leaving us to understand the brain
no more than we understand a simple puff of smoke.
And this raises an important question.
Does the brain control us,
or do we control the brain?
What we do know is that forcing your brain to your will
does not work.
An adversarial relationship with your brain
can be catastrophic.
Instead you must approach the brain with caution.
Sneak up on it and hide your true intentions.
For centuries, man had struggled
to gain control over the brain
and had consistently failed
until one man made a leap that would change everything.
Someone who would help science understand
just how to trick the brain into yielding its secrets.
His name was Sigmund.
The son of humble sex workers,
Sigmund was born in Austria's capital city, Brussels,
where his parents ran a small sex shop.
This Sigmund had a tumultuous childhood,
in which he tried to kill his father numerous times.
During one of these attempts,
Sigmund lost his balance and hit his head
on the sex machine in his parent's storefront.
In the process he knocked himself unconscious
and fell asleep on the machine,
which was shaped like a comfortable sofa.
After recovering some months later,
Sigmund would devote his life
to studying how this machine operated.
And he wasn't just Sigmund,
he was Sigmund Applebaum Freud II,
who would later drop his middle name
and the two digits at the end of it,
to become the most famous Freud in history,
just plain Sigmund Freud.
Freud discovered that asking the brain questions
while its owner was lying on a couch,
fully clothed,
would send mixed signals to the brain and confuse it,
making it easier to coax secrets out of it.
And these secrets were often portals to memories
and dreams, and sometimes violent gibberish.
And in this cocktail of fascinating brain activity
Freud realized he had found the edge of the brain,
where reality and imagination overlap.
And in this overlap,
he discovered something nestled deep in a pocket
that was surrounded by the brain,
a powerful center of consciousness,
a small, pea-like structure that determines intellect,
imagination, and how annoying we become when we are drunk.
Freud would call this small, pulsating gland, the mind,
and it would play a key role in man's attempt
to control, not only the brain,
but also, himself.
And this is where the story gets fascinating.
Next time on Our Fascinating Planet.
- Conventional wisdom will tell you that the brain
is an organ that uses electrical impulses
to control a nervous system in the human body
and self governing our emotions and movements.
And, I'm sorry, I just don't buy it.