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 Copyright

Published by Piatkus

ISBN: 978-0-349-41720-2

Copyright © 2018 Kaja Nordengen

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

This translation has been published with the financial support of NORLA

Illustrations by Guro Nordengen

Photograph on page 185 © Geir Mogen; edited by Birte Nordengen

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of the publisher.

The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not
owned by the publisher.

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 About the author

Kaja Nordengen is a brain researcher and physician

specialising in neurology at Akershus University Hospital.
She has a PhD in neuroscience and also teaches at the
University of Oslo.

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 CONTENTS

Title Page
Copyright
About the author
Foreword by May-Britt Moser
Introduction: You Are Your Brain

1 Thought (R)evolution
The reptile brain
The mammal brain
Ingenious apes
Why isn’t it enough to have the biggest brain?
The unfinished brain
Intelligence is an art
From the treetops to prime-time TV
Not stronger but smarter

2 Hunting for the Personality

The seat of the soul
A place for everything
The frontal lobe
The director behind your forehead
Personality in every corner of the brain
Split brain, split personality?
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Multitasking
You can change yourself … but only a little
Herd-wired brains
Can your personality get sick?
The psychological is physical
 Do animals have personalities?
Personality tests

3 Memory and Learning

Short-term memory
Long-term memory
The hippocampus and its pals
Remembering for the future
Learning
Clowns and drooling dogs
Focused learning
Storage
From dating to a permanent relationship
Mr LTP
White matter rules!
The 10 per cent myth
Unlimited storage capacity
Remembering
How to improve your memory
Using your nose to remember
Blacking out
Dementia is brain failure
Mr Appelsine
False memories
Celebrate your forgetfulness

4 The Brain’s GPS

Grids in your brain
You are here
Map and compass
To here, but no further
Fred Flintstone’s car
It’s not just the temporal lobe
Are men better than women at finding their way around?
The cab driver’s brain workout
How can you improve your sense of direction?
5 The Emotional Brain
Feeling with your brain
Smiling your way to happiness
Bad moods are bad for you
The brain’s green-eyed monster
Sex on the brain
To do or not to do
Angry winners
Stress kills neurons
Anxious about anxiety
Loving with your brain

6 Intelligence
IQ
High IQ – so what?
Long-headed and short-headed
Nature or nurture?
The downside of high intelligence
Artificial intelligence

7 Culture © The Brain

Together we’re strong
Social networks
The social code
The creative brain
Does Mozart make you smart?
The same almighty God
Different cultures, similar stories
Understanding the abstract
Crazy or brilliant?

8 Eating with Your Brain

Ancestral eating habits
Food and sex
The joy of food
Addicted to sugar
 Marketing experts know their neuroscience
Advertising
Food make-up
The problem with artificial sweeteners
Chocoholic in the womb?
Brain food
Diets

9 Addiction
Dependency
Coffee
Cocaine and amphetamines
Nicotine
Alcohol
Endorphins, morphine and heroin
Hash

10 Reality versus Perception

Your amazing sense of smell
Fooling your taste buds
The taste of crunch
The taste of red
What you don’t feel
Selective hearing
A world without depth or contrast
Infrared and ultraviolet light
Facial recognition
Why perception is better than reality

11 The Way Forward

Acknowledgements
Selected Sources
Index
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 FOREWORD
by May-Britt Moser*

The brain is the most wondrous, complex and mysterious organ we know.
As a psychology student in the 1980s, I was taught that the cause of autism
in children was an emotionally cold mother. Today we know better. Autism
is due to a developmental change in the brain, which brings a multitude of
factors into the picture.
For me, this memory of my student days serves as a reminder of how
quickly our knowledge has developed within the field of brain research. We
should rejoice at the progress being made, but we should also remain
humble when it comes to recognising the role that modern technology plays
in making this new knowledge possible. Many of the big research questions
of our day are the same ones that people have been asking for centuries.
However, thanks to the development of ground-breaking research tools and
methods, we are now able to look for the answers to these questions in the
brain itself. We are standing on the threshold of a knowledge revolution in
terms of the brain and its interaction with the body, genetics and the
environment.
But it’s not enough to collect research data in laboratories and share the
results internationally with colleagues. The knowledge has to be conveyed
beyond professional settings to society at large, where it may be
incorporated into people’s lives and translated into insight and
understanding. To understand how our brain functions and how it
participates in all of the body’s processes is to understand our capabilities
and who we are as human beings.
Greater knowledge also leads to superior means of evaluation and
treatment when something goes wrong in the brain. We now understand the
importance of separating the symptoms of a brain disorder from the
person’s character and personality. We know that the symptoms are due to a
failure in the system. Armed with greater knowledge about how the healthy
brain functions, researchers can proceed to look for where in its processes
the failure has occurred and how it may be repaired. This insight provides
the basis for largesse and willingness to adapt, which are essential for
everyone to have a place in society.
In this book, Kaja Nordengen presents an accessible introduction to the
most recent research into the organisation, mechanisms and functions of the
brain. Writing in an engaging manner, she interweaves the results of this
research with anecdotes from her own life. By anchoring theory in concrete
experiences that are part of our shared world, she not only conveys facts but
stimulates curiosity. The playfulness in the way she presents the material
awakens the sort of enthusiasm that drives both the questioning child and
the experienced adult. The warmth of Kaja’s narrative voice is sure to stay
with every reader long after they have closed her book.
The excellent illustrations were drawn by the author’s younger sister,
Guro Nordengen. Once again, I suspect that readers will remember these
clear, simple drawings for many years to come, which is not usually the
case with sophisticated 3D graphics. They mirror the text by encouraging
further contemplation and general understanding rather than attempting to
present every minute detail.
I would like to thank Kaja Nordengen for daring to take on this bold and
ambitious project. Her tireless efforts mean that some of the most important
advances in brain research are now accessible to a broad cross section of
readers, both young and old.
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 INTRODUCTION

YOU ARE YOUR BRAIN

When the ancient Egyptians embalmed their dead rulers in preparation for
the afterlife, the heart was carefully removed before being placed back
inside the body. Meanwhile, the brain was simply discarded. A stick was
poked up the nose, the brain matter was whipped into mush, then it was
sucked out. The brain became trash. It would be a long time before humans
understood that we are who we are because of our brains.
Even before recorded history, the brain was sometimes linked to
functions such as movement and thinking. Yet it would be several thousand
years before people generally accepted that ‘I’ is situated within the brain.
Aristotle and several other great classical thinkers, for example, believed
that the soul was to be found in the heart. It was only in the mid-
seventeenth century that the French philosopher René Descartes proposed a
different hypothesis.
Almost everything on each side of the central line that divides the brain’s
two halves has a corresponding feature on the opposite side. For instance,
we have a left and a right frontal lobe. Yet Descartes noticed that the pineal
gland was located in the very centre, so he identified this as the seat of the
human soul. But it wasn’t quite that simple. In 1887, the Arctic explorer –
and Norway’s first brain researcher – Fridtjof Nansen correctly postulated
that intelligence lies in the brain’s numerous neural synapses. Since his day,
we have learned that joy, love, contempt, memory, knowledge, musical taste
and every other human preference are also located in these neural synapses.
Since every trait that makes up ‘I’ exists in the brain, clearly you could
not have become you without your brain. Our laws also recognise that the
brain is the principal determining factor for what constitutes life: if you are
‘brain dead’, then you are dead. Provided that permission has been granted,
your organs can then be removed and transplanted to save someone else’s
life. There are few organs that we can manage without, yet the heart, liver,
lungs, kidneys and pancreas are all replaceable, as long as a suitable donor
can be found. But no one has yet attempted to transplant a human brain into
another body.
Even when the technical challenges of doing so have been overcome,
significant ethical dilemmas will remain. If someone who is brain dead
receives a new brain, the person associated with that particular body will no
longer be the same ‘I’. She may look like your daughter; but if she has
someone else’s brain, is she really your daughter? She will have a
completely different consciousness – alternative thoughts and dreams. We
cannot replace the brain without also replacing the person. In other words,
the brain is our only irreplaceable organ.
In this book, we will explore the mysteries of the brain – everything from
what happens when we fall in love to where to find the ‘I’. Lots of
interesting questions arise when we talk about the brain. Who are you?
What makes you who you are? What is personality? What is free will?
Where do our thoughts originate? We already have some clear answers …
or at least some clear indications from patient histories and advances in
brain research. Nevertheless, many mysteries remain, so we must hope that
further research and bright minds will find more answers in the years to
come. After all, the brain is the only organ that can research itself.
Language, culture and lifestyle all involve memory and the brain’s ability
to detect and interpret patterns. The brain makes us who we are, and it’s the
reason why sports, art and music exist. Your brain is a superstar.
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 CHAPTER 1

THOUGHT (R)EVOLUTION

The human brain’s wrinkly surface, which is reminiscent of the outside of

a walnut, is called the cerebral cortex. It is packed full of neurons, and
marked a revolution in the history of evolution. The bigger an animal’s
cerebral cortex, the greater its chances of having high intelligence.
Half a billion years ago, only the so-called reptile brain existed. This is
now known as the rhombencephalon. The early mammalian brain – what
we call the limbic system – appeared some 250 million years later, while
the cerebral cortex developed about 200 million years ago. However, what
we consider the human brain did not appear until 200,000 years ago –
almost the equivalent of yesterday in evolutionary terms.

The reptile brain

The human race’s large cerebral cortex helped us to survive the last ice age
as it allowed us to adapt to the changing environment. By contrast, 65
million years ago, when a meteor strike generated major climatic change,
the dinosaurs were not very well equipped to cope. For instance, an adult
stegosaur weighed in at a whopping five tons but had a brain that weighed
only eighty grams (about the size of a lemon). Moreover, this mini-brain
lacked a cerebral cortex. When you know that, it’s hardly surprising that
you find stegosaurs only in movies and museums today.
However, while our cerebral cortex makes us the most intelligent species
on the planet, we wouldn’t have made it this far without the deeper parts of
our brain. Deepest of all – and therefore most fundamental to our existence
– is the reptile brain, which consists of the brainstem and the cerebellum.
The brainstem is the perfect caretaker: it ensures that everything keeps
functioning without any need for conscious thought. Its neurons regulate
our breathing, cardiac rhythm and sleep. They never rest, whether we are
awake or asleep. Meanwhile, the cerebellum, which sits behind the
brainstem, regulates our movements. Therefore, we become uncoordinated
and unsteady if it is affected by alcohol.

Figure 1: The right half of a human brain, seen from the middle, with the different
developmental stages in evolutionary history identified. The reptile brain is shown in dark
grey, while the early mammalian brain is shown in light grey. The most developed
mammalian brain – i.e. the human brain – is shown in white. Several brain structures that
have central and definable roles are mentioned by name.

The mammalian brain

All mammalian brains consist of so-called grey and white matter. The grey
matter – which isn’t actually grey, but pink – is home to the neural cell
bodies and the synapses, where signals are transferred between the neurons.
The white matter, which serves as the highway for those signals, runs
through long, wire-like axons. Like all other wiring, the brain’s wires must
be insulated to function properly. The insulating material is called myelin,
which is white because of its high fat content. We find grey matter in the
cerebral cortex – around the cerebrum and the cerebellum – but there are
also islands of it in the middle of the brain.
The human limbic system consists of all of the structures that appeared in
the first mammalian brains as well as the oldest parts of the cerebral cortex
and islands of grey matter made up of neurons. Many of these neuron
islands (also known as nuclei) are vital for a number of the body’s basic
functions – crucial evolutionary instincts that are sometimes referred to as
the ‘Four Fs’: fighting, fleeing, feeding and fucking.
One particularly important limbic nucleus is the amygdala, which is
located inside the temple (see Fig. 1). ‘Amygdala’ is the Greek word for
almond – early anatomists named the structures in the brain according to
what they resembled – and it plays a central role whenever the human body
is engaged in one of the first two Fs. Its neurons not only cause you to blurt
out a few choice words when you run for a bus and the driver pulls away
just as you reach the stop, but also make you feel worked up all over again
when you relate the story later the same day. The amygdala is also
important for motivation, so it is at least partly to blame when you break
into a flat-out sprint to try to catch that bus, even though you know the next
one will be along in a few minutes. Moreover, when you’re walking home
in the dark and hear footsteps behind you and pick up your pace a bit, that’s
your amygdala at work again. Even if you were in a safe environment and
didn’t have anything to fear, you would feel absolute terror if your
amygdala were electrically stimulated.
Figure 2: The cerebral cortex is made up of grey matter, and it is also where we find all the
neurons and the contact points between them – the synapses. Inside the grey matter we
find white matter, which is made up of insulated neuron axons.

Behind the amygdala sits another part of the more primitive portion of
the mammalian brain – a three–four-centimetre-long, sausage-shaped
structure known as the hippocampus, named after the Greek word for
seahorse (see Fig. 1). The hippocampus is important for both memory and
spatial orientation: for instance, it can help you remember your
multiplication tables. However, even if you recite your multiplication tables
until your hippocampus aches, you won’t become a better mathematician.
That’s because mathematical understanding resides in the cerebral cortex.
Right in the centre of the brain, the thalamus straddles the midline (see
Fig. 1). It sends signals to practically every corner of the cerebral cortex
with all the latest news from the body’s senses. If we were to compare brain
structures to people, then the left and right thalamus would be the local
gossipmonger – the neighbour who knows everyone’s business, the one
who keeps a finger on the pulse of everything that’s happening. Extensive
highways of nerve cell axons run through the thalamus, where they merge
with other roadways to form complex circuits of electrical information that
zoom off in coordinated, rhythmical patterns.

Ingenious apes
A long time ago, our ancestors lived in the treetops of Africa’s jungles, and
they stayed there right until the moment when the climate changed. Back
then, the earth’s climate was like a roller coaster, with a series of alternating
ice ages and heatwaves. While these fluctuations eventually forced our
ancestors down from the trees, they were not extreme enough to wipe them
out. The earth-bound apes quickly developed larger brains while also
retaining both the reptile brain and the limbic system. The increase in
volume was entirely due to enlargement of the cerebral cortex.
The early hominids who walked on two legs across the African savannah
almost four million years ago had brains that weighed about four hundred
grams. Although their hands could now do something other than cling to
branches, they didn’t hold tools until ‘the handyman’ – Homo habilis –
appeared two million years ago. By then, the size of the hominid brain had
increased to a good six hundred grams. Using tools was undoubtedly a
breakthrough, even though Homo habilis was hardly sophisticated – he
mostly just grabbed rocks and hit stuff with them. Moreover, these weren’t
the only creatures to make such a breakthrough: dolphins use bits of sea
sponge to protect their beaks as they search for prey on the sea floor; cactus
sparrows use thorns to flick insect larvae out of holes; and chimpanzees use
branches to scoop termites out of tree trunks. Using tools to extract termites
might be impressive, but it’s quite a long way from writing a symphony. So,
something else must have happened during the course of human
evolutionary history – something that made our brains unique in the animal
kingdom.
Another million years passed and Homo habilis gave way to Homo
erectus – ‘the upright man’ – who was less governed by the primitive parts
of his brain, which now weighed about a kilogram in total. Instead of
running away from fire, he understood that he could use it for light, heat
and protection on his journey further into the world. He also started to hunt.
Finally, Homo sapiens – ‘the thinking man’ – evolved some 200,000 years
ago, boasting a brain that weighs between 1200 and 1400 grams – three
times heavier than those of the hominids who had first walked on two feet a
mere 3.8 million years earlier.
In parallel with this steady increase in brain size, humans developed a
level of intelligence that leaves other species far behind. However, this isn’t
just a matter of size. The brains of dolphins, chimpanzees and even cows
are all similar in size to our own, but they cannot match our creativity or
innovation.

Why isn’t it enough to have the biggest brain?

Some animals have even bigger brains than we do. For instance, a blue
whale’s brain weighs a whopping eight kilograms … but it’s housed in a
body that weighs 170 tons! In general in the animal kingdom, the bigger the
body, the bigger the brain. So what about our close relative the gorilla,
which is two to three times the size of the average human? Are gorillas’
brains correspondingly larger than ours? Actually, the opposite is true: our
brain is two to three times larger than a gorilla’s. Indeed, only whales and
elephants have larger brains than humans: that is, the largest animals in
water and on land, respectively. Relative to body size, then, the human
brain is the largest of any animal.
Moreover, having a brain that weighs eight kilograms doesn’t help the
blue whale in terms of intelligence, since IQ isn’t measured in kilograms.
Two brains of identical size don’t necessarily have the same number of
neurons or an equal capacity for complex thought. A classic example is
Albert Einstein, who, despite being the father of the theory of relativity and
the winner of a Nobel Prize in physics, had a brain that was 20 per cent
smaller than average. We know the precise size thanks to an unethical
doctor. Einstein wanted to be cremated after his death and have his ashes
spread somewhere that would make idol worship impossible. However, this
wish was not fulfilled, because the doctor who conducted the autopsy stole
his brain and took it home with him!
Different species’ brains are also not built the same way. In primates
(humans and apes), the size of the neurons themselves is the same whether
the brain weighs eighty grams or a kilogram. Therefore, a one-kilogram
brain would have ten times as many neurons as a one-hundred-gram brain,
plain and simple. However, in rodents, larger brains have larger neurons.
So, to get the same tenfold increase, a rodent’s brain would need to be a
whopping forty times heavier. Hence, a primate’s brain will always have
more neurons than an equal-sized rodent’s brain. If a rat’s brain had as
many neurons as a human brain, it would weigh thirty-five kilograms!
Thus, we don’t just have the largest brain relative to body size; we also
have far more neurons per gram than any other animal.
On the other hand, although rodents’ brains and primates’ brains differ
significantly, the basic principles are identical. The neurons appear to talk to
each other the same way. This is why rats and mice are often used in
research into how the human brain works.

The unfinished brain

We couldn’t really have much bigger brains because of the way we are
constructed. There simply isn’t any more room in our skull. Even though
the cerebral cortex curls neatly to fit, the skull is already so large that
human babies don’t have much wiggle room at birth. If a baby doesn’t turn
the right way at the right time, there can be serious trouble. Nevertheless,
the brain is still unfinished at that moment, to enable the head to make it
through the birth canal. The disadvantage of this is that human children are
entirely dependent on their parents for a very long time. Effectively, we
give birth to small, helpless creatures whose brains continue to develop
once they’re outside the uterus, and as a result we need to put a lot of
energy into raising every individual.
However, even though humans are vulnerable and need protection for at
least the first decade of life, the human population has grown until there are
now more than seven billion of us. In the last half century alone, the
number of humans on earth has doubled. So, how have physically weak,
naked apes who give birth to helpless infants achieved such a dominant
position? We don’t run particularly fast or swim particularly well, and our
night vision is terrible. Therefore, we would seem to be at a significant
disadvantage when compared to other animals – hunters and hunted alike.
Successful predators tend to have powerful jaws, multiple rows of sharp
teeth, paralysing venom or great speed, while prey animals protect
themselves with thick armoured skin, camouflage or exceptional hearing.
We have none of these assets.

Intelligence is an art
From an anatomical perspective, humans were entirely ‘modern’ 150,000
years ago, although there is no concrete evidence that these first Homo
sapiens were capable of abstract or symbolic thought. However, we know
that humans began producing works of art, jewellery and advanced tools,
like canteens and fish hooks, about 40,000 years ago. We made these tools
to compensate for our lack of physical attributes, but what led to this
sudden burst of creativity? The only explanation is that there must have
been a considerable change in the human brain around that time. Maybe this
was due to genetic mutation? Or perhaps it was linked to Darwin’s principle
of ‘survival of the fittest’: perhaps the most creative and intelligent
members of the species were considered the most attractive, and thereby
had the greatest chance of passing on their genes? No one knows for sure.
There is a big difference between hitting stuff with a rock and building
pyramids. Egypt’s pyramids were erected some four thousand years ago,
and the largest one consists of about 2.3 million stone blocks. Each of those
blocks weighs about 2.5 tons, and they are so square that there is no more
than a 0.1 per cent difference in the lengths of the opposite sides. It wasn’t
primarily muscle power that moved them into position, it was engineering:
it was the brain. A couple of thousand years later, Eratosthenes calculated
the earth’s circumference so precisely that his conclusion deviates by only 2
per cent from the figure we use today; he did it by measuring the shadows
the sun cast in Syene (modern-day Aswan) and Alexandria. Another couple
of thousand years later, we are sending robots to Mars.
From the treetops to prime-time TV
It’s not just the size of the human brain that’s important, but also which
parts of it account for that size. As we have seen, humans are more
intelligent than other animals because of both our large brain size relative to
our bodies and our unusually large cerebral cortex. On average, of the 86
billion neurons in the human brain, 16 billion are in the cerebral cortex. No
other species has more neurons in its cerebral cortex than humans. It is the
seat of our thoughts, language, personality and problem-solving ability. In
short, it is what makes people people.
We outshine the other animals because of our cerebral cortex, even as we
sit on our sofas watching TV. A satirical news anchor might report a story
with a serious face and then introduce footage of the exact opposite of what
he has just said. This causes us to start laughing, because our brains
understand parody. Our highly developed cerebral cortex allows us not only
to read the news anchor’s emotions, but to interpret the hidden meaning
behind what we’re hearing and understand that something that was
seemingly stated in all seriousness was actually sarcasm. Do you feel very
superior as you sit there on your sofa, deciphering all of this in a matter of
milliseconds? Well, you should, because only a creature with an exceptional
brain can develop humour and language.
Other animals communicate too, of course, but their exchanges are
limited to warnings about danger, along with expressions of pleasure,
hunger and the desire for a mate. Because humans can read, write and talk,
we have few limitations as to what we can communicate. We can use these
sophisticated tools to write plays or compose operatic arias … or to
understand someone else’s joke.

Not stronger but smarter

Everything has to do with sex, at least in evolutionary terms. Early humans
developed their complex brains because this gave them an advantage in
spreading their genes. Those who couldn’t solve problems quickly or failed
to learn from their mistakes didn’t survive long enough to procreate.
Nowadays, our brains help us to handle difficult situations and allow us to
make friends, not enemies. They make it possible for us to save money over
time, so that we can turn our attention to more ambitious goals. If you’re
clever and play your cards right, you can find a good partner, a rewarding
job and supportive friends. In general, bright brains are more attractive than
dull brains. Therefore, the net effect of our evolutionary journey has been
the development of a species that is not stronger or faster, but smarter.
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 CHAPTER 2

HUNTING FOR THE PERSONALITY

Cogito ergo sum. The French philosopher René Descartes’s familiar

statement is usually translated as: ‘I think, therefore I am.’ But who are
you? What makes you you? Personality is a combination of how you see
yourself and how others see you. You aren’t just what you think and feel,
but also what you do and how you behave. But is this ‘self’ constant?
Philosophers aren’t the only ones trying to find the answers to these
questions any more. Brain researchers are searching for them, too. As with
everything else in medicine, the question of nature versus nurture crops up
here. And, as ever, we can say that both are crucial. Anyone with a sibling
knows that two people who are raised in an identical environment do not
share the same personality. Siblings who grow up together can develop
completely different temperaments, values and attitudes. But the
environment plays an important role, too. How a child is raised and how
their role models behave both contribute to changes in that child’s brain.
Children see, hear and learn. Unfortunately, those who grow up in violent
surroundings are likely to become violent themselves. Those with religious
parents and friends are likely to become religious themselves. And those
who are raised in a home filled with empathy and respect have a high
chance of becoming empathetic themselves. However, these developments
generally do not continue after childhood – most people’s personalities are
set by the time they become adults.

The seat of the soul

Descartes did more than point out that we are because we think. He was
also convinced that the body and the soul are separate entities, with the
latter non-physical. He argued that all of the sensory information we receive
about the world is collected by the pineal gland – named because of its
resemblance to a pine cone (see Fig. 3) – and then forwarded to the
intangible soul.
But what is the soul? If it is ‘I’ – the sum total of what we think, feel,
believe and do – then that isn’t too far from what we now call the
personality.
In 1848, two hundred years after Descartes proposed his theory, the
railway worker Phineas Gage’s tragic fate helped us say with certainty that
the seat of the human soul is indeed in the brain. However, it is not in the
pineal gland. In a freak work accident, an explosion forced an eleven-inch
iron rod through Gage’s left cheek, behind his left eye, through his left
frontal lobe, and out of the top of his skull. The entrance and exit wounds
were treated within an hour, and six months later Gage seemed to have
made a remarkable physical recovery, save for loss of vision and drooping
of the eyelid in his left eye.
Yet the accident had altered his personality completely. The iron rod had
destroyed the front section of his frontal lobe, with the result that he was no
longer able to keep appointments or control his temper. Unsurprisingly, he
was also unable to hold down a job. He died twelve years after the accident,
steeped in alcohol, alone and abandoned by society.
Figure 3: The right half of the brain, seen from the middle. The pineal gland – or epiphysis
cerebri – is on the midline, towards the rear.

Gage’s story has become a classic case study for brain researchers
because this was the first time in history that a link was established between
a change in personality and a traumatic brain injury. Notwithstanding the
prevailing view in the nineteenth century that the human personality was
both unassailable and intangible, the consequences of a serious injury to the
frontal lobe were suddenly undeniable. It was apparent that Descartes
hadn’t been right about everything. The self was physical.
Many other philosophers, theologians and scientists throughout history
have claimed to know the location of the seat of the soul. For instance, as
far back as the second century ad, the Greek physician Galen argued that
the soul was contained in the liquid that surrounds the brain – the
cerebrospinal fluid. It’s a good sign that we can laugh at such suggestions
now. Science has progressed and our knowledge is greater than it has ever
been. For example, while it can no longer be called the seat of the soul, we
know that the pineal gland has an important role to play because it produces
the hormone that regulates our circadian rhythm.

A place for everything

The cerebral cortex is divided into lobes according to where the various
parts are located within the cranium (see Fig. 4). Although many
characteristics are linked to one specific area (or one lobe) of the brain, the
various lobes do not operate in isolation. All of the brain’s neurons have to
be part of a network in order to function correctly. So, even characteristics
that are considered to be located in particular centres depend on cooperation
between groups of neurons in other parts of the brain.
The parietal lobe sits inside the parietal bone in the crown of the head
and enables us to feel someone stroking our cheek or tears running down
our face when we cry. The temporal lobe is inside the temple; it is important
for memory, smell and hearing. The occipital lobe is crucial to our ability to
see. The frontal lobe helps all mammals, including humans, to control their
movements.
Every human has two speech areas in their dominant brain hemisphere.
The left hemisphere is dominant in all right-handed people, but the
language areas are located there among 70 per cent of left-handers, too. The
language area that enables us to generate language is located in the frontal
lobe, while the one that allows us to understand language is located between
the temporal and parietal lobes. If the latter language area is damaged, you
may well talk incessantly but neither you nor those listening will be able to
understand what you are saying because your brain will just invent words
that don’t exist. And you won’t understand what other people are saying,
either. On the other hand, if the language area in your frontal lobe is
damaged, you will understand everything but will be unable to find the
words to respond.
Figure 4: The lobes of the human brain shown from the left side and above. The second
image shows that we have two of everything – for instance, a right frontal lobe and a left
frontal lobe.

Other vital functions are also located in the frontal lobe, and specifically
in the prefrontal cortex. This is the most recent addition to the human brain,
and not just in an evolutionary sense; it is also the last part to develop as we
grow up.
Altogether, the various regions of the cerebral cortex give us the ability
to think analytically, to understand the consequences of our actions and to
plan for the future. They also allow us to become mathematicians, poets and
composers.

The frontal lobe

Damage to the frontal lobe results in the loss of many personality traits,
which makes everyone who suffers such an injury similar to each other. But
what does a healthy frontal lobe actually do for you? First, it allows you to
plan for the future. Losing this ability can have devastating consequences,
as it did for Phineas Gage. Why would anyone go to the trouble of arriving
at work on time if he wasn’t worried about losing his job tomorrow? So,
your frontal lobe helps you carry out plans, but it also constrains you. In
other words, without a functioning frontal lobe, you lose self-control and
will probably end up doing something you regret. Or at least would have
regretted, because damage to the frontal lobe also has a serious impact on
self-awareness. Gage became unemotional, indifferent and apathetic
because he no longer had any interest in or understanding of other people,
so he hurt and injured those around him.
When brain researchers want to test a person to see if they have lost the
ability to understand that the rules of a game have changed, many of them
will pull out a deck of cards. Based on the tester’s responses, the subject is
encouraged to sort the cards in a particular way. Eventually, they work out
that the black and red cards should go in separate piles. After a while,
though, the tester no longer wants spades to be placed on top of clubs. It’s
normal for the subject to be confused at this point, but then they will figure
out that the rules of the game have changed and they will start sorting the
cards by suit. By contrast, someone with frontal lobe damage will be unable
to accept that the rules have changed; instead, they will continue to group
clubs with spades over and over again.

The director behind your forehead

The frontal lobe does more than organise personality traits, however.
Without it, we wouldn’t be able to wiggle a finger because all human
movement is governed by the rear of the frontal lobe. Meanwhile, the
foremost part of the lobe – the prefrontal cortex – controls our morality and
humour. It helps us evaluate the possible consequences of every potential
action, which allows us to align our behaviour with generally accepted
norms and guidelines. It also contains the working memory, which helps us
hold on to sensory data while we evaluate it and link it to ongoing processes
and previously stored information.
So the prefrontal cortex is like a director controlling the brain. It is a
command centre that collates all of the information relating to one’s ‘self’
into an overall picture. It receives nerve signals from other parts of the
cerebral cortex as well as from deep parts of the reptile brain. It also has a
supervisory role by linking complex functions like memory, intellect and
emotions. This provides the foundation for personality, conscience and
other brain functions that are unique to Homo sapiens and distinguish us
from other animals.

Personality in every corner of the brain

Although the frontal lobes are of paramount importance, a complex
function like personality requires extensive cooperation between all of the
brain’s regions. Most people respond to the question ‘Who are you?’ by
stating their name, age, where they live and their occupation. Your parietal
lobes are in charge of this sort of factual information (see Fig. 5). They also
make it possible for you to know that the hands which are holding this book
are yours. So, if you had a stroke that affected one of your parietal lobes,
you might look at your arm and think that it belonged to someone else! In
other words, the parietal lobe helps you recognise yourself – and not just
your physical self, but also how you think and view your inner self.
The centre for emotions and memory is located in the temporal lobe. If
you pulled this lobe aside, you would see a region called the insula (see Fig.
5). While the parietal lobe helps you understand that parts of your body –
such as your arms and legs – belong to you, the insula enables you to
appreciate that your memories are your own and allows you to recognise
yourself in photographs. You also use this area of the cortex when searching
for words to characterise yourself.
Scientists used to think that the cerebellum (part of the reptile brain, as
we saw in Chapter 1) only coordinated movement, but recent research
suggests that it also plays an important role in regulating certain personality
traits. For instance, without a functioning cerebellum, you would always do
and say the first thing that popped into your head. You would have no safety
catch to prevent you from putting your foot in your mouth – mirroring the
problems that arise with a frontal lobe injury. You would also become
emotionally unstable as your mood fluctuated between joy, grief and
aggression without warning.
Figure 5: The left half of the brain, seen from the side, with the various lobes labelled. Parts
of the brain have been omitted to reveal the insula – the area of cortex behind the temporal
lobe.

Personality is also related to our attitudes and choices. Researchers have

found that we make a decision almost a full second before we are aware of
reaching that decision. This doesn’t mean that someone else makes the
decision for you; it is simply that your consciousness is not involved at the
start of the process. We like to think that we consciously choose to lift an
arm and then lift it, but in reality the movement is planned before we know
that the decision has been made.
Most of the studies on conscious choice have been quite simplistic. For
instance, a research subject might be told to push a button with either her
left or right hand while she watches a clock. The subject is supposed to
notice where the second hand is at the precise moment when she makes the
decision to push the button, but before she starts moving her arm. If
electrodes have been applied to the subject’s head, it is possible to watch
her brain function and predict which hand she will choose before she
believes she has made the decision.
As yet, no studies have attempted to explore more complicated choices,
such as opting for a particular career or life partner. However, even if it
turns out that some aspects of these choices are made before you become
aware of them, the final decision is still yours. You are your brain.

Split brain, split personality?

What are the consequences of the fact that the human personality isn’t one
thing located in one place? As we saw above, almost all of our brain’s lobes
make some sort of contribution to the various traits that comprise the
personality, and they are in constant communication with one another. The
information that passes between the right and left hemispheres travels
through the corpus callosum – a several-hundred-million-lane, white-matter
superhighway that sits directly on the midline (see Fig. 6).
When treating a patient with severe epilepsy, doctors may reluctantly
choose to cut the corpus callosum in order to prevent the condition from
afflicting both hemispheres. After this operation, some patients are left
feeling that they have two brains that think differently from each other. For
instance, one half may want to remove the patient’s trousers, while the other
half will want to keep them on. The end result is that one arm will try to
pull the trousers up while the other tries to pull them down. And it’s not just
movement that’s affected: each hemisphere has its own thoughts, feelings,
experiences and memories. In short, one person has two different minds.

Figure 6: The brain on the right has been cut open to reveal the corpus callosum – the
communication route between the right and left hemispheres.

The question is: does a person with a split brain have a genuinely split
personality? Actually, decades of research suggest that, while people with
split brains often have two distinct personalities, these are at least quite
similar to each other. Maybe that’s not so strange, given that surgeons
usually don’t perform the operation until the patient is an adult.
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
The fancy, scientific term ‘dissociation’ describes something that is
completely different from a split brain. You’ve probably experienced a mild
form of this yourself: you don’t hear what someone is saying because
you’re focusing on something else. Hopefully, you haven’t experienced the
more severe form. This involves two (or more) distinct consciousnesses that
are never present at the same time – a number of personalities with their
own preferences and behavioural patterns in a single body. Each personality
has its own memory and cannot remember anything that happens to the
other personalities. In both popular literature and scientific studies, the
personalities tend to be at least different from each other and often polar
opposites.
In many ways, then, the story of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is a realistic
depiction of a split personality: Jekyll is a pleasant, caring and popular
doctor, while Hyde is the complete opposite. However, in Robert Louis
Stevenson’s novella, the split personality occurs as a result of one of
Jekyll’s own experiments, which is obviously not the case for real-life
patients with dissociative identity disorder.

Multitasking
We live in a society that’s obsessed with efficiency. It’s not enough to
complete one task, then move on to the next. We are placed in open-plan
offices where we are expected to respond to emails, answer the phone and
write a report all at the same time. Multitasking is the modern way.
Multitasking is the future. Or is it?
In reality, no one can do two things simultaneously, because the brain is
able to focus on only one task at a time. When you think you’re reading a
report while also ordering a takeaway, your brain is actually switching back
and forth at great speed between reading and barking your order down the
phone. This is an impressive feat and you don’t even notice that your brain
is doing it. But the end result is that it takes longer to complete the two
tasks than if you’d ordered the food and then read the report. Thus, if you
want to be truly efficient, you should learn to prioritise, not try to multitask.
Indeed, if you try to do something while still working on something else,
you run the risk of temporary brain paralysis, because the prefrontal cortex
can’t just spontaneously shift its focus – there’s always a pause as you
switch between one and the other. This is especially true if the two tasks are
similar, because they will compete for the same neural networks. For
instance, trying to listen to the news on the radio and read a book at the
same time requires activity in overlapping regions of the brain, which
makes it much harder to do than listening to an audio guide in a gallery
while looking at the exhibits.
Remember, though, trying to do two tasks at once always has an impact
on the amount of attention we are able to devote to each of them, even if
they are very different. It has been estimated that a driver who is talking on
their mobile phone drives as inattentively as someone with a blood alcohol
content of 0.08 per cent – the drink-drive limit in the UK. And that applies
whether they’re using a hands-free device or not.
So, increase your efficiency by focusing on one thing at a time. Finish
reading your emails, then pick up the phone to make that important call.

You can change yourself … but only a little

Synapses (the connections between the neurons), membrane potential
(essentially the difference in voltage between the inside and outside of a
cell) and neurotransmitters (chemical messengers) all contribute to the
human personality. Our thoughts, feelings and volition arise from the
chemical and physical processes that take place within, among and between
them. So we are biology, but we are not slaves to it. The brain can be
influenced, attitudes can be changed, bad habits can be broken and temper
can be controlled. If one part of your brain sends a signal to the language
centre that the kettle you have just touched is so hot that you should blurt
out some choice words, your frontal lobe can step in to stop you swearing in
front of your children. Or, if you decide to rewrite an angry email from
scratch rather than send it to your boss and to hell with the consequences,
you can thank the part of the cortex that sits just behind your forehead.
If you have a spouse who believes that dirty clothes should be left in the
middle of the bedroom floor rather than put in the laundry basket (as I do!),
remember that everyone’s brain is plastic, so habits can be altered
throughout life. However, if you hope to encourage radical change in your
partner, it might be time to start looking for someone else. The brain we
have at birth and our upbringing play such fundamental roles in defining the
human personality that it remains surprisingly constant, unless the brain is
physically damaged in some way. A few traits may be modified, but in
general you shouldn’t expect to achieve much more than that.

Herd-wired brains
People are pack animals. We all have brains that allow us to cooperate and
obey orders. This is one reason why we are able to live in relatively
peaceful societies. But what would happen if we found ourselves in an
environment where the norms were destructive and the leader was even
worse? What would we do if the traits that have helped us get along with
each other for thousands of years were suddenly exploited and used to our
own detriment?
A young boy grew up in the 1930s in a poor household in Indiana with a
hard-working mother and an alcoholic father. The neighbourhood kids kept
their distance as he seemed to be obsessed with religion and death: he
stabbed a cat to death in the street just because he wanted to perform a
funeral service. Unsurprisingly, the boy started to feel increasingly excluded
and ostracised. During his teenage years, even though he was white, he
identified with the similarly excluded African-American community. In his
early twenties, he started his own religious community, which he called the
Peoples Temple. His name was Jim Jones.
The new church was open to all, regardless of race or background, and
the poor, isolated boy became a charismatic religious leader to several
thousand devotees. Over time, the congregation began to function
increasingly like a cult, with the members living, sleeping and working on
site and shunning all contact with outsiders. Jones became an autocrat who
ordered marriages between members of the group and cracked down hard
on any criticism. As the US authorities grew increasingly concerned about
the church’s activities, he decided to move the whole congregation to a
newly constructed compound in Guyana that he named Jonestown. Just
over a year later, on 18 November 1978, he instructed all 909 cult members
to commit suicide. Parents forced their children to drink poison before
taking it themselves. It was the largest mass suicide in history.
Why didn’t the members of the congregation rebel against their
obviously deranged leader? What had happened to the attitudes and values
that had once defined their personalities as individuals? A couple of
decades earlier, at the conclusion of the Korean War, the term
‘brainwashed’ was coined to describe US prisoners of war who had become
ardent supporters of communism during their captivity. Unfortunately, since
then, there has been relatively little research into this phenomenon.
However, a number of studies have explored group thinking.
Time and again, this research has shown that ordinary, decent people can
be persuaded to act in ways that they would never normally countenance.
For instance, an American history teacher was finding it hard to explain
how Hitler managed to gain the support of almost the whole German
population in the 1930s, so he decided to demonstrate the process in action.
He placed a small number of students in a group he called the ‘Third Wave’
that was based on two of the founding principles of the Nazi Party: strict
discipline and strong community. Over the course of the next five days, the
group recruited ever more members and started to spiral out of control, so
the teacher decided to end the experiment. He summoned all of the
members – who already numbered in the hundreds – to what was billed as a
presentation by their supreme leader. When the students arrived, the teacher
showed them a picture of Hitler. Many of the members started to cry when
they realised the sort of organisation they had been so eager to join.
When I saw the movie The Third Wave, which is based on this
experiment, I was sure I would have been one of the few to resist the
pressure to join the group. I was convinced that my brain would have had
the strength to stand alone. But would I really have been as resolute as I’d
like to think?
In another experiment, US social psychology researcher Stanley Milgram
found that 65 per cent of normal, upstanding people were willing to hurt a
fellow human being if ordered to do so by an authority figure. In this first
part of the study, the subjects were assured that the person issuing the order
bore full responsibility for the consequences of their actions, and they did
not have to witness those consequences as they were tested in a separate
room from the ‘victim’. The figure rose to 90 per cent if the subjects did not
have to inflict any pain themselves, but rather instructed someone else to do
the dirty work for them. In the second part of the study, the subject was
placed in the same room as a person who was pleading for mercy and
supposedly receiving a painful electric shock every time a button was
pressed (actually an actor who felt no pain at all). Rather more of the
subjects refused to push the button in this instance.
 Milgram’s study revealed no gender differences. All of the subjects,
including those who always obeyed, emphasised that they disliked the
situation in which they had been placed. Nevertheless, although their brains
produced stress hormones that caused them to sweat and stutter, the
majority still did whatever they were instructed to do.
Many people believe that NASA’s two most serious accidents – the
Challenger and Columbia space shuttle tragedies – could have been
avoided if someone had dared to stand up to the group. In both cases,
questions had been raised about possible flaws in the design of the space
shuttle, but the large majority’s strong desire to avoid further delays caused
those with serious doubts to remain silent.
Clearly, then, suppressing prior knowledge, following the rules and
meeting the group’s expectations is not always the best course of action.
Although the urge to comply – which originates in the frontal lobes – is
strong, it can be resisted, especially if you recognise the warning signs.
Brain researcher Irving Janis advocates extra vigilance if you are working
in a close-knit group that means a lot to you. In such situations, you might
be particularly disinclined to offer opinions and information that could
generate conflict with the other members of the group, and this is
exacerbated if you are working under pressure, insulated from external
opinions and have a strong leader. Nevertheless, warning lights should flash
if people who express doubts about a project are instructed not to rock the
boat. You should fight against this as self-censorship is usually unhealthy. If
you and other group members share similar concerns but don’t protest for
fear of exclusion, the end result will be an illusion of unanimity in which
possibly beneficial counterarguments are never heard.
Bear this in mind the next time you wonder if you should bite your
tongue or blurt out your opinions. Did I say ‘in mind’? Of course, I mean in
your frontal lobes.

Can your personality get sick?

Abnormal personality traits do not necessarily indicate that the people who
have them are sick. They might simply be that way. Outside the broad
spectrum of what is considered ‘normal’ lie the extremes of what we term
‘personality disorders’. If you are wicked enough, egocentric enough,
impulsive enough, dramatic enough or compulsive enough, then you are
said to have a personality disorder. The entire nation of Norway became
familiar with this concept during the trial of the terrorist and mass murderer
Anders Behring Breivik. According to the first report on his mental health,
he suffered from a psychiatric disorder and thus could not be held legally
accountable for his actions. However, a second report stated that he suffered
from personality disorders and therefore could stand trial.
A personality disorder is not a disease in the strict definition of the term;
rather, it causes pronounced deviant personality traits that often create
serious problems for the sufferer and those around them. Since the
personality is shaped by the environment and fully realised only during
adulthood, personality disorders are rarely diagnosed in children.
In a few cases, psychologists and psychiatrists have tried to exploit the
brain’s malleability in order to correct deviant personality traits. However,
this requires a willingness to change on the part of the patient.
Unfortunately, if you have one of the more common disorders – narcissistic
personality disorder, which manifests as extreme self-absorption – you will
be unable to acknowledge that you have any sort of problem, let alone that
you would benefit from treatment. An even more well-known disorder used
to be called psychopathy and is now termed antisocial personality disorder.
The second report about Breivik’s mental health claimed that he suffered
from both of these disorders, which are characterised by a lack of empathy.

The psychological is physical

Psychologists and psychiatrists work with the psyche, while neurologists
and neurosurgeons work with organic brain diseases – in other words, the
physical. But why is the distinction so sharp when we know that the
psychological is also physical and all of these professionals work with the
brain?
The human personality is not supernatural; rather, it is an amalgamation
of an individual’s unique heredity and unique experiences, which have led
to unique connections among the neurons in that individual’s brain.
Diseases that affect our feelings or alter our personality traits are generally
known as mental illnesses. This maintains the sharp division Descartes
drew between the physical and the mental. On the other hand, we are
finding ever more physical causes for so-called mental illnesses. For
instance, about half of the patients with frontal lobe dementia develop
antisocial behaviour which is reminiscent of illnesses we have traditionally
categorised as mental. They might start shoplifting or drink-driving and
seem to develop a total disregard for the normal rules of society. As the
disease progresses, the loss of neurons in their frontal and temporal lobes
can be so pronounced that it eventually becomes visible to the naked eye.
This obvious atrophying of the brain tissue makes it easy for us to
understand the biological processes that are taking place. Similarly, we
know that a tumour in the occipital lobe can cause blindness, while one in
the frontal lobe can have a profound effect on the patient’s personality.
Unfortunately, brain researchers have made far less progress in their
studies of classic mental illnesses, such as depression, anxiety and
schizophrenia. One reason for this is that the diagnoses for all of these
illnesses are based on symptoms alone. So, if a patient feels dejected for a
long period of time, their doctor may well diagnose ‘depression’ and
prescribe antidepressants. However, that catch-all term doesn’t tell the full
story. The patient’s sense of dejection and despair is probably due to twenty,
thirty or even thousands of disorders in their brain’s chemistry.
The same is true for schizophrenia. Researchers are currently searching
for what distinguishes people who hallucinate from those who don’t, but
they are hampered by the fact that the former group is far from uniform.
Some hallucinators seem to have been born with a genetic disposition to the
condition, whereas others apparently developed disorders in their brain
chemistry due to drug abuse. Given such wide discrepancies in the study
group, one can’t expect a simple answer to the question: why does someone
develop schizophrenia? Therefore, this field of study would benefit from
more cooperation among psychologists, neurologists and brain researchers,
rather than each profession championing their own explanatory model while
denigrating the others.
Many mistakes have been made in our attempts to treat the most serious
mental illnesses. The widespread use of lobotomisation in the 1940s and
1950s is one of the worst examples. ‘Lobotomy’ is used as an umbrella
term to describe any one of a number of operations that aim to destroy the
connections between the nerve cells in the prefrontal cortex. Aggressive
patients would generally calm down dramatically after undergoing the
procedure, but their personality changed in other ways, too. Typically, they
would be left with a blunted emotional life and little in the way of self-
control, spontaneity and/or self-knowledge. The fact that the Portuguese
neurologist who originated the procedure won 1949’s Nobel Prize in
medicine for ‘curing’ hallucinating patients reveals how little we knew
about the human mind less than seventy years ago.
Indeed, the prefrontal cortex remained an enigma until the late twentieth
century, partly because it was considered relatively insignificant. It is
unfortunate that the scientific community did not identify the frontal lobe as
the seat of the personality immediately after Phineas Gage’s accident in
1848. Medical history might have looked very different if it had, and we
may have been much closer to solving the mystery of so-called mental
illness.

Do animals have personalities?

We are much more sophisticated than any other animal. Nevertheless, all
mammals have frontal lobes and thus certain personality traits. In humans,
the frontal lobe accounts for 30 per cent of the total volume of the brain. It
gives us our humour, self-image, morality and judgement, among many
other attributes. In dogs, the frontal lobe accounts for only 5–6 per cent of
the total volume, but that’s sufficient for them to maintain focused attention.
Our memory allows us to keep track of the past and predict the future,
which gives us the sense of being the same person over the course of a
lifetime. We are constantly aware of ourselves. In the brainstem, the
reticular activating system is a group of neurons that controls our
attentiveness. It keeps us awake and activates our frontal lobes, so it is a
prerequisite for human consciousness. The actual content of that
consciousness, on the other hand, is controlled by the frontal lobes
themselves. In other animals, memory and consciousness are not so closely
linked. When it comes to an awareness of time, for example, they are
entirely focused on the here and now. As far as we know, we are the only
creatures who have a clear understanding of our own history.
Our sense of self grew out of the complex social lives of our ancestors.
They formed small groups and shared whatever food they found, which
demanded considerable self-control and cooperation. This was only
possible due to their consciousness of the self. Some animals have
developed something similar: chimpanzees, for example, are able to
recognise themselves in a mirror. But their sense of self is much less
developed than our own.
Personality tests
Many companies now use personality tests when assembling project teams
with the aim of increasing cooperation within the group. The most
commonly used is called the ‘Big Five’. This five-factor model grades the
candidates’ answers and rates them on a scale for five different traits:

• energy and enjoyment of the company of others (extraversion);

• quality of social contact (agreeableness);
• self-discipline and need for order (conscientiousness);
• vulnerability and temperament (neuroticism); and
• values, reflection and information handling (openness).

Where each candidate falls on the scales for these factors – and various
combinations of them – supposedly says something about their personality.
This test is widely used in both scientific research and the professional
world, and the internet has any number of short versions that you might
want to try. However, the results should always be interpreted with caution.
Our behaviour does not follow one consistent pattern in every situation.
People who have taken tests like the Big Five at work know that the results
would have been completely different had they been asked about a family
situation instead. If someone makes what may be interpreted as a sarcastic
comment, should you ignore it, laugh it off or snap back? Your brain
bombards you with all of these alternatives and more. Your frontal lobe will
help you choose the best option, but its decision always depends on your
current situation. For instance, you might not want to take the leadership
role in some situations, yet you’ll feel in total command in others.
The human personality is complex because the human brain is complex.
We all have personality traits we can strengthen or suppress as required.
Becoming more familiar with how your brain forms your personality will
enhance your ability to control your negative impulses and help you
understand how you relate to those around you. In the meantime,
researchers around the world are working on increasing our knowledge of
this enigmatic field.
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 CHAPTER 3

MEMORY AND LEARNING

Learning and memory are the foundation stones of culture. Without

learning, there would be no development. Without memory, we wouldn’t
recognise our family and friends.
People who have suffered damage to various parts of the brain, and
consequent memory loss, have taught us much of what we know about
human memory. The most famous patient, Henry Molaison – better known
simply as H. M. – became a bona fide celebrity in the field of neuroscience.
In 1933, at the age of seven, he suffered a head injury as a result of a
bicycle accident, which led to epilepsy. This condition causes the sufferer to
experience debilitating episodes because their neural activity is disrupted
either in a specific lobe or throughout the whole brain. H. M.’s case was
particularly severe: he would frequently lose consciousness and fall to the
floor without warning prior to experiencing prolonged convulsions.
Moreover, after every episode, he would suffer extreme tiredness and
lethargy. Unsurprisingly, it was not long before he was unable to keep up in
school.
Twenty years after the accident, in a desperate search for some sort of
solution, H. M.’s family contacted one of the pre-eminent neurosurgeons of
the day, who suggested that the trigger for H. M.’s unpredictable electrical
impulses was probably located somewhere within his temporal lobes.
Hence, with the family’s permission, the surgeon removed sections from
these lobes, and H. M.’s epilepsy improved significantly. However, he lost
the ability to form new memories and was unable to use his memory to
travel mentally through time and space. In other words, he was trapped in
the here and now. He would greet everyone he met politely, and was more
than happy to walk and talk with them. Yet, if the same person returned an
hour later, H. M. would invariably reintroduce himself as he had no
recollection of their previous meeting. This meant he was unusually patient
with the researchers who subjected him to numerous tests over the course of
the next fifty years because he undertook each test as if for the first time.

Short-term memory
In the Pixar film Finding Nemo, the title character’s father joins up with
Dory, a scatterbrained blue reef fish, to search for his son. Like H. M., Dory
has trouble storing new memories. However, she does have some power of
recollection because she remembers where she is when she reads the word
‘Sydney’ on a drain. She also constantly calls Nemo by similar-sounding
names. H. M. wouldn’t have been able to do that as he had absolutely no
memory of any of the people he had met and should have been able to
name. Yet both Dory and H. M. were able to form and express rational,
coherent thoughts.
Before researchers began to study H. M., they thought that memory was
a single entity. However, their observations indicated that a person can lose
one part of the memory yet still retain another. Using this as their starting
point, they gradually began to divide memory into short-term and long-
term. H. M.’s short-term memory was left largely unaffected by the
operation.
Many people use the term ‘working memory’ as a synonym for all short-
term memory. Others think of it specifically as those parts of short-term
memory that demand all of our focus, while the other parts are more passive
and relate only to memory storage, which does not demand any conscious
attention. Yet the difference between these two parts is so blurred that I and
many others prefer to treat them as a whole.
The difference between short-term memory and long-term memory is not
crystal clear either, but at least in this case a distinct anatomical difference
was apparent after parts of H. M.’s temporal lobes were surgically removed.
Following the operation, he could still remember random words and
numbers for several minutes, as long as he wasn’t distracted. Therefore, the
researchers were able to say conclusively that short-term memory is not
located in the temporal lobes. (Later research would reveal that it is actually
located in the frontal lobe.) It’s important for reasoning, making plans and
formulating alternative solutions to problems, but H. M. showed that it’s
difficult to function properly with nothing but short-term memory.
Have you ever sat talking with a friend, only to find yourself distracted
by a more interesting conversation on the neighbouring table? Nevertheless,
you keep nodding and smiling until you hear your friend’s intonation rise at
the end of a sentence, at which point you suddenly realise that you have no
idea what they have just asked you. Your working memory is limited. In
order to remember something, first we have to process the information our
senses provide by asking a series of questions. What’s important to me?
What’s missing? What would I like to know? Do I agree with the
assumptions? Then, in order to recall that information later, we have to
memorise it. Even though you heard the words as your friend spoke them,
you weren’t fully focused on what they were saying, so you neither
processed nor memorised the sensory information you received. As your
friend waits for an answer, your only option is to admit that you got
distracted and ask them to repeat the question.
When my family gets together in the mountains during the Easter
holidays, we play a game that involves memorising a number of objects or
words in the space of a minute. We are a motley group of people between
the ages of twenty and sixty from different backgrounds and with various
levels of education. Yet there is strikingly little variation when it comes to
remembering those objects and words in a given amount of time. Usually,
most of us manage seven – the number of heavens in Allah’s universe and
the number of colours in a rainbow, but also, it turns out, the number things
that an average human is able to process and remember at one time.

Long-term memory
Some people can remember much longer lists of words, however. By using
brain scans, we can observe the activity in the innermost parts of these
people’s temporal lobes. When asked to memorise a long list of words, it
appears that the words they heard first have already been stored in their
long-term memory while more recent words are still in their working
memory. The transition between the two seems to be quite fluid.
H. M. played another important role in increasing our understanding of
human memory. In the early 1960s, he was asked to draw a star while
looking at a mirror image of one, but without being able to see the page on
which he was drawing. He did the best he could, but the results were
terrible. The next day, the researchers asked him to try again. Predictably,
H. M. said that he’d never done anything like this before, so the scientists
repeated the same detailed instructions. Again, H. M. tried his best but
struggled. Yet the end result was better, and his drawings continued to
improve over subsequent days. So, even though H. M. couldn’t remember
performing the task, and had to be given the same instructions every day, it
was as if his hand did remember.
In light of this experiment, long-term memory was divided into data
memory and motor memory. When you try to ride a bike or swim for the
first time, studying these skills or listening to someone explain the theory
behind them isn’t much use. The only thing that really helps is practice,
practice and more practice. And the information you accumulate from all
that practice is stored in your motor memory, otherwise known as implicit
memory.
Meanwhile, data memory – also known as declarative or explicit memory
– involves all of the factual information and experiences that you store
away as memories. For instance, when you study multiplication tables or
memorise a list of kings and queens, all of that information becomes part of
your data memory, along with everything you’ve experienced in your life.

The hippocampus and its pals

The specific part of H. M.’s brain that was surgically removed in order to
treat his epilepsy was the sausage-shaped structure known as the
hippocampus (see Fig. 7). Since the 1950s, we have known that memories
are spread right across the cerebral cortex, and this was confirmed by the
fact that H. M. could recall everything he had experienced until a couple of
years before the operation: that is, he retained all of the memories he’d
stored up to the age of twenty-five. Thereafter, however, he was unable to
store any new ones and went through the rest of his life believing that he
was still in his twenties. When he saw a picture of himself in later life, he
thought it was a photograph of his father, even though he knew his father
didn’t wear glasses. He was also surprised by his own reflection each
morning. All of this led the scientists who studied his case to reach the
conclusion that the hippocampus must play an important role in the memory
storage process.
 We now know that if you are to remember what you experience, read or
discuss, the hippocampus has to encode that information. Otherwise, it will
simply disappear. The hippocampus receives signals from the olfactory
(smell-related) cortex, the auditory (hearing-related) cortex, the visual
(sight-related) cortex and the somatosensory (touch-related) cortex, as well
as from the limbic system, where our emotions are generated. Once it has
received this wealth of data, it creates a memory – or, more precisely,
fragments of memory that can be amalgamated later.
The frontal lobe is the hippocampus’s best friend, its wingman, the pal
who tells it how to deal with the information it receives and what to forget.
That’s because the working memory in the frontal lobe processes all of the
sensory information before sending it to the hippocampus for storage.
Sometimes, though, the frontal lobe forgets what it should be doing and
instead starts to babble with the hippocampus about holiday plans, dreams
and all sorts of other things. When that happens, the hippocampus is unable
to fulfil its storage responsibilities. That’s when you have to take control:
for instance, you may have to read a chapter over and over again in order to
force the frontal lobe to send the hippocampus all of the information it
needs to create a new memory.
Figure 7: The right hemisphere of the brain, seen from the centre, with most of the left
hemisphere’s temporal lobe removed to reveal its hippocampus.

The cerebellum and the basal nuclei are other friends, although the
hippocampus doesn’t hang out with them very much (see Figs. 8 and 9).
They are also involved with memory, but specifically with motor memory,
rather than data memory. They work in unison to make us better pianists,
better artists or better football players – provided we put in the necessary
effort. So, if either one starts to malfunction, practice will no longer lead to
mastery. In short, while the frontal lobe and the hippocampus help us
remember what, the cerebellum and the basal nuclei help us remember how.
Remembering for the future
The memory’s primary function is to improve our chances of survival. It’s
the tool we use to change and adapt our behaviour, based on previous
experience. What should I do now? Where should I go? What can I expect
to happen? Our memory is not meant to recreate the past, but to help us
make the right choices in the future. When we picture future actions or plan
what we should do, we are able to form these scenarios in our mind because
of our memories. Of course, memory does not provide a perfect,
unchangeable image of the future; it can be constructed and reconstructed,
depending on our knowledge of our surroundings.
Figure 8: The brain’s right hemisphere, seen from the centre, with most of the left
hemisphere removed to reveal its basal nuclei – groups of nerve cells situated deep inside
each half of the brain.

Figure 9: The brain seen from above and to the left, with each side’s basal nuclei visible.

An important part of this process takes place in the hippocampus, where

expansive, interconnected scenes are assembled on the basis of what we
have previously experienced. Therefore, in addition to losing their ability to
store memories of the past, people who suffer damage to the hippocampus
are unable to picture the future. Like H. M., they become locked into the
here and now. They cannot travel mentally through time. A pair of healthy
hippocampi allow the rest of us to undertake that kind of time travel.

Learning
Learning involves the acquisition of knowledge, while memory is related to
storing it. In other words, without learning, you would have nothing to
remember. On the other hand, memory is essential for all learning because
you have to be able to store – and then retrieve – the information that you
learn.
Many areas of the brain contribute to learning. For instance, the
prefrontal cortex and the hypothalamus (our hormone centre) play
important roles through a complex system of reward and punishment. In
turn, sustained practice can have a profound – sometimes even a visible –
effect on the areas of the cerebral cortex that are responsible for movement,
as these develop in response to the challenges we set for ourselves. During
surgery, it’s important to have equally good use of both hands. I’m right-
handed, so one of my colleagues suggested that I should try brushing my
teeth with my left hand in order to train my brain to make better use of that
hand. It was sound advice. Studies have shown that the part of the cortex
that governs the left hand is larger in musicians who play the strings of their
instruments with that hand when compared to individuals in a control
group. And the difference is greatest in musicians who started playing at a
young age.

Clowns and drooling dogs

While the Russian physician Ivan Pavlov was studying dogs’ digestive
systems and specifically what their saliva contained at various stages of a
meal, he noticed that the dogs started drooling before he presented them
with any food. That is, they started salivating when they thought they were
about to be fed, even if they had nothing to eat. The mere sound of
approaching footsteps was enough to set them off. This discovery prompted
Pavlov to investigate the link between the stimulus and the physical
response. He found that he could teach the dogs to associate almost
anything with the prospect of receiving food. First, he made a specific
sound, then gave the dogs food. After a while, the dogs started drooling
whenever they heard the sound. This type of learning is called ‘classical
conditioning’.
When my younger sister was a child, she loved strawberry ice cream. All
of the other children would choose chocolate, but she always had to have
strawberry. One day, our grandparents allowed her to help herself to their
strawberry ice cream. Like most children, she didn’t know her own limits:
she ate far too much and ended up with a terrible stomach ache. Ever since,
she has associated the sight and taste of strawberry ice cream with sickness
and vomiting. Even thinking about it makes her nauseous. It’s another case
of classical conditioning.
Something similar happens when you see a picture of George Clooney
wearing an Omega watch and feel a sudden, powerful urge to buy that
particular brand. Classical conditioning is a form of subconscious learning.
My younger sister does not want what was once her favourite flavour of ice
cream to make her feel sick, and nobody intends to be swayed by
advertising. Yet it does and we are.
Operant conditioning is more conscious than classical conditioning.
Instead of a dog that unconsciously starts to drool at the sound of a bell,
think of one that is willing to sit, offer its paw or play dead in order to
increase the likelihood of receiving a treat. If you give the dog the treat, it
will probably perform the same trick again. On the other hand, if you scold
it, the chances are that it will try something else. That annoying beep in
your car when you forget to fasten your seat belt is a form of operant
conditioning, because you learn and then remember what you have to do to
make it stop. Therefore, operant conditioning requires conscious action.
Another form of learning is simpler than either classical or operant
conditioning. Known as habituation, it involves no more than getting used
to something. My first job was as a sales assistant in a clothes shop, and I
would sometimes lock up in the evening without remembering to turn off
the pounding music. I had become so used to hearing it throughout the day
that I no longer noticed it.
The most complex type of learning involves absorbing information from
others. You can’t master playing a piano, driving a car or playing football
solely through operant conditioning. The rules are too complicated. Your
first driving lessons involve sitting in the back seat and watching your
parents drive. Consequently, many years later, when you have your first
official lesson, you have at least some idea of what to do. You learn to play
football by watching games on TV, playing video games and having
kickabouts with your friends. You observe other people, then try to emulate
what they do.
The psychologist Albert Bandura demonstrated this process in a rather
unpleasant experiment. He placed a child alone in a room, where they were
shown a film of an adult beating up a clown doll. Later, when placed in a
room with the doll, the child would usually start to hit it. Moreover, the
likelihood of this response increased significantly if the film showed the
adult receiving some sort of reward for beating up the clown.

Focused learning
Some types of learning – such as habituation and classical conditioning –
never make their way into our conscious memory. We become accustomed
to certain situations and anticipate future events subconsciously. When
tackling more complex tasks, such as playing the piano or driving a car, we
rely on the information we have previously stored in our data and motor
memories. The data memory is the repository for information such as the
rules of the road and how to interpret the symbols on a sheet of music.
Then, through practice, we improve our skills, which are stored in the motor
memory.
As anyone who has attempted to learn a new skill will tell you, certain
pieces of advice and information sink in immediately, whereas others have
to be endlessly repeated. Why does this happen? First and foremost, it’s
important to concentrate and remain focused, which requires a healthy
thalamus (see Fig. 1) and fully functioning frontal lobes. However, some
tricks can aid concentration. For instance, students are more likely to
remember the details of a text that is written in an elaborate typeface rather
than a simple typeface because the former forces them to concentrate.
You are more likely to remember what you’ve read or experienced if
emotions such as fascination, joy or even anger are involved in the learning
process, because all of these emotions enhance our attentiveness. The stored
memories will then provide valuable information for the amygdala in the
future (see Fig. 1). Equally, however, very strong emotions can have a
detrimental effect on our ability to store important memories. Robbery
victims who have stared down the barrel of a gun in terror tend to
remember the weapon in great detail, but struggle to recall the clothes the
robber wore, his height or even the colour of his skin.
Everything we remember enters the brain via one or more of our senses.
All of the information is encoded in various areas of the cerebral cortex
before the hippocampus combines everything into a single experience. It is
also the hippocampus that links the new information to previously stored
information. Once it has completed these complex tasks, the new
experience is stored in the brain’s long-term memory. We know that our
long-term memories are stored in various parts of the cerebral cortex, but
more research is needed into precisely where each type of information is
stored.
The human memory is associative, meaning that it works better if we are
able to link new information to something we have previously experienced
or with which we are already familiar. If you can manage to link what you
want to remember to something that means a lot to you, it will sink in
properly. By contrast, if you try to remember something that you don’t fully
understand, you will probably forget it.
A well-known memory technique exploits this associative quality by
linking new information to previously stored memories. In your mind, you
imagine entering a house and then associate each new word you hear with a
specific room as you mentally walk through the building. Mnemonic
devices work in much the same way. You create a catchy rhyme or a funny
word based on the first letters of whatever you want to remember. In school,
we remembered how to spell the word ‘necessary’ by reciting, ‘Never eat
chips; eat salmon sandwiches and remain young’. Later, as a medical
student, I remembered where each heart valve was located by silently
repeating the phrase ‘all patients trust me’: A stood for aortic valve, P for
pulmonary valve, T for tricuspid valve and M for mitral valve. Eventually, I
became so familiar with the heart’s valves that I no longer needed the
mnemonic, but it certainly helped in the early stages of the learning process.
The more you repeat something, the better you will remember it, but this
process is not the same as building up your muscles by working out at the
gym. Although mnemonics are useful for remembering specific pieces of
information, they do not lead to a superior memory.
Storage
Each of our long-term memories is not stored neatly in a single mental
drawer that can be opened as and when we need to access it. The visual
information relating to a particular memory is stored in the visual cortex,
the aural information in the cortex for hearing, the emotions in the
amygdala and the information derived from touch in the somatosensory
cortex. Of course, we remember our own pain and try to avoid experiencing
it again, but this might be reinforced by the memory of a TV programme in
which someone trips over and involuntarily shouts, ‘Ouch!’ or the memory
of seeing a boy cringe as he witnesses his friend falling off his bike. It’s not
just the sensory information that we remember, but how we felt when we
saw, heard, smelled or touched it.

From dating to a permanent relationship

In laboratories all around the world, researchers are searching for an answer
to the question: how is information stored in the brain? In other words, what
happens when we press our mental ‘store’ button?
As mentioned in Chapter 1, each of us has around 86 billion neurons,
which is certainly a lot. On the other hand, very few parts of the brain have
the ability to make any more. For instance, when we first study algebra at
about the age of ten, the brain does not suddenly start producing ‘algebra
cells’ to store all of the new information we receive. Instead, we have to
repurpose our existing neurons, all of which are already full of earlier
memories.
Everything we think, learn and remember is sent as a series of electrical
and chemical signals via an interconnected neural network. Each electrical
signal is sent through the neuron cell body and into the nerve fibre, or axon.
At the tip of each axon, this signal is converted into a chemical signal that is
sent across the so-called giant synaptic cleft, which in reality is a not-so-
gigantic twenty nanometres across. So the nerve cells are not in direct
contact with one another: they are separated by a gap of 0.00002
millimetres. On the far side of this gap, the chemical signal arrives at the
next neuron in the network. The signal is transmitted through a synapse and
converted into another electrical signal, which then speeds towards the next
nerve cell in the chain.
 The more synapses you have, the easier it is to adapt to new challenges.
So how do you increase your number of synapses? Simple: learn something
new! And that doesn’t mean you have to take a course in Latin or study for
a degree in philosophy. Learning how to play table tennis or joining a salsa
class can be just as effective. As your number of synapses increases, your
neurons will be able to form ever more neural networks. However, a word
of warning: if you don’t practise what you’ve learned, the synapses you’ve
created will start to disappear. In other words, the brain constantly generates
and destroys synapses, although those that we use regularly become
permanent. Meanwhile, those that we use all the time are reinforced by a
mysterious substance called LTP.

Mr LTP
You know you’re a nerd when you feel star-struck upon meeting an eighty-
year-old professor. I was that nerd when I met Terje Lømo – the Norwegian
physician who discovered LTP.
Each neuron has between 10,000 and 15,000 points of contact – synapses
– with other neurons. However, these synapses are not all equally efficient.
LTP stands for long-term potentiation, meaning that the synapse becomes
more efficient as it is used over time. It develops when neurons send signals
to one another so often that their sensitivity gradually increases. It’s rather
like building a friendship: the neurons that communicate with each other
frequently across the synapses become more closely linked. Eventually, it’s
as if neuron number two is more attentive every time neuron number one
starts chatting: ‘Your signals are really faint, but I can hear them and I’ll
pass them on. But only because it’s you!’
Professor Lømo discovered LTP back in 1966, but it was a long time
before the rest of the scientific community understood the crucial role it
plays in learning. Our synapses learn, so the neural networks that we use
most often become increasingly proficient over time. You’ve probably
experienced this yourself. For instance, you may have noticed that your
movements are very awkward when you first try to master a new dance
move. However, if you continue to practise, it starts to get easier. That’s
partially due to your neurons increasing and utilising their LTP, which
allows them to communicate better with each other.
Figure 10: The large diagram shows an axon from one neuron contacting the axon from the
next neuron in a network. The place where the information is transmitted from one cell to
the next is called the synapse, and the gap between the two axons is called the synaptic
cleft. These are shown in the upper-right diagram. The information is transmitted when the
first neuron releases a chemical signal (neurotransmitter) that acts on the next neuron’s
receptor system.

White matter rules!

As we have seen, nerve tissue consists of white and grey matter, with the
synapses found in the latter. Information is not stored in the synapses but
rather in networks of neurons, each of which includes highways of white-
matter axons that allow electrical signals to pass from A to B. The axons are
insulated with myelin, which not only helps them transmit the signals more
efficiently but also gives the white matter its distinctive colour. Some
particularly important pathways are prioritised and given additional myelin,
which results in ultra-fast communication and reduces the risk of a message
getting lost along the way. In other words, the most important neural
networks not only have the most sensitive synapses because of their
increased LTP but also the best highways because of their extra myelin.
Both myelin and the synapses require nutrients and oxygen, which are
supplied by the brain’s blood vessels. For this reason, learning leads to the
formation of more blood vessels, which are needed to meet the neural
networks’ increased energy demands.
Although our knowledge of the formation of new synapses, thicker
myelin around the axons, new blood vessels and the role of LTP is
increasing all the time, we don’t yet fully understand the vital processes of
learning and memory. Nevertheless, these discoveries are helping us reach a
better understanding of how the human brain works.
Figure 11: Axons are insulated with myelin, which allows the electrical signals to move
faster.

The 10 per cent myth

The idea that we utilise only 10 per cent of our brain is a myth that has
proved difficult to refute, especially as Hollywood continues to perpetuate it
in countless movies. For example, in the 2014 film Lucy, Scarlett Johansson
plays a woman who has a new kind of drug implanted under her skin. As
the chemical starts to leak into her bloodstream, Lucy learns how to exploit
her brain’s full potential to dramatic effect.
From a neuroscience perspective, this is nonsense. Nine-tenths of the
human brain does not lie fallow in the absence of chemical stimulation. In
fact, we use every one of our neurons. If we didn’t, evolution would have
ensured that the brain never reached its current size, because its demand for
energy is so high. However, that’s not to say that there is no untapped
potential, because our neurons could form thousands more networks than
they do today. Moreover, as we have seen, the synapses become more
efficient as their LTP increases. In this way, the brain can organise and
reorganise itself in response to new experiences and new learning, storing
the information we accumulate through practice, training and education.

Unlimited storage capacity

The brain is not a locked hard drive from the moment you are born. Its 86
billion neurons are constantly changing, so you can always learn more and
improve your skills. Memory storage never definitively ends; rather, it’s an
ongoing process, with new experiences and memories continually merging
with older memories.
If you’re not concentrating, you will store very little. And if you’re tired
after long days of revision in the run-up to a big exam, you might feel as if
your head is full and that there simply isn’t room for anything else.
However, many researchers now believe that our mental storage capacity is
almost unlimited. If you forget something, it’s not because you’ve deleted it
from your hard drive; rather, you’re just having trouble retrieving it. Have
you ever tried to remember a name that won’t come to mind? Then, a few
hours later, it pops into your head when you’re focused on something else
entirely? Researchers say this proves that the memory was not deleted; it
was just temporarily difficult to access. With this in mind, we know that our
brain performs a sorting process, both consciously and unconsciously. It
evaluates what’s important and what isn’t, and details that it deems
insignificant are rarely stored.
 On the other hand, it’s hard to say anything with certainty in this field.
After all, memory is a flexible process. Researchers now believe that some
seemingly unimportant details are stored at least temporarily, presumably
because the brain suspects that they might turn out to be useful in the future.
For example, you might surprise yourself by being able to remember the
colour of the car that drove past your house right before your burglar alarm
went off.

Remembering
Our ability to recall a specific memory rests on the stability and strength of
the neural networks where it is stored. As we have seen, our neural
networks are strengthened by frequent use, and a strong memory is more
easily remembered. However, the act of remembering is also a creative
process in which you blend new and old memories rather than simply recall
one specific experience. Moreover, as fragments of memory are stored in
various parts of the cerebral cortex, they need to be remembered as
fragments before being combined into a meaningful whole.
Both your surroundings and your mood can help you recall certain
memories. We’ve all entered a room only to find ourselves unable to
remember why we walked in there. So we return to our starting point and
immediately remember what we had intended to do. In this case, our
surroundings help us remember. Similarly, it’s easier to recall memories
from last year’s trip to the mountains if you’re currently in the mountains.
And you’re more likely to remember pleasant memories when you’re
happy, and sad memories when you’re feeling down.
When asked to remember a list of words, most people are able to recall
those at the beginning and end but struggle with those in the middle.
However, if hints are provided, almost everyone can recall the words that
they failed to remember initially. This points to the fact that the words
haven’t completely vanished from our memory; we just need some help to
access them.
When asked a question on a particular subject, we know immediately if
we know nothing about it. We don’t need to scroll through our memory to
reach that conclusion. Similarly, we know instantly if we know something
about it, although, in this instance, we will probably have to think for a
while to remember the information we need to answer the question, and this
can vary depending on how long it’s been since we last retrieved it.
We retrieve memories in two distinct ways: we can actively recall them
or we can recognise them. The latter involves comparing something we see
or hear with the memory of it. Our brains even have a special facial
recognition region. This allows you to identify your father effortlessly in a
crowd of two thousand men even though you’d never be able to describe
him with sufficient precision for a stranger to do the same. Recognition,
then, is a much more passive process than recollection. It’s as if something
just clicks without any need to think about it.
Familiar faces – such as those of family, friends or even favourite
celebrities – generate activity in specific areas of the brain whenever we see
them. For example, you probably have a Jennifer Aniston neuron! When the
signal to a particular neuron was measured with an electrode in a group of
patients who were waiting for operations to treat their epilepsy, the
scientists discovered that the neuron reacted whenever Jennifer’s picture
came up, regardless of whether it was a close-up or a long shot, from a
movie or real life, or any other variable.
When you need to remember something specific, your brain reactivates
the neural network that was used when the memory was formed.
Fortunately, the two sensations are not identical, as that would feel like
hallucinating every time you thought about a previous experience. Instead,
your brain tells you that you are picturing a memory and also reminds you
where you are at present.
We know that our memories help us make future choices. But we don’t
need to remember absolutely everything we’ve ever experienced in order to
achieve that. So it seems that some of the episodes that are stored in our
long-term memory eventually form a general knowledge database that
allows us to generalise on the basis of previous experience even though we
lose the ability to access them as individual memories.

How to improve your memory

By now, you should understand the importance of concentration when
trying to store new information. Your powers of concentration – and
therefore your memory – are adversely affected by both sleep deprivation
and stress, so you’re unlikely to benefit from worrying about an upcoming
exam or revising long into the night. If your stress increases as a big event –
such as an exam – approaches, it’s extra important to focus on what you
need to remember well in advance. And if you can manage to engage with
the material and link it to your emotions, so much the better. Similarly, the
more senses you employ, the better something will stick. For instance, if
you read a passage from a textbook out loud, your brain receives
information from both your eyes and your ears, which often creates a
stronger memory. But don’t overdo it because this technique works best if
you limit yourself to reciting only the most important passages. Then you
should try to repeat all of the essential information from memory. In other
words, practise your retrieval skills, and maybe even correct your memory
when it introduces errors.
Since repetition helps memory, allow me to reiterate the point: make the
time to listen to yourself, or read aloud to others. Test yourself, review
sample exam questions or have friends ask you questions about the subject
you are studying. Practising retrieving knowledge from your memory is far
more effective than reading silently through the same material time and
again. Your memory will improve as you work actively with the material
you have already learned. Remember, you don’t just need to store
information well; you also need to become adept at retrieving it.
It’s also advisable to cut down on the wine before trying to commit
something to memory, at least if you expect to be sober when you need to
access it. If you learn something while you’re drunk, you’ll remember it
better when you’re intoxicated. This is because the retrieval process works
more smoothly when our current situation is similar to the one when we
learned the information. So, if you know you’re going to take an exam in a
silent auditorium, you should revise in a quiet environment. Language has
an important role to play here, too. Bilingual speakers of Russian and
English who live in the United States find it easier to remember details from
their childhoods if they discuss them in Russian rather than English. Our
memory is also better if we see a mental image in colour rather than black
and white.
So it is possible to optimise the functioning of almost any memory.
However, all memories are not the same. Some people can remember an
amazing amount of detail after the briefest flight over a large city; others
can recall entire phone books. Yet, such people usually lack some of the
basic skills that the rest of us take for granted. That’s because their
exceptional memories are the result of certain types of brain injury. We
have no definitive explanation for why a person’s memory can improve
after their brain is damaged, although there are plenty of theories. One of
these focuses on injuries or impairments in the left half of the brain, which
usually plays a vital role in filtering information.
People who have the paradoxical combination of intellectual disability
and super-developed memory are known as savants. About fifty savants
from around the world have been studied in various research projects. One
of them, Kim Peek, learned to read before he could walk. He had an
enlarged head, no corpus callosum between the left and right hemispheres,
and no cerebellum. Understandably, he was diagnosed as suffering from a
mental disability, yet he could read two pages of a book at the same time –
one with each eye – and remember everything in great detail. For ever!
Ultimately, he was able to recite the contents of twelve thousand books. In
1984, the screenwriter Barry Morrow met Peek and based his script for the
Oscar-winning film Rain Man on his life.
From the kitchen window where I grew up, I could see a tree that was
usually populated by all sorts of different birds. I would watch the tree for
hours and learned to recognise bullfinches, great tits, house sparrows and
the Eurasian jay. I remember the jay especially well, because it has such
beautiful blue feathers. Coincidentally, this species often crops up in
discussions of memory because it hides food for the winter in branches,
under tree roots and in all manner of cracks and crevices. The Eurasian jay
is not considered particularly intelligent, even by bird brain standards, yet
studies have shown that it can remember the locations of several hundred of
these caches.
When we were in elementary school, we thought the smartest kids in the
class were those who could memorise the most capital cities. The truth is
rather different: you can bone up on a lot of facts, but you can’t bone up
your intelligence. Henry Molaison (H. M.) had no recollection of what had
happened yesterday, yet he was personable and intelligent. Kim Peek could
read a large book in an hour and remember every word, but he couldn’t
button up his own shirt.

Using your nose to remember

 And soon, mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a
depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I
had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and
the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my
whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that
were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but
individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin … I was
conscious that it was connected with the taste of tea and cake, but that
it infinitely transcended those savours, could not, indeed, be of the
same nature as theirs … Will it ultimately reach the clear surface of
my consciousness, this memory, this old, dead moment which the
magnetism of an identical moment has travelled so far to importune, to
disturb, to raise up out of the very depths of my being? I cannot tell.
Now that I feel nothing, it has stopped, has perhaps gone down again
into its darkness, from which who can say whether it will ever rise?
Ten times over I must essay the task, must lean down over the abyss
… And suddenly the memory returns … The sight of the little
madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it … But
when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are
dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more
fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent,
more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time,
like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment,
amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and
almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of
recollection … [T]he whole of Combray and of its surroundings,
taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town
and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.

Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past

Have you ever noticed that a smell or a taste can evoke a powerful
memory? The parts of the cerebral cortex that are most associated with
memory and olfactory information are located right next to each other. And
they are closely linked functionally as well as anatomically. Thus, a familiar
smell can help us recall a previous experience. This is known as the ‘Proust
phenomenon’.
 Most of the information that ultimately arrives at the hippocampus has
already visited several other parts of the cerebral cortex. These areas make
associations between various pieces of information and interpret any new
messages that come in from the senses. By contrast, all of the information
relating to smells takes a shortcut from the olfactory cortex straight to the
hippocampus, without making any detours through the cerebral cortex’s
associational areas. Olfactory data doesn’t even enter the thalamus, in
contrast to all other sensory information. The shortcut is useful because
olfactory axons are both uninsulated and very narrow, which makes their
transmission of electrical signals extremely slow.
The olfactory cortex is also closely linked to the amygdala, the almond-
shaped group of neurons that plays a key role in stimulating and controlling
our emotions. Consequently, the memory of a specific smell will generally
trigger a particular emotion. If the memories you associate with smells
seem unusually powerful, genuine and important, that’s because they are
emotionally charged.
The olfactory nerves are the only neurons in the whole central nervous
system that are exposed to the open air – at the top of the nose. They detect
dozens of smells that we are able to recognise immediately, although we
have trouble describing them. For example, how would you describe the
aroma of a strawberry to someone who’s never smelled one? Would you be
able to explain it with sufficient precision that they would recognise it when
they first encountered it? Probably not. Yet, once you’ve stored a scent in
your memory, you don’t forget it, because your olfactory memory is
amazingly stable.

Blacking out
‘Blacking out’ is not a scientific expression, but it’s used frequently,
especially when describing the consequences of drinking too much alcohol.
To be sure, it requires a lot of alcohol to reach such a point, but the brain
can become so incapacitated that it is no longer able to store memories. And
that will mean you won’t remember anything.
A more controversial topic is the concept of ‘suppressed memories’,
which supposedly cannot be recalled after a person suffers some sort of
trauma. At present, the evidence both for and against the subconscious
suppression of memories following a traumatic incident is inconclusive.
However, it is generally accepted that we can consciously repress some
memories. In 2007, researchers at the University of Colorado showed a
series of unpleasant images to a group of volunteers and found that the
subjects were able to exercise a certain amount of control over their
memories of the pictures. The conclusion was that the subjects were able to
stop the retrieval process by actively forcing themselves not to remember
the images.
Of course, before we can suppress something unconsciously or repress
something consciously, first we need to create a memory. And traumatic
experiences are usually burned into our memory. As a rule, we usually
remember them extremely well.

Dementia is brain failure

Increasing forgetfulness is a normal part of the ageing process, because the
neurons in older brains lose some of their connections and start to die.
Indeed, it is possible to see the shrinkage in human brains over time in
standard CT scans. The hippocampus, which plays one of the most
important roles in memory, is one of the first areas to decline with age.
When the kidneys fail, we call the condition kidney failure; when the
heart fails, we call it heart failure; when the liver fails, we call it liver
failure. Yet, for some reason, when the brain fails, we call it dementia.
Translated directly from the Latin, dementia means ‘out of one’s mind’,
which is a fairly accurate description of what happens to someone who
suffers from the condition. But a better term might be ‘brain failure’.
Dementia is divided into many subgroups, based on the specific part of
the brain where the failure originates, but ultimately the condition spreads
to such an extent that it’s difficult to tell the various groups apart.
Alzheimer’s disease – the most common form – is linked to the presence of
a particular protein, which in turn damages the brain’s neurons. The
condition seems to begin in the temporal lobes, right next to the
hippocampus, so, inevitably, the short-term memory is affected in the very
early stages of the disease. At this point, the patient’s personality and sense
of humour will be almost unaltered, but they will start to forget to turn off
the oven, blow out a candle before going to bed or buy the item they need
from the supermarket. Initially, it’s possible to compensate for the
deterioration by drawing up lists, but eventually that’s not enough. This is
often the point when the sufferer – or a close relative – realises something is
wrong and consults a doctor.
My great-grandmother developed Alzheimer’s, and there is one episode
that I remember particularly well. One weekend, she spent hours in the
kitchen, preparing a fantastic meal for all the family. But no one turned up,
which really hurt her feelings. Later, it transpired that she had forgotten to
invite any guests.
Dementia sufferers often feel a sense of grief, especially in the early
phase, when the rest of the brain is working properly and understand that
something is going badly wrong. Later, once they have lost most of their
working memory but while the information in their long-term memory
remains intact, they can experience something of a second childhood. As
the disease spreads, however, the long-term memory starts to disappear, too.
And the personality. And the sense of humour. In short, relatives are forced
to watch, helpless, as their loved one gradually fades away.
Fortunately, some important discoveries have already been made on the
road towards solving the Alzheimer’s mystery. For instance, a group at
Stanford University discovered that if elderly mice receive blood
transfusions from young mice, they start to produce more neurons in the
hippocampus. So maybe youthful blood contains a factor that has the power
to limit and possibly even reverse the forgetfulness that comes with old
age? If we can manage to supplement such findings with establishing why
harmful proteins start to accumulate as we age, we will be well on the way
to developing a viable treatment and arresting the disease’s progression.
The second most common form of dementia is known as vascular
dementia. This disease involves a narrowing of the brain’s blood vessels,
which results in mini-strokes – or transient ischemic attacks (TIAs) – and
the death of the affected areas’ oxygen- and nutrient-starved neurons.
Therefore, this type of dementia usually does not develop gradually; rather,
it progresses intermittently, depending on when and where the strokes
occur. As with all other diseases that are linked to blood vessels, the
principal risk factors are an unhealthy diet and insufficient exercise.
The other types of dementia don’t affect the memory first; instead, at
least in their early stages, they cause personality changes and
hallucinations. Eventually, though, they impact on the memory, too.
According to a report by the Alzheimer’s Society, 850,000 people were
living with dementia in the UK in 2015. And that figure is likely to double
by 2050. As yet, there’s no cure. So, what can we do to reduce the risk?
Obviously, it’s hard to do anything about the ageing process, but we know
that a well-trained brain is more able to resist the deterioration that is
associated with Alzheimer’s. If you continue to exercise your brain well
into old age, it will tolerate higher levels of the protein that seems to play a
key role in memory loss and personality change. Consequently, while
sufferers who keep their brains active still deteriorate, their symptoms
develop at a slower rate. The way to combat vascular dementia is even
simpler: eat well and get a lot of physical as well as mental exercise.

Mr Appelsine
When I was a toddler in Norway – long before I started to study English –
my mother told the family a story about an English teacher who would
never admit to making a mistake or not knowing the answer to a question.
During one of his lessons, he anglicised the Norwegian word for orange –
calling it an ‘appelsine’ – and wouldn’t admit that he’d got it wrong when
one of his students tried to correct him. From that moment on, the whole
school called him Mr Appelsine.
Everyone else laughed, but I didn’t get the joke as I didn’t speak English,
so my mother had to explain why it was funny. Now that I do speak
English, I have to concentrate in order to avoid making the same mistake.
Whenever I’m about to request a drink on a plane, I invariably find myself
on the verge of asking for an ‘appelsine’ before repeating ‘orange, orange,
orange’ quietly to myself. I don’t want to acquire the nickname Mrs
Appelsine!
There should be an easier way to unlearn knowledge, but our brains have
no ‘delete’ button. Indeed, the more we try to forget something, the more
we remember it. Every time I’m about to blurt out the wrong word for
orange and need to correct myself, I’m forced to access exactly the same
neural network as I did when I stored my mother’s story about Mr
Appelsine in the first place. As a result, my memory of hearing that story
grows stronger and stronger, so I’ll probably remember it for the rest of my
life.

False memories
Although the memories we access on a regular basis tend to be clearer than
others, the human memory should never be considered entirely reliable.
This is because we store information in the form of a ‘memory skeleton’
that consists of only the most important details. When we retrieve it later,
we use our general knowledge and understanding to flesh it out on the basis
of a series of assumptions and other memories. Of course, this
embellishment has the potential to introduce numerous errors, yet our brains
are desperate to put some meat on the bones of the original memory
skeleton. Studies have shown that we are highly receptive to suggestions
that help us fill in the gaps in our memories both when we construct them
and when we retrieve them. There are many examples of so-called false
memories, when witnesses are unconsciously influenced by leading
questions or media coverage and change their testimony as a result.
Many memories must be recalled and stored again numerous times
before they find a permanent place in the long-term memory. However, the
entire memory can be changed during this re-storage process: the relative
strengths of the neural connections can be altered and the memory might be
associated with new sensations, environmental conditions, expectations or
knowledge.
Elizabeth Loftus is a talented scientist who has dedicated much of her
life to studying false memories. For instance, she has proved that
terminology plays a key role in how we remember particular incidents. In
one experiment, she showed the same short film of a car accident to two
groups, one of which was told that the car was ‘smashed’, while the other
was told that it was ‘hit’. The first group remembered seeing much more
broken glass than the second group, even though all of the subjects
witnessed the same incident. In short, Loftus’s description of the event had
a profound effect on what they remembered seeing with their own eyes.

Celebrate your forgetfulness

With no memory, we wouldn’t recognise our family or friends. We wouldn’t
even recognise ourselves. So it’s hardly surprising that a lot of people wish
that they could remember more than they do. But be careful what you wish
for. If you have an average memory, you should probably be satisfied with
that. After all, your brain is able to sift through all of your experiences, pick
out whatever’s important and store it away for future reference, and discard
the insignificant details. In short, your memory works like a filter that
protects you from the sensory overload that you encounter every day.
A handful of people are cursed with being unable to forget a single thing
that has happened to them. I’m not talking about the memory champions
who employ a range of strategies to remember dozens of packs of playing
cards and get their names in the Guinness World Records. And I’m not
talking about savants. Even Kim Peek could not compete with the amazing
memory of an American woman named Jill Price. You can pick any date at
random and she is able to rattle off what the weather was like, exactly what
she and the people around her were doing, and what was on the news. She
remembers everything, down to the tiniest, most inconsequential detail, and
likens her memory to a movie that never stops. Every day, she sees the
present and the past simultaneously, as if on a split screen. Understandably,
although most people call her extraordinary memory a gift – the technical
term is hyperthymesia – Jill herself describes it as a burden.
So, you should start to celebrate your forgetfulness. Although most of
our memories are not high-resolution images of the past, they don’t need to
be. They are good enough to help us make wise decisions in the future, and
that’s always been the human memory’s most important task. It’s what
makes it such an important component of the superstar brain.
OceanofPDF.com
 CHAPTER 4

THE BRAIN’S GPS

A rat runs contentedly around its large cage, searching for the chocolate
chip a researcher slips through the bars at regular intervals. The rat is
wearing a device that resembles a hat with wires emanating from it. The
wires record every occasion when a specific neuron in the rat’s temporal
lobe sends a signal. At first glance, the neuron seems to be sending totally
random signals, but gradually a pattern starts to emerge when the rat’s
position at each moment of neural activity is plotted on a grid. If you draw
straight lines between the points where that neuron sparks into life, you end
up with a series of geometrically perfect, interconnecting hexagons: every
side of every hexagon is exactly equal in length (see Fig. 12). For many
years, video-game developers have believed that a hexagonal grid is far
preferable to a square grid when creating a virtual universe. Now it turns
out that the brain was millions of years ahead of them.

Grids in your brain

This groundbreaking discovery was made by a team of Norwegian brain
researchers led by May-Britt and Edvard Moser in 2005. They called the
neurons that generate these hexagonal patterns ‘grid cells’, and later showed
that our sense of orientation consists of multiple grid-cell modules, each of
which operates at a specific scale. We use larger-scale modules for large
areas where details are unimportant, and finer scales for small areas where
we need high resolution. The researchers located all of these modules in the
region of the cortex right next to the hippocampus in the temporal lobe. The
scale – which ranges from small at one end of this cortical region to
enormous at the other – increases by the square root of two from one
module to the next.

You are here

In the past, most people used paper maps to find their way around. In the
pre-GPS era, you had to flip the map over and rotate it in order to orient
yourself. Sometimes you would have to search for landmarks like
mountains or churches to figure out where you were. Wouldn’t it have been
great if there had been a little red dot on every map that said ‘You are here’
every time you looked at it? Well, your brain actually has something like
that.
Less than ten years after the Mosers discovered grid cells, they shared the
Nobel Prize in medicine with US-British researcher John O’Keefe, who
discovered neurons he named ‘place cells’. These are the cells that enable
us to know where we are at any given time: in effect, they are our brain’s
little red ‘You are here’ dots. Having fitted his rats with similar hats to those
used by the Mosers, O’Keefe measured the neural activity in the
hippocampus and found that some of its neurons emitted strong signals
whenever the rats were in a specific location in their cage, yet remained
inactive when they were anywhere else.
Figure 12: A rat’s neuron sends signals at specific moments to create a grid of perfect
hexagons.
Figure 13: The place cell emits a signal whenever the rat visits a specific part of its cage.

When a surgeon removed both of Henry Molaison’s hippocampi as well

as some of the adjacent cortex, he lost both his place cells and his grid cells.
Hence, in addition to being unable to recognise his nurses after the
operation, he couldn’t find his way to the bathroom. Unsurprisingly, place
cells and spatial orientation are closely connected to memory. Indeed, the
vast majority of our memories are linked to the specific places where they
were created. Based on further studies of rats, it seems that place cells are
not concerned solely with where we are right now; they also provide
information about the memories that are associated with particular
geographical locations. For instance, in all likelihood, the place cell that
emitted a signal whenever you opened the toy box in your childhood
bedroom now sends a clear signal each time you reminisce about playing
there, even if you’re a thousand miles away when the memory comes to
mind. In other words, mentally if not spatially, you’re right back in your
bedroom when you remember that toy box.
As we have seen, all of these discoveries were made during research on
rats, but the hippocampus is one of the oldest parts of the mammalian
cerebral cortex, so it is physically very similar in humans and rodents.
Moreover, given that a good sense of orientation is just as important for
people as it is for rats, we are likely to share similar ability in that respect.
The research into human spatial orientation certainly seems to point in that
direction. Indeed, studies have already identified human grid cells that seem
to function in much the same way as those of the rats in the Mosers’
experiments.

Map and compass

I’m the first to admit that I’ve never been too good at finding my way
around. As a result, I often just follow along passively, which means that I
don’t practise and improve my orientation skills. Every once in a while,
though, I am absolutely certain about which way to go. For instance, ten
years ago, I visited Budapest with a couple of friends. On one occasion, I
was so convinced that I knew which way to go that I found it almost painful
when one of my friends insisted we should go in the opposite direction.
Based on our respective track records, there was every reason to believe
that she was right and I was wrong, but we were in no hurry, so she
humoured me and accompanied me in the direction I wanted to go. She
pointed out landmarks along the way and patiently explained why they
meant we were getting ever further from our intended destination.
Eventually, through this process of gentle persuasion, she managed to
recalibrate my feeble orientation centre. We did an about-turn, walked back
to our starting point, then headed in the direction she knew we should have
taken from the beginning. By now, though, my head direction cells weren’t
screaming in protest.
In many ways, our head direction cells act like a compass, although they
don’t tell us which way is north, south, east or west. This is because they
aren’t linked to the earth’s magnetic poles, but to our own balance organ in
the inner ear. A particular head direction cell is activated whenever you turn
your head in its direction, regardless of whether you’re standing on your
hands or have your eyes closed. However, if you keep your eyes closed for
a long time, the signals from your head direction cells become less precise.
Studies on rats have shown that if the lights are turned on and off
repeatedly, the rat becomes disoriented and its whole head direction system
temporarily breaks down. Moreover, if the rat is placed in new surroundings
for only a couple of minutes each time, the head direction cells seem less
able to orient themselves on the basis of landmarks. This causes them to
start sending inconsistent – or even completely random – signals. I
sometimes wonder if my head direction cells do something similar.

Figure 14: A rat’s head direction cell emits a signal when its head is facing in a particular
direction, regardless of the direction in which it is moving.
Figure 15: Border cells identify any boundary, be it the exterior of a rat’s cage or an interior
dividing wall. Here, a specific neuron emits a signal whenever the rat approaches a border
to its right. A different border cell will perform the same function whenever it approaches a
border to the left.

It seems highly likely that our head direction cells are closely connected
to memories, just like our place cells. Studies have shown that rats’ head
direction cells remain active even while the animals are asleep, especially
during REM (rapid eye movement) sleep.

To here, but no further

Between the head direction cells and the grid cells in the section of the
cortex around the hippocampus, another small group of cells tells you when
you are approaching a boundary or a border, such as a mountain, a wall or a
fence. However, they emit a signal only when you are right next to that
border. So, if a rat’s cage is enlarged between two experiments, the border
cells remain inactive until it reaches the new edge of the cage. They have an
important role to play in telling the place cells and the grid cells where to
focus their attention.

Fred Flintstone’s car

Fred Flintstone, the cartoon caveman, has a car with no motor and stone
wheels. He has to run to make the car move, with his legs poking through
the floor. May-Britt and Edvard Moser constructed a similar car in
miniature for their rats. The rats would propel it to a chocolate reward at the
far end of a four-metre track. If they were allowed to run freely to the
chocolate, they could achieve speeds of 50 centimetres per second.
However, the Mosers chose to limit their speed to 7, 14, 21 or 28
centimetres per second by increasing the friction on the car’s wheels (see
Fig. 16). The point of the experiment was to measure the activity in
hundreds of neurons while the rats ran towards their rewards. After
amassing results at various speeds, the Mosers identified dedicated speed
cells: that is, neurons that emit signals depending on how fast the rat is
running. These speed cells send their signals independently of landmarks
and irrespective of whether the rat runs in daylight or complete darkness.
Interestingly, if a rat is allowed to run at its own pace, its speed cells give a
clear indication of the speed it is about to achieve, as opposed to its current
speed.
While the head direction cells tell the grid cells the direction in which a
rat is moving, the speed cells tell the rat how fast it is moving (or will be
moving). The grid cells know how to utilise this information, and the rat’s
grid is updated. In short, the grid cells draw a map, the border cells indicate
its boundaries, the place cells work out where we are within those
boundaries, and the speed cells tell us how long it will be before we arrive
at one of them. All of these neurons contribute in their own distinctive ways
to our spatial orientation. Taken together, they are the brain’s global
positioning system – its GPS – which comprises a speedometer, a compass
and boundary markings.
Figure 16: Rat in a Fred Flintstone car with a speed cell emitting a signal at 21 centimetres
per second.

It’s not just the temporal lobe

As we have seen, the place cells are located in the hippocampus, while the
grid cells are in the adjacent cortex. Thus, as far as we know, two crucial
components of our spatial orientation system are found exclusively in the
temporal lobe. Head direction cells, however, are located not only around
the hippocampus but in some other parts of the cortex as well, and in the
thalamus and the basal nuclei (see Figs. 1, 8 and 9).
To orient ourselves in our surroundings, we need more than a mental
map, a compass and a speedometer. We need our occipital lobe to process
visual information and recognise landmarks. And we need our sense of
touch and an awareness of our own motion, such as when our foot touches
the ground. Both the parietal lobe and the cerebellum have roles to play in
this awareness. In other words, when we move, our ability to orient
ourselves doesn’t rest solely on our perception of landmarks on the horizon.
Our brain also receives constant information about how we’re moving and
where our arms and legs are positioned at any given time. It’s by processing
all of this information that we are able to navigate and orient ourselves
effectively.
 A fully functioning parietal lobe combines visual data with information
from the other senses. Rats with damaged parietal lobes can still move
around with assistance from their cerebellum. However, their interpretation
of sensory information is clearly impaired, which means they struggle to
find hidden food and their way back to their own cage. And it’s not just rats
that lose their way after suffering parietal lobe injuries: humans who have
had strokes in their parietal lobes struggle to identify the right path even in
familiar surroundings.

Are men better than women at finding their way around?

No – in fact, the opposite may well be true. At present, though, the only
firm conclusion we can draw from thousands of hours of research is that
women and men employ different – not necessarily better or worse –
strategies when finding their way around. This has generated a series of
seemingly contradictory results depending on how different groups of
researchers have designed their experiments. For instance, several studies
on virtual orientation – an important aspect of many computer games –
have shown that men outperform women. However, critics of these
experiments have suggested that the findings simply reflect the fact that the
male subjects have probably played more video games throughout their
lives than their female counterparts. In other words, they’ve had more
practice at virtual orientation. When it comes to orientation on actual
terrain, the sexes record almost identical results. However, as a group,
women seem to rely more on landmarks, such as hills, church spires and
other conspicuous physical features, whereas men are more inclined to use
their sense of direction. This is also evident when they give directions. A
woman will typically say, ‘Take a left at the grocery store, then go straight
until the road starts to turn to the right,’ whereas a man would be much
more likely to give instructions to drive east, west, north or south. Multiple
studies have shown that, in general, the women’s strategy of utilising
landmarks is better than the men’s at helping them find their way back to
their starting point after visiting a new place.
All of these studies are based on averages, though. Obviously, some
women are far better than the average man, but others are far worse.
Unfortunately, I’m definitely in the latter camp. And I can’t even use the
excuse that I was ‘born like this’. Of course, some people are born with a
better sense of direction than others, but, as we know, our brains are plastic,
so spatial orientation can be improved with practice. If you spend all your
time thinking, ‘I’m terrible at this,’ ‘I’m sure to get lost,’ or ‘If I go by
myself, I’ll never arrive on time,’ then it quickly becomes a self-fulfilling
prophecy. There’s a tendency for women to have little confidence in their
spatial skills. Maybe that’s why the myth of male superiority is so deeply
entrenched. Self-confidence is always an important contributory factor in
performance. A study published in the journal Science in 2006 showed that
women who were told that men were naturally better at maths did worse on
arithmetic tests than women who were told that the sexes performed equally
well.

The cab driver’s brain workout

So, can you train your hippocampus and develop a better sense of direction?
When researchers at University College London decided to explore this
question, they didn’t have to look far for perfect subjects. London’s streets
are a real hodgepodge – the city has very little of the geometrical urban
planning of Paris or New York. So, London’s cabbies have to remember a
complex labyrinth of 25,000 roads, not to mention thousands of tourist
attractions and other important locations. Most trainee taxi drivers spend
two to four years learning the routes before they feel sufficiently confident
to take the test and gain their licence to drive a black cab. Even then, the
failure rate is close to 50 per cent.
When the University College researchers scanned the brains of a group
of taxi drivers and a group of people of equivalent age and IQ, they found
that the cabbies’ hippocampi were significantly larger than those of the
control group. Was the extra size due to the cabbies’ years of practice and
subsequent experience on London’s streets, or did the rigorous selection
procedure simply weed out any applicant with a naturally small
hippocampus? Further analysis pointed towards the former conclusion,
because the researchers found that cabbies with many years’ experience had
larger hippocampi than those who had just started their driving careers.
Later, the same research team followed a group of aspiring cab drivers from
the start of their training to the moment when they passed the exam,
scanning their brains at regular intervals. The hippocampi of those who
passed the exam grew significantly larger during the course of their training
due to the formation of new neural connections, and possibly through the
creation of new neurons, too.
The hippocampus is one of the few locations in the brain where new
nerve cells can form, and the London study is one of the clearest indicators
that our experiences can have a physical impact on our brains.

How can you improve your sense of direction?

London’s taxi drivers have the ability to picture a map of the city in their
heads and calculate the shortest route to a destination. If they simply
entered an address into a GPS and passively followed the system’s
instructions, their hippocampi would not grow during their training and
throughout their careers.
Similarly, if we use landmarks to orient ourselves and thus construct a
mental map, we use our brain more actively than if we just follow the
instructions on a GPS screen. If you take the same route home from work
every day, your brain is much more passive than if you explore a new route.
As we have seen, neural connections deteriorate when they aren’t used. If
we automatically follow the GPS when it tells us to go straight ahead for
200 metres then turn right, we are not exercising any of the neural
connections in our hippocampus. We are not noting the locations of any of
the landmarks we pass or putting them into a coherent context because we
have been staring at a screen the whole time. Hence, in addition to
depriving ourselves of the pleasure of seeing a beautiful old church or a
blossoming cherry tree, we lose much of the geographic and cultural
context of the world around us. Our brains would be much better served if
we used our own sense of direction or even followed an old paper map.
Japanese researchers asked three groups of subjects to find their way on
foot to a specific destination. The first group used mobile phones equipped
with GPS software, while the second made their way to the same
destination using a paper map. The researchers gave the members of the
third group a route to follow, and they were not allowed to use any
additional navigational aids. Unsurprisingly, the first group was the worst at
explaining the route they’d selected, and they struggled to draw a map of it
after reaching their destination. Rather more surprisingly, they also ended
up walking further than the other two groups and making more stops en
route. The group that had to navigate on their own after the route was
explained to them did the best. Of course, GPS devices can be time-savers,
but don’t forget that you have your own internal GPS and it’s really quite
good at what it does.
If you want to keep your navigational skills in top shape (and you don’t
have anyone to tell you the best route to take), then a paper or even a digital
map is preferable to GPS. The size of GPS screens often prevents you from
seeing where you are and where you’re going simultaneously, and a
researcher called Véronique Bohbot believes that this might have serious
long-term consequences. She claims that an overreliance on GPS devices
may make our brains so passive that we will be much more likely to
develop diseases such as Alzheimer’s later in life. In short, while London’s
cabbies have taught us that the hippocampus is physically enlarged through
extra use, Bohbot insists that our increasing dependence on GPS is making
it smaller. Alzheimer’s affects the neurons in the hippocampus in the early
stages of the disease, but a fit and healthy hippocampus will probably
tolerate more damage before the person starts showing pronounced
symptoms.
We should be happy that we don’t need to rely on our mobile phones and
sat navs to find our way around. As we have seen, the brain’s internal GPS
can be just as effective in helping us reach our destination. It’s especially
useful when we need to find our way in new places, or when navigating to
the kitchen in the middle of the night. Without this ability, we would walk
around in a series of concentric circles and never be able to work out which
way to go.
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 CHAPTER 5

THE EMOTIONAL BRAIN

Imagine how boring the world would be without happiness, love,

disappointment or anger. It’s important to understand your own and other
people’s emotions. When you recognise your own emotions and understand
why you’re experiencing them, you can learn how to make a few of them
take a detour around your cerebral cortex in the future. This will enable you
to nip an emotional outburst in the bud before you hurt or offend anyone.
Strong emotions can make people shave their heads, attack the paparazzi
with an umbrella, grab the microphone from a teenage singer who is giving
an acceptance speech or scream childish – and premature – celebrations in
the immediate aftermath of an election. In such circumstances, carefully
cultivated images can be destroyed in an instant.
All of us wish we had more control over our emotions. We all want to be
like the doctor who allows an outburst from a frustrated patient to play itself
out before calmly explaining the best course of action. By contrast, no one
wants to be the lawyer who starts crying in frustration when a vital witness
changes their story under cross-examination. That sort of behaviour seems
so … unprofessional. Yet sometimes our emotions seem to control us, rather
than the other way around.
There are two different pathways for expressing emotions. One involves
a detour through the cerebral cortex, which allows it to talk some sense into
the more primitive parts of the brain: ‘There’s no reason to be afraid of
slow-worms. They’re not poisonous.’ In my case, however, whenever I see
a slow-worm, the visual information does not take a trip through my
cerebral cortex. Consequently, my body reacts as if it’s on the brink of
death, even though, rationally, I know that’s not the case. Even if I remind
myself on the way to the zoo’s reptile house that all of the exhibits are
safely locked in their cages, and none of them can hurt me, these reassuring
thoughts evaporate the second I catch my first glimpse of a slow-worm. The
primitive parts of my brain send my whole body into a state of high alert
before my cerebral cortex has a chance to talk any sense into me.
The pathways that various sights, sounds and other sensory information
take in the brain vary from person to person, and within each person. For
example, I have no problem flinging myself out of an airplane as long as
I’ve got a parachute on my back, or off a bridge with a bungee cord
attached to my leg. Yet the sight of a legless lizard, even if it’s on TV,
invariably freaks me out. I’m not predestined to suffer from this for ever:
the cerebral cortex can be forced to take charge in cases where a phobia has
previously enjoyed free rein. However, the opposite can happen, too: one
frightening episode can be sufficient to generate intense fear of something
similar in the future. And the cerebral cortex doesn’t always calm you
down. Sometimes it will warn you to steer clear of something that doesn’t
seem too threatening at first glance, such as the seemingly friendly stranger
who came to the playground and offered you sweets when you were a child.
In most cases, we seek a second opinion from the cerebral cortex before
acting on our emotions. Otherwise, we would all find ourselves jumping up
and down on Oprah Winfrey’s sofa and screaming about how great it is to
be in love. Nevertheless, in some situations, we should be grateful that our
feelings occasionally take a more direct route. If a car is careering towards
you, you won’t have time to contemplate what’s going on, who’s driving the
car, what their intention might be, or whether you’ll rip your new coat if
you jump out of the way. In such circumstances, it’s advisable just to hurl
yourself over the nearest hedge, rather than mull over your options.
The only place where it’s acceptable for adults to scream out loud is at a
sporting event. For instance, most parents try to keep the swearing to a
minimum when their child accidentally drops a bag of flour and covers the
whole kitchen in a thin, white dusting. Instead, you take a deep breath,
count to ten, then clean up. A large proportion of everyday life involves
reining in our emotions in this way. On the other hand, what would the
world be like without strong emotions? What if we didn’t feel guilty when
we lied, didn’t experience love for our children, partner, family and friends,
or lacked the motivation that drives us to achieve a challenging goal? The
truth is that we are all utterly dependent on our feelings, both positive and
negative. They guide us through our lives and help us advance a little
further each day.

Feeling with your brain

Whenever the cerebral cortex reaches a decision, the body’s hormones and
autonomic nervous system follow up on it. If the cortex is the ruler, the
autonomic nervous system – which consists of the sympathetic nervous
system (which turns you on) and the parasympathetic nervous system
(which turns you off) – is one of its subjects. The sympathetic nervous
system causes you to tremble the first time you write on a whiteboard in
front of a class and makes your hands sweat when you are asked a difficult
question, but it also helps you react quickly and escape from danger, if
necessary. As soon as the danger is over, the parasympathetic nervous
system calms you down, brings your heart rate back down to normal and
slows your breathing. While your sympathetic nervous system channels
most of your blood to your muscles in preparation for fighting or fleeing,
your parasympathetic nervous system redirects it back to its routine
functions, such as powering the digestion of food in your intestines.
Without the sympathetic nervous system, we wouldn’t focus our full and
undivided attention on staying on an icy road after an unexpected skid.
Without the parasympathetic nervous system, we would continue to have
butterflies in the stomach and remain in a state of high alert even after
driving home safely.
Of course, the brain controls the body and its reactions to specific
situations. Its most primitive part starts the process which causes the
adrenal glands to start producing the stress hormone adrenaline. For
instance, adrenaline is released when someone you’ve been attracted to for
a long time kisses you, when you feel anger or when you’re frightened.
Once it has entered the bloodstream, it causes an increase in heart rate,
respiration rate and blood pressure.
In most situations, the cerebral cortex knows precisely which emotions
we are feeling at any given time. But a team of US researchers wanted to
explore what we feel during physiological arousal, so they injected two
groups of volunteers with adrenaline. The first group was informed of the
hormone’s effects – such as a pounding heart and rapid breathing – which
meant the volunteers had a logical explanation for the symptoms they
experienced after the injections. None of them reported any change in their
mood. The other group was not informed of the effects of adrenaline, so
they started searching for explanations for why they suddenly felt so frantic.
If an actor joined the group and started behaving erratically, the volunteers
tended to relate their racing heartbeats and sweaty hands to irritation at his
behaviour. In other words, their brains identified the most logical cause of
their physical symptoms. Thus, it appears that arousal due to adrenaline – or
other neurotransmitters (chemical messengers) – can contribute to an
emotional change, with the brain deciding what kind of emotion we are
experiencing. It’s not the hormone that makes you feel angry or happy;
rather, your cerebral cortex interprets what you’re feeling after analysing
the situation.
When you’re in love, your brain emits signals that make your heart beat
faster and cause you to focus all of your attention on the point where your
lover’s hand is resting on your thigh. However, the sensation of being in
love is not located in your thigh or your heart; it’s in your brain. And the
same is true of every other emotion. It’s difficult to pinpoint precisely
where each one is found, but some patterns are emerging. A number of
structures that lie deep within the brain – around the corpus callosum on
each side – comprise the limbic system, and this is generally considered to
be the seat of all of our emotions (see Fig. 17). As we saw in Chapter 3, one
of these structures – the hippocampus – converts information from the
working memory into long-term memories, and those memories tend to be
stronger when they’re associated with strong emotions.
Figure 17: The right half of the brain, seen from the middle, along with the left temporal
lobe’s hippocampus and amygdala. Important areas for emotions include the region of the
cerebral cortex known as the cingulum, the hippocampus and the amygdala, all of which are
parts of the limbic system. A more recent part of the human brain – the prefrontal cortex –
has the capacity to override emotions.

Just as hunger motivates us to find food, emotions motivate us to address

needs such as safety and relationships. This is the essence of evolution:
survival and reproduction.
Everything mental is also physical, because all of our emotions are
controlled by various chemical substances in the brain. For instance, when
you interpret someone’s behaviour as friendly or generous, you experience
a surge of dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin. All three of these
neurotransmitters make us feel good and motivate us to try to produce the
same pleasant sensation in the future.
As in this instance, numerous chemical substances tend to be active in
the brain at any given time. Some of them aid communication from one
neuron to another, whereas others affect many neurons simultaneously in a
particular area. Because so many different neurotransmitters are working in
unison, your brain is able to adjust your mood and emotions to find the best
balance for your particular situation. Moreover, it doesn’t only control
which emotions you feel, but how strongly you feel them. So it decides
when a sensation escalates from grumpy to furious or from nervous to
terrified.
We all need emotions to function in society, but permanently heightened
emotions or emotions that are experienced at inappropriate times or in
response to the wrong stimulus are not good for our health.

Smiling your way to happiness

When you smile, your brain receives signals from your facial muscles that
improve your mood. People who were asked to smile while watching a
cartoon found it funnier than those who were asked to furrow their brows.
When you make an angry facial expression, the anger and fear centre in
your brain – the amygdala – is activated.
Botox is poisonous to neurons, so when it’s injected into a patient’s
forehead, the muscles stop working because the neurons that control them
are no longer able to send and receive signals. Consequently, the patient’s
amygdala receives no information from the paralysed facial muscles.
Researchers studied the impact of Botox injections on patients who were
treated for frown lines caused by contractions of the small depressor
muscles near their eyebrows. The results were astonishing: 90 per cent of
the subjects in the study group who had been profoundly depressed for at
least six months prior to their Botox treatment were depression-free within
two months of undergoing the procedure.
Botox is certainly not an established or recommended treatment for
depression, but this study raises an interesting question: is it harder to feel
down when you’re unable to frown?
Bad moods are bad for you
… and good moods are good for you. Of course, life is never that simple.
Our mood is governed by far more complex mechanisms than our facial
expressions. Nevertheless, people who claim that a bad mood is all in your
head are right. Everyone has experienced a bad mood at some point in their
life. There’s always something that will make you feel sad: a tear-jerker
movie, betrayal, disappointment or grief, for instance. But once the
situation has changed and a little time has passed, most of us are able to
drag ourselves out of it.
Depression is very different. It isn’t on the normal spectrum of emotions;
instead, it’s a disease that has a profound effect on the way some people
think, behave and view the world. It extends well beyond sadness, and it is
rarely triggered by one specific event. It robs the sufferer of energy,
motivation and the ability to experience happiness, exhilaration, satisfaction
or meaning in their everyday life. People who suffer from depression also
have shorter lifespans than those who never experience it. There are many
reasons for this. Sufferers tend to isolate themselves, which makes it harder
for them to access help when it is needed; they neglect other aspects of their
health; and we know that chronic stress harms both the body and the brain.
Therefore, depression should not be viewed as a mental illness. A change in
mood is linked to a series of physical changes: in the brain’s chemistry; in
the areas of the brain that are active; in which neural connections continue
to function; and in which neurotransmitters the neurons release.
Studies of depression have focused much of their attention on the
neurotransmitter serotonin, which helps most people maintain a sense of
equanimity and optimism. Normally, it is released into the cleft between
two neurons and then received by the second neuron’s receptor system (see
Fig. 10). Multiple studies have found that deeply depressed individuals
have fewer receptor systems to capture the serotonin, which seems to
indicate that physical changes in the brain’s neural networks contribute to
depression. Under normal circumstances, any excess serotonin in the
synaptic gap between two neurons would be reabsorbed by the neuron that
released it. However, a group of medications known as selective serotonin
reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) blocks this reabsorption process, which means
that the surplus serotonin remains in the synaptic gap for longer. This gives
the second neuron’s receptor system more of an opportunity to absorb it
and, ultimately, pass it on. The end result is that people with too few
receptors can achieve relatively normal levels of serotonin transmission,
which makes life much more enjoyable. Hence SSRIs have acquired the
nickname ‘happy pills’.
Unfortunately, they don’t work for everyone, because depression is not a
single disease. Rather, it’s an umbrella term for multiple conditions that
share similar symptoms, and we don’t know enough about the chemistry
behind those conditions to provide targeted treatment. Maybe in the future
we’ll be able to take a scan of the brain to establish how many serotonin
receptors there are in various regions, and that will help us predict whether
SSRIs will be effective. At present, though, it’s more a case of trial and
error.
When depressed people have relatively normal levels of serotonin
transmission, problems relating to another neurotransmitter – dopamine –
might be to blame for their low mood. You tend to feel sad if your brain is
unable to absorb this hormone correctly, even after experiencing something
that should have been a pleasurable experience.
Sufferers from Parkinson’s disease generally do not receive a diagnosis
until they start to display a number of physical symptoms, such as a resting
tremor in the hands and difficulty initiating movement. However, we’ve
known for years that other symptoms, including depression and a
deteriorating sense of smell, often precede these physical manifestations of
the disease. This is hardly surprising because Parkinson’s kills not only the
neurons that produce dopamine but also those that transmit it from the
brainstem to the basal nuclei, which makes sufferers far more susceptible to
problems relating to personal motivation and low mood as well as muscle
control.
Yet not all Parkinson’s patients are depressed. Indeed, recent research
suggests that fewer than half – 45 per cent – suffer from the condition. The
depressed patients seem to have fewer dopamine receptors in their limbic
systems than those who manage to maintain a positive outlook, so
medications that increase the availability of this neurotransmitter are
proving effective at alleviating not just their muscle control issues but also
their depression. This is consistent with the findings of earlier experiments
which found that inhibiting dopamine in the midbrains of mice causes
symptoms of depression, whereas boosting dopamine transmission reduces
depression.
 Although we know that depression in Parkinson’s patients is due to
specific physical changes in their brains, we should not focus all of our
attention on the neurons that produce and transmit dopamine. Both
conversation therapy and learned strategies for tackling negative thoughts,
in addition to medication, can also initiate physical changes in the brain.
Moreover, they can help sufferers of depression to mitigate the
accompanying chronic stress that can prove very harmful over the long
term.

The brain’s green-eyed monster

If you become green with envy, an area in your cerebral cortex between the
right and left hemispheres – popularly known as the ‘jealousy spot’ – fires
up. Jealousy is caused by our fear of losing something we value. When the
subjects in an experiment read glowing reports about the achievements of a
group of eminent people, they felt jealousy and their jealousy spots were
activated. By contrast, when the same subjects read about VIPs suffering
some sort of misfortune, they experienced Schadenfreude – a sort of
malicious pleasure – and activity was detected in a particular region of their
basal nuclei.

Sex on the brain

Simply stimulating the cerebral cortex in the cleft between the two halves
of the brain is sufficient to cause a monkey to have an erection. However, a
complete, fulfilling sexual experience involves activity in almost every part
of the brain at one time or another. For instance, a man’s occipital lobe
plays a pivotal role when he looks at a plunging neckline, and a woman’s is
active when she sees a tight t-shirt stretched over a well-defined torso. If
you were then to place your hand on that body part, the signals from your
palm and fingers would travel to the parietal lobe on the opposite side of
your brain. Meanwhile, your frontal lobe dictates what you find attractive in
the first place, with some help from your limbic system. Thus, it causes you
to focus much of your attention on people who possess the features that
appeal to you and disregard those who don’t.
 On the other hand, the frontal lobe is one of only two parts of the brain
(the other is the amygdala) that remains inactive during an orgasm. The
deactivation of the frontal lobe makes perfect sense, since its passivity
prevents the person in question from mulling over the possible
consequences of what they’re doing. We do not yet fully understand why
the amygdala, which is usually involved in primitive emotions, is also
deactivated. However, researchers have observed hypersexuality and
uncritical sexual behaviour in patients with certain types of brain injury, so
perhaps the amygdala needs to be shut down at critical moments to suppress
the development of these harmful conditions. For instance, an injury to the
inside of the temporal lobe, where both the hippocampus and the amygdala
are situated, can result in Klüver–Bucy syndrome. Like most syndromes, it
takes its name from the people who first described it – in this case, the
German-US psychologist Heinrich Klüver and the American neurosurgeon
Paul Bucy. Sufferers have significant memory problems, including an
inability to store new memories. They are also unable to feel fear or anger.
However, they continue to experience strong – and sometimes abnormal –
sexual urges.
As a teenager in New Jersey, ‘Kevin’ suffered from epilepsy, but
neurosurgeons managed to eliminate the attacks by removing the part of his
brain that was causing them. For a time, the procedure enabled Kevin to
live a normal life: he was happily married and enjoyed his job. Everyone
found him personable and he was a well-liked member of his local
community. However, a few years later, his epilepsy returned, so he decided
to undergo another operation. Once again, the procedure eradicated his
seizures, but this time there was a serious complication: Kevin lost his
inhibitions. Sometimes this manifested itself in relatively harmless ways:
for example, he would play the same song on the piano for nine hours at a
stretch. But he also developed an insatiable appetite for food … and for sex.
In addition to downloading hours of regular pornography, he developed a
fascination for movies and pictures involving very young children.
At his trial for possession of child pornography, Kevin’s defence rested
on the claim that he hadn’t committed the offence; his surgically altered
brain was to blame. By then, he had been diagnosed with Klüver–Bucy
syndrome. The judge took this into account when passing sentence.
All of our brains emit signals that turn on sexual desire, but most of us
also generate signals that help us to rein it in. Keeping up appearances and
maintaining self-control in the immediate vicinity of a ripped torso or perky
breasts involves more than just our temporal lobes. The region of the
cerebral cortex between the two halves of the brain (the cingulum) and the
prefrontal cortex (see Fig. 17) are actively involved in dampening our
passion, too. The sweet, elderly grandmother who used to be interested in
nothing but her vegetable garden yet now pinches male nurses’ bottoms
may have suffered damage to one of these areas, usually as a result of
frontal lobe dementia.

To do or not to do
Procrastinators put off what they have previously decided to do, even if this
makes them feel guilty, experience stress and, obviously, achieve less than
they should. Procrastination is a side effect of how we assess various tasks.
It’s not that you can’t do a particular task; you simply lack the motivation to
begin. Of course, you still intend to do it; just not today. You choose short-
term pleasure over long-term benefit.
There is a pattern to the tasks that we decide to shelve. Theoretical tasks
demand more self-control than physical ones, and repetitive tasks require
more self-control than varied ones. Therefore, we’re more likely to do the
weeding in the garden than fill out our tax returns. This is particularly true
if the deadline for submission of your tax return is months away. The longer
the deadline, the less attractive working on that project becomes. And the
harder we expect a task to be, the more likely we are to procrastinate.
If you tend to shelve tasks that seem just too daunting, try dividing them
into a series of smaller goals. If a physical job is more tempting than a
theoretical one, reward yourself by using it as a break in the course of
getting on with the theoretical task. Before you know it, you’ll have
finished both. Most importantly, allow yourself to be a dreamer. People
often postpone important tasks because they know they won’t see any sort
of payoff for a long time. By contrast, they are willing to tackle jobs that
provide immediate benefits. So, try to visualise the hefty refund that will
eventually come your way if you submit your tax return on time, or the
praise that you’ll receive if you give a stellar presentation. Don’t worry
about being full of yourself, just dream big.
Your brain is to blame when you procrastinate, but you also have it to
thank when you’re motivated to get on with something. The way in which
the signals travel between the neurons in your brain determines whether
you’ll stick to your New Year’s resolution or whether you’ll decide to hit
the snooze button in the morning. Nobody is born a snoozer. Some neural
networks deteriorate over time while new ones form when we learn. So,
you can think your way to physical changes in your brain.
People who seem to have a limitless capacity for hard work tend to have
more of the ‘reward neurotransmitter’ – dopamine – in their basal nuclei
and prefrontal cortex than those who are inclined to procrastinate. Both of
these parts of the brain have important roles to play in generating
motivation. Healthy rats with plenty of dopamine choose to work for good
food rather than eat bad food that is supplied to them regardless of the effort
they put in. On the other hand, if the dopamine signals in their basal nuclei
and prefrontal cortex are blocked, they make do with whatever is thrown
into the cage. In other words, dopamine motivates us to work towards a
positive outcome (or avoid a negative outcome), so the term ‘reward
neurotransmitter’ is a little misleading as it does some of its most important
work before we receive a reward, not afterwards.
Dopamine’s effectiveness rests not only on the amount we produce but
also on it reaching the right areas of the brain. For instance, high levels of
dopamine in a part of the basal nuclei called the nucleus accumbens enables
us to predict an eventual reward if we behave in a certain way now. In short,
the brain recognises that something important is happening and generates
the necessary motivation to do something about it. By contrast, slackers
have relatively low levels of dopamine in their frontal lobes and basal
nuclei, but higher levels in their insula – the part of the cerebral cortex that
lies behind the temporal lobe (see Fig. 5). If you find yourself lazily surfing
the internet instead of getting down to important work, then you should try
to increase the dopamine levels in the regions of your brain that are
important for motivation. You can do this by linking your dopamine
response to the achievement of specific goals. Give yourself a mental pat on
the back every time you accomplish something important. Dopamine will
flow as a result.
Be warned, though, this can require a lot of effort. The will to win isn’t
worth a damn if you’re not prepared to put in the necessary legwork.
Whatever the weather, champion marathon runners pound the streets every
day to give themselves even the slightest chance of selection for the next
Olympics. Sometimes the solution to low motivation is simply good old-
fashioned determination and perseverance. There are times in life when you
must be prepared to stick with something you find mind-numbingly boring
or physically taxing in order to reap a reward in the distant future.

Angry winners
Evolution ensures that those members of a species with beneficial traits
survive and pass on their genes to generations of descendants. So why, after
millions of years of human evolution, do we still have brains that lose their
temper? In what way is this emotion – which is often viewed in a negative
light – an evolutionary advantage?
The answer is that anger helps us to keep unacceptable, antisocial
behaviour at manageable levels because people who are tempted to act like
jerks know that they will soon feel the wrath of those around them. While
sadness and fear make us shy away from uncomfortable situations, anger
drives us to resolve them. It is generated by neurons in the gyrus (in the
middle of the brain, just above the corpus callosum), the cingulum and the
left frontal lobe, all of which burst into life whenever you tell someone off
for elbowing their way to the front of a queue or failing to show up for
work on time (see Fig. 17). Interestingly, strong men and beautiful women –
that is, those with obvious evolutionary advantages – often have hotter
tempers than the rest of us, too. They’re also adept at resolving conflicts to
their own advantage.
A Dutch study found that it usually pays to express anger or irritation
during negotiations. That’s because we tend to concede more when sitting
across the table from someone who’s angry as opposed to someone who
seems satisfied. We find their anger so uncomfortable that we back down
time and again in a bid to soothe them, which means they secure a much
better deal than if they’d remained calm.

Stress kills neurons

If your life is in imminent danger, digesting your breakfast or making some
new white blood cells suddenly doesn’t seem so important. So those routine
functions are put on hold while your brain ensures that it and your muscles
receive all the energy they need.
 The instant your brain realises that you’re under threat, it sends nerve
impulses down your spinal cord to your adrenal glands and asks them to
release the hormone adrenaline. As soon as this enters the bloodstream,
your heart rate and blood pressure both increase and you start to breathe
faster. All of this enables you to send oxygen- and nutrient-rich blood to
your muscles and brain in double-quick time. Meanwhile, your liver raises
your blood sugar level in preparation for action. Without this impressive
stress response, our species would never have survived on the African
savannah.
Figure 18: The right half of the brain shown from the middle, with a closeup of the three
structures that are responsible for controlling the body’s hormonal system. The brain’s
stress hormones stimulate the adrenal glands, which in turn release their own stress
hormones into the bloodstream.

The hypothalamus sits directly beneath the brain’s gossipmonger, the

thalamus. It controls the pituitary gland, which looks like a tiny pair of
testicles hanging beneath the brain. After receiving an order from the
hypothalamus, the pituitary gland releases a hormone that causes the
adrenal glands to release cortisol (yet another stress hormone). This is vital
during your stress response because it maintains high blood sugar and high
blood pressure for as long as you need to escape danger.
There are multiple causes of stress – from everyday annoyances like long
queues at the supermarket to major life events like the birth of a child or a
natural disaster. Feeling stressed about a chemistry test helps you focus, set
aside other projects and stick to learning the periodic table. Over the short
term, then, a certain amount of stress is often beneficial. However, a stress
response that continues for weeks or even years is almost always harmful.
High blood pressure, especially when accompanied by high cholesterol and
high blood sugar, increases the risk of a heart attack or stroke. One study
showed that medical students had 20 per cent more cholesterol in their
blood before an exam than after it. Accountants had both higher cholesterol
levels and markedly faster blood clotting during stressful days in the run-up
to the end of the tax year.
Continual stress doesn’t just affect our cholesterol level, blood pressure
and blood sugar. Cortisol also has a hand in accelerating the brain’s ageing
process. After travelling around the bloodstream, it reaches the
hippocampus – the brain’s memory centre. Once there, it helps us memorise
stressful events – an essential survival mechanism as it enables us to avoid
dangerous situations in the future. However, prolonged exposure to cortisol
eventually damages and ultimately kills the neurons in the hippocampus.
It’s impossible to avoid stress completely. We’re all at risk of being flung
into new, frightening or unforeseen situations. But we differ in terms of how
long we let these new situations bother us and what we do to address them.
Many studies have shown that people with a positive outlook on life live
longer and happier lives than their more peevish neighbours. So don’t let
new or undesired situations stress you out for months on end. Calm down,
remain positive, minimise your stress and start to enjoy life.

Anxious about anxiety

Early one morning, when I was sitting in the laboratory, one of my
colleagues walked through the door and shouted, ‘Hi.’ This startled me
because I hadn’t expected anyone else to turn up for many hours and I was
so focused on what I was doing that I hadn’t heard his footsteps in the
corridor. As a result, I dropped the glass cylinder I was holding and it
shattered on the floor. My colleague wryly remarked that he wouldn’t
bother saying hello in future if that was my reaction.
In such situations, I’m tempted to curse my overactive amygdala – the
brain’s emotional centre. It makes me spill hot coffee every time I walk
round a corner and meet someone unexpectedly, and I’ve got reams of notes
in which a line of ink veers right off the edge of the page because someone
shouted my name at an inopportune moment. Feeling startled is a
completely spontaneous reaction. After all, the amygdala is one of the more
primitive parts of the human brain, so it reacts to sensory information
almost immediately. I simply don’t have the time to interpret the abrupt
sound I hear as a friendly greeting. Cecilie, one of my closest colleagues,
understands this, so she now makes a discreet noise before approaching me.
As a result, I’ve wrecked less of our research than I might have done!
There’s a big difference between my sort of jumpiness and full-blown
anxiety. Indeed, anyone who’s experienced anxiety will tell you that it’s one
of the worst things a person can experience. In effect, your whole body
reacts to the fact that your brain has just pushed the alarm button. You’re so
scared that your chest tightens and you feel a knot in the pit of your
stomach. You’re convinced that your heart is about to jump out of your
ribcage. You become dizzy and feel as if you’re about to faint. The effects
are so severe that millions of people choose to isolate themselves and avoid
places or situations that might trigger an attack. For example, if a person
has suffered a panic attack in a grocery store, they might avoid all grocery
stores or even refuse to set foot outside the house.
The amygdala sits at the tip of the hippocampus (see Fig. 17), and the
two work very closely with each other. With the hippocampus’s help, you
are able to remember the last time you started to hyperventilate and almost
fainted in the queue for the checkout. That memory alone is enough to
activate your amygdala, so you become anxious about your own anxiety.
We feel anxiety when rational fear is allowed to run wild. In general, fear
is a beneficial emotion: it stops us putting our hands in open fires and
persuades us not to wander down dark alleys in crime-ridden parts of town.
If we walk too close to the edge of a cliff, our amygdala decides that we
should start to feel afraid so it sends out signals that make our legs shake
and our palms sweat. In short, it protects us from going any further and
doing ourselves an injury. As they say, forewarned is forearmed.
Unfortunately, sometimes the brain can be too wary. Some people feel
their bodies gearing up to fight or take flight several times a day, even when
there’s no evidence of any danger. When this happens – due to the brain
misinterpreting everyday situations and sensing a threat around every
corner – we’re no longer talking about regular fear, but anxiety. Most of the
blood is directed to the body’s major muscles, while the hands, feet and
digestive system are all neglected. As a result, the body’s extremities start
to feel cold and numb and the mouth becomes dry. Meanwhile, the heart
beats like crazy and the lungs start hyperventilating. This causes the arteries
in the brain to contract, leading to dizziness and fainting.
While great advances have been made over recent years in the treatment
of depression, anxiety is still treated with mind-numbing drugs that can lead
to dependency and intoxication. However, there are alternatives. As we
have seen, the brain is a dynamic organ: as you learn, it changes. Therefore,
cognitive therapy focuses on explaining the symptoms of panic attacks, and
especially why sufferers experience them. Armed with this information, a
sufferer is less likely to spiral into terror the next time they start
hyperventilating or feel their heart racing. Remember, the brain’s frontal
lobes do have the capacity to talk some sense into the more primitive limbic
system. So, with a little practice, many people are able to take control of
their anxiety and halt a panic attack before it’s really had a chance to get
going. In short, they learn to feel less anxious about their anxiety.
If thinking your way out of anxiety doesn’t work, physical exercise can
generate new neurons and stimulate the release of several neurotransmitters
that help reduce stress. Endurance training seems to be particularly effective
in this regard. So regular exercise not only keeps you physically fit and
healthy; it also helps you combat anxiety or depression.

Loving with your brain

Being in love makes your heart beat faster and your voice tremble. You feel
like you need to pee about a thousand times before that first date with
someone you’ve fancied for months. You have butterflies in your stomach
and say that you love someone from the bottom of your heart. But all of
these physical sensations are caused by activity in the brain, which then
sends signals to the body.
As yet, we don’t know what it is in the brain that makes us fall in love.
However, we do know that love is an extremely complex emotion. It’s not
like fear and anger, which are almost entirely generated by the amygdala.
When research subjects are shown pictures of people they love, several
parts of the cerebral cortex, especially the insula, as well as deeper and
more primitive parts of the brain, such as the basal nuclei and the limbic
system, light up in their MRI scans. All of these regions of the brain are rich
in the reward neurotransmitter, dopamine, which gives us the motivation to
overcome our fear and approach people we find attractive in the first place.
Only 5 per cent of mammal species generally stick with one partner
throughout their lives. We are one of them, and coyotes are another. Most
coyotes are highly sensitive to the ‘love hormone’ – oxytocin – and tend to
remain loyal to their partners. Those with brains that are less sensitive to it
often go against type and switch partners. Most humans – as well as most
coyotes – produce large amounts of this hormone during birth, nurturing
and mating, and it certainly seems to play a role in strengthening the bonds
of affection. For instance, studies have shown that men with naturally low
levels of oxytocin are less likely to get married. But filling a nasal spray
with oxytocin and squirting it up the nose of a sleeping partner with
‘commitment issues’ won’t necessarily make him pop the question the next
morning. Both the brain and love are much more complicated than that.
Oxytocin is just one piece of the puzzle.
And it should be remembered that romantic love is just one aspect of this
multifaceted emotion. For instance, parental love motivates us to dedicate
years to caring for our children – a process that ensures the survival of our
genes for at least one more generation. Brain scans have shown that this
type of love is located specifically in the grey matter surrounding parts of
the drainage system for the cerebrospinal fluid in the brainstem.
My daughter chose to come into this world almost two and a half months
early. She was placed in an incubator and received all of the help and
support the medical team could provide. Her temperature was closely
regulated, nutritional physiologists administered essential vitamins and
minerals through a tube, and oxygen was blown into her nose. But I knew
that the hospital couldn’t meet all of her needs. Infants’ brains need love
and nurturing if they are to develop properly. Food, warmth and clean air
simply aren’t enough. Nor was it enough for the physiologists to add my
expressed breast milk to her feeding tube. She couldn’t feel indirect love;
she needed direct, skin-to-skin contact.
Even full-term babies don’t have fully developed brains at birth. Rather,
their brains continue to develop as they interact with other people. So
insufficient interaction results in insufficient development. In the middle of
the twentieth century, several studies found that infants and young children
in hospitals and orphanages have a tendency to become passive, lose the
ability to walk or talk and stop gaining weight. Some even die. While such
children generally receive adequate food, clothing and warmth, they are
deprived of love. Hence, a doctor named René Spitz concluded that all
children need nurturing if they are to develop normally. It was later
discovered that the brains of children who have been emotionally neglected
are smaller than those of children who are raised by loving parents.
Children learn when they are greeted with a smile the first time they try to
walk a few steps or when they are comforted after a fall. This learning
process involves the creation of hundreds of thousands of new neural
connections, so the brain physically grows. On the other hand, neural
connections can wither and die if a child fails to use them, especially in the
first two years of life.
Further studies have shown that brain development is impaired even
when children are raised in attentive, caring institutions. One or two
permanent caregivers who are always there for infants and toddlers simply
seem to be more conducive to full development than twenty or thirty
employees who work in shifts, no matter how affectionate the latter may be.
One study monitored the progress of two groups of orphaned children:
those in the first group went into foster care while those in the second were
raised in an orphanage. After a number of years, the former group scored
higher on an IQ test than the latter.
However, the brain controls every aspect of who we are and how we live
our lives, so a loving, nurturing environment is crucial for more than just
our intellectual development. Children who receive unconditional love
while growing up are also more likely to be socially adept and empathetic
than those who are neglected. So, in the long run, we’d all benefit if they
were given it.
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 CHAPTER 6

INTELLIGENCE

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In 1933, the author Aksel Sandemose proposed what he called the ‘Law of
Jante’. In essence, his suggestion was that individuals shouldn’t be too full
of themselves because the welfare of the group is more important than
individual achievement. This idea is typically Scandinavian, and it dates
back much further than the 1930s. Indeed, the epigraph above is taken from
a Viking-era poem called the Hávamál that was first transcribed in the
thirteenth century.
Nevertheless, Scandinavians also accept that everyone is different. We
understand that each individual has his or her particular strengths and
weaknesses. We know that some have a great sense of humour, while others
have a terrific memory, are more musical, can pick up a new language in an
instant or are more adept at sports. Yet, we are not so willing to accept
natural differences when it comes to intelligence. In this respect, we believe
that everyone should be included and everyone should be equally
impressive. But is there really a measurable factor that we can call
‘intelligence’ and, if there is, does it tell us anything about ourselves?
Intelligence can be defined in various ways, so there are many possible
answers to this question. Moreover, some people believe that it is not a
single, definable characteristic at all but should be divided into various
constituent parts, such as social intelligence, language-related intelligence,
musical intelligence and so on. Others argue that this undermines the whole
concept of intelligence and insist that we should focus on the classic
definition – an aptitude for abstract thought – and not include applied or
social skills.
Some people who are deemed to be highly intelligent on the basis of this
classic definition are also accomplished tennis players, while others trip
over their feet every time they set foot on the court and never manage to hit
the ball. Some of them have extraordinarily good memories while others
can scarcely remember what they had for breakfast. All they have in
common is that they seem to be extremely accomplished at acquiring
knowledge, solving problems and thinking logically. No more, no less.

IQ
To be of any value whatsoever, a test of intelligence must measure a
person’s reasoning and aptitude for abstract thought independent of their
ethnic and socioeconomic background, education and gender. The ideal
would be a test that produced very similar results every time a certain
individual took it, with no significant variations over time.
IQ stands for ‘Intelligence Quotient’, with ‘quotient’ another term for
‘ratio’. So the first IQ tests supposedly generated ratios of the participants’
mental age to their chronological age (with the results multiplied by 100 for
ease of comparison). They were not absolute measures of the participants’
intelligence, per se. IQ is no longer calculated in this way, although the
name lives on. Today, everyone who sits an IQ test is measured against a
reference group where the average is set at 100. An individual’s score is
based on how they perform in relation to that reference group. Hence, if a
whole population were to sit the same test, the results should generate an
almost perfect bell curve. Approximately 50 per cent of the sample will fall
between 90 and 110, 68 per cent will fall between 85 and 115, and about 96
per cent will fall between 70 and 130. The 2 per cent who record an IQ
below 70 are classified as intellectually disabled. The 2 per cent who score
more than 130 are eligible for membership of the international high-
intelligence organisation, Mensa.
For almost a century, countless teams of researchers have striven to make
IQ tests as good as they can be. Yet there are still dozens of rival systems,
each with its own supporters. In other words, after a hundred years and
millions of test papers, even the experts can’t agree on the best way to test
intelligence.

Figure 19: A typical IQ graph, with 50 per cent of the sample group falling between 90 and
110.

The most commonly used tests aren’t designed to measure the

participants’ level of formal education or their knowledge of reading,
writing and arithmetic, so the questions are often based on abstract pattern
recognition. Nevertheless, participants from some cultures may never have
used a pen before arriving at the testing centre, which puts them at an
obvious disadvantage in comparison with those from Western nations.
Moreover, as with any other exam, performance can vary depending on how
the participant is feeling when they sit the test. A broken heart, financial
worries, insufficient sleep or a lack of food might result in a loss of
concentration and a score of 105 (average) rather than 115 (intelligent).
Finally, the designers of IQ tests seem to assume that they will always be
held under optimal conditions – in bright, well-ventilated, quiet exam halls.
Of course, this is often not the case, especially in the developing world.
Understandably, then, critics of IQ testing insist that it is a far from
perfect measure of intelligence. Nevertheless, many countries continue to
use it in medical diagnostics. As mentioned earlier, anyone with an IQ
below 70 is classified as having an intellectual disability, but there are
subcategories all the way down to less than 20. For instance, in Norway at
least, a person with an IQ below 55 cannot be held criminally accountable
for his or her actions. Therefore, the concept of IQ seems to be generally
accepted when dealing with those at the lower end of the scale.
The situation is rather different for those who score more than 130. Few
people view high intelligence – at least as measured in an IQ test – as
synonymous with wisdom. The latter is seen as a broader concept that
includes common sense and acquired knowledge as well as abstract
reasoning. It is linked to what has already been learned, whereas IQ is
primarily related to the potential to learn. Even members of Mensa can find
it difficult to realise that potential.

High IQ – so what?
In practical terms, is it really any use to know that the next figure in a
sequence will be a parallelogram divided into four white and black
segments? Does having the ability to work that out during an IQ test prove
that a person has an excellent memory or knows how to be a good friend,
parent or spouse? Of course it doesn’t. You can easily find a homeless
person with a high IQ, or a millionaire businesswoman with an average IQ.
Nevertheless, in general, ‘intelligent’ people – that is, those with IQs above
110 – are often able to come up with solutions to problems that others fail
to see. That alone means they are more likely to find a good job, earn a high
salary, live in a comfortable house and even enjoy a harmonious family life
than those who are lower down the scale.
One study found that 55 per cent of people with a low IQ had dropped
out of high school, while all of those with a high IQ had completed their
secondary education. That could explain why 30 per cent of those with a
low IQ were in a bad financial situation, while only 2 per cent of those with
a high IQ were experiencing similar trouble. Perhaps more surprising is the
fact that IQ appears to correlate just as well with domestic stability. For
instance, women with low IQs are four times as likely to have children out
of wedlock as those with higher IQs, while mothers with low IQs are eight
times as likely to receive benefits as their counterparts with high IQs.
Similarly, individuals with below-average IQs are twice as likely to go
through a divorce as those who are above average.
All of us have probably seen a handsome boy or a beautiful girl walking
down the street and secretly hoped that they’re not too bright, because it
doesn’t seem fair when someone ‘has it all’. But nature isn’t fair. Recent
research has established a link between appearance and intelligence. Simply
put, it seems that attractive people – as a group – are smarter than the rest of
us. One study followed 17,000 British children between 1995 and 2011,
during which time each and every one of them sat eleven intelligence tests.
Meanwhile, multiple teachers objectively evaluated their appearance.
Similarly, an American study followed more than 20,000 children over the
course of eight years. Again, the students sat a number of intelligence tests
and independent assessors evaluated their physical attractiveness. In both
the British and the American study, there was a clear correlation between
good looks and intelligence.
In the years since these reports were published, many researchers have
attempted to explain their remarkable findings. Some have argued that
intelligence and attractiveness are both manifestations of general good
health, citing the old adage, ‘Healthy mind, a healthy body’. Others believe
that the correlation is linked to natural selection. Intelligent men with good
jobs and secure financial situations tend to marry attractive women and vice
versa. And because both intelligence and physical features are heritable,
their children tend to be both attractive and smart.
Even if IQ tests only test our ability to solve seemingly meaningless
conundrums – such as recognising the next geometric figure in a sequence –
multiple studies have shown that the results can be used to predict a
person’s aptitude for tasks that demand high-level language and
mathematical skills or a good memory. These clear correlations have led
some researchers to argue that IQ tests actually measure a sort of general
intelligence, known as the g-factor. When this is tested, subjects achieve the
same results regardless of whether the test uses words, series of numbers or
abstract figures, and regardless of whether it is taken orally or in writing,
individually or in a group. A high g-factor score usually correlates to
subsequent success in school or at work.
In conclusion, though, a high IQ doesn’t equate to high intelligence;
rather, it’s just one measure of intelligence. Moreover, while intelligence
might help you achieve your goals, many other factors are sure to come into
play, too. Nobody’s life is preordained by their position on an IQ scale.

Long-headed and short-headed

Today, most of us scoff at the nineteenth-century pseudoscience of
phrenology, which attempted to estimate people’s intelligence from the
shape of their heads. However, a number of recent, scientifically rigorous
studies have claimed that there is indeed a link between brain size and IQ.
We know there are exceptions – including Einstein – but on average, it
seems that extremely intelligent people generally have larger brains than
those of more average intelligence (according to their relative positions on
an IQ scale). That is, if you add together all of the brain sizes of a large
group of intelligent people and compare that number with the aggregate
brain sizes of an equal number of less intelligent people, the first figure will
be significantly larger. And the difference between the two groups is even
more pronounced when just the frontal lobe (which is important for logic
and abstract thinking), the temporal lobe (which, among other things, is
important for memory) and the cerebellum (which is most concerned with
motor coordination but also has a role to play in thought processes) are
measured. Interestingly, no study has managed to establish a link between
the amount of white matter – which houses the brain’s signal pathways –
and IQ. By contrast, the correlation between the amount of grey matter –
where the neurons themselves are found – and intelligence is undeniably
strong.
This holds true for children as well as adults, with the correlation
especially clear when only the cerebral cortex at the front of the frontal lobe
is measured. Yet, this doesn’t mean that we should start assessing
everyone’s intelligence on the basis of their brain scans alone. While the
correlation between the amount of grey matter and intelligence now seems
indisputable, at most it accounts for only about 20 per cent of the difference
in intelligence between one person and another.
Researchers around the world are now exploring how the brains of highly
intelligent people actually work. Over the last twenty years, a number of
studies have found that intelligent people employ smaller amounts of their
cerebral cortex when solving problems than those with lower intelligence.
The general conclusion is that their neural activity is more focused.
 It takes a huge amount of effort to reach the top in any field: you don’t
get to be a four-time Olympic champion like Mo Farah by lounging around
on the sofa. But it’s certainly an advantage to be born with a good pair of
lungs and a strong competitive instinct. Obviously, very few people would
be able to match his achievements, even if they trained just as hard and in
precisely the same way. That’s how it is with the brain, too. We’re all born
with different potential, so it’s simply a case of realising as much of it as
you can.

Nature or nurture?
Most of the variation in intelligence between individuals in a particular
population seems to be due to genetic inheritance rather than environment.
For instance, the circumstances in which adopted children are raised don’t
have a noticeable effect on their IQ, as long as they receive good care.
Instead, as they grow up, their IQs tend to approximate those of their
biological parents, even if they’ve never met them. Therefore, financial or
social context seems to have no lasting impact on intelligence, at least as
measured by IQ tests in the Western world. A number of studies have found
that it has some effect on children’s IQs, but this seems to disappear as they
reach adulthood.
Nevertheless, the debate about the relative importance of nature versus
nurture in determining intelligence shows no sign of abating. In part, the
controversy has been fuelled by the fact that average IQ has increased over
time. Now, this is a complicated subject because the average IQ of a group
of people who sit the same test must be 100 on account of the way in which
IQ tests are scored: individual participants are always marked in relation to
the group’s average, so half of them will always be in the central, average
band, while smaller proportions will be in the low and high sectors. That
said, the setters have made IQ tests steadily harder over the years, and
someone who scores 100 on one of today’s tests would almost certainly
score higher if they were to sit one from the 1940s.
This is simultaneously both fascinating and frustrating, because we’re
not entirely sure why the human population has become more intelligent (or
at least more adept at answering questions during IQ tests). The general
consensus is that it’s mostly due to natural selection. Throughout much of
the previous century, the children of wealthy, healthy parents were more
likely to survive into adulthood than those of impoverished parents, even in
the West. Therefore, as long as we accept that affluence is linked to
intelligence, the genes of intelligent people were more likely to be passed
down through the generations, leading to a gradual increase in the average
intelligence of the population. However, some researchers are now
suggesting that this process has already ceased and may soon go into
reverse. Whereas the most affluent sectors of society used to produce the
most descendants, the opposite is now the case, partly because they start
trying for children much later in life than the less well-off. Moreover, in the
West at least, medical advances and the development of the welfare state
mean that children from poor backgrounds now have a much better chance
of surviving into adulthood and passing on their genes.
Therefore, it’s safe to say that environmental factors – as well as genetics
– have played a role in the general increase in human intelligence, and not
just in terms of giving the poorer members of society more opportunities to
reproduce. Over the last century, there’s been a clear increase in average
human height due to better living conditions and better nutrition, both of
which have also been linked to improvements in brain function. Similarly,
our daily routines are very different from those of our great-grandparents.
We undertake far more tasks that demand abstract thought and reasoning
than they did, and we are less reliant on practical, hands-on skills. Whereas
they used to scrub their laundry with a brush and feed it carefully through a
mangle, we have to decode complex symbols on the washing machine and
our clothes in order to select the best program. While most of us would lose
a finger if we tried to sharpen a knife on a grinding stone, they would be left
baffled by the buttons on a TV remote control. All of these are
environmental factors, and they have probably contributed to generational
improvements in the type of thinking that IQ tests measure.
Nevertheless, some individuals are sure to be disappointed when they
receive the results of an IQ test. So, is there anything they can do to achieve
a better score next time? The honest answer is ‘not much’. In general, an
individual’s IQ will remain unchanged once they’ve reached adulthood,
regardless of the career path they take or whether they become rich or poor.
If there’s a way to increase the g-factor, no one’s found it yet.
That might sound depressing. After all, we’ve seen that, on average,
people with high IQs are more likely to succeed in life than those of lower
intelligence. However, you can still have a very big impact on your
prospects if you’re prepared to put in the necessary effort. Studies have
shown that Chinese-Americans, Japanese-Americans and American Jews
all overachieve when compared to white Americans. For instance, an
averagely intelligent Chinese-American – with an IQ of 100 – is likely to
achieve just as much in life as a white American with an IQ of 120. In other
words, the effort we put into reaching our full potential can be just as
important as the potential itself.
In light of this, some psychologists have divided intelligence into two
distinct components. The first of these is known as ‘fluid intelligence’ and it
is the form that we have focused on throughout this chapter. It remains
stable throughout adult life – at least until the onset of dementia or some
other form of brain injury – and relates to how well the brain functions from
a biological perspective. The other form – which is known as ‘crystallised
intelligence’ – relates to your ability to make the most of your opportunities
and utilise the skills and knowledge you have learned over the years.
Therefore, although there’s nothing you can do about your fluid
intelligence, you can increase your crystallised intelligence every day and
make the most of your potential.

The downside of high intelligence

Schools are designed for the average student. Those with very low and very
high intelligence tend to be neglected. Consequently, high intelligence does
not guarantee smooth progression through the education system. Indeed, a
child with extremely high intelligence may require more attention than an
average student. For instance, they may become bored and restless if they
understand an assignment immediately and have to wait for the rest of the
class to catch up over the course of the next few days. Over the long term,
slow classroom progress and too few intellectual challenges can cause such
children to develop poor work habits, which in turn can result in them
failing to reach their full potential.
In addition, the most intelligent children often have trouble fitting in
socially. If we think in terms of how IQ was originally calculated – as the
ratio of mental age to chronological age – then it’s hardly surprising that an
eight-year-old child with a mental age of thirteen doesn’t play so well with
her classmates. Indeed, by that age, she might have lost all interest in play.
Maybe the extract from the Hávamál that opens this chapter has a point.
Maybe people who don’t know too much have the nicest lives.
So, to be fair to child geniuses, should we create elite groups in
elementary school in much the same way as we cater to the special needs of
children with low IQs? Or would that merely serve to widen the gap
between them and the rest? These are difficult questions, and there are no
simple answers.

Artificial intelligence
If you score well in an IQ test, there’s a high probability that your whole
brain is functioning well. Therefore, such tests are useful tools for
measuring human intelligence, as long as we define ‘intelligence’ as having
an aptitude for problem-solving and a high capacity for logical and abstract
thinking.
Machines are different. I’m sure a computer could be programmed to
answer all of the questions that appear on a standard IQ test in the blink of
an eye. Maybe such a program already exists. So, if we were to measure
artificial intelligence in the same way as we measure human intelligence,
we’d have to concede that even the humblest laptop is a genius. However,
there are many other aspects of human intelligence. Consequently, even
proponents of artificial intelligence have to acknowledge that no computer
can be considered truly intelligent until it manages to perform all of the
tasks that an average human cerebral cortex tackles every day.
At present, computers do just fine with well-delineated tasks like playing
a game of chess or manoeuvring a trolley around hospital corridors. And the
day is surely coming when a robot will be able to detect tears rolling down
the cheek of a patient and recite a few pre-programmed words of comfort.
But could such a response really be termed empathy if it’s not generated by
compassion? Computer engineers are a very long way from making
artificial brains that work in the same way as our own, not least because we
still know so little about how the human brain actually functions. Moreover,
our brains have evolved over millions of years, so it’s unlikely that they’ll
be replicated in a few decades of software research.
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 CHAPTER 7

CULTURE © THE BRAIN

Why did Stone Age humans carve petroglyphs? When I walk around
Ekeberg, in Oslo, and look at the preserved rock carvings from 4000–5000
years ago, I am left in awe of the amazing human brain. The people who
carved them lived in caves and tents made of animal hides, had a life
expectancy of little more than thirty years and had to find their own food
each and every day to avoid starvation. So why did they devote so much
time and effort to the laborious task of carving figures into rocks? Why
does the human brain value creativity, interpretation and imagination so
highly?
Some people believe that culture must have emerged along with
language and the ability to plan – that is, about 200,000 years ago, when
Homo sapiens first walked the earth. However, the earliest tangible
evidence of human culture is only 40,000 years old, which was around the
time when we started supplementing our traditional tools – such as hand
axes and picks – with fish hooks. It requires a certain amount of abstract
reasoning to devise something as sophisticated as a fish hook, so humans
from this era must have been thinking in much the same way as we do
today. This conclusion is reinforced by the fact that they started painting the
walls of their caves at precisely the same time.
Their stick figures of fellow humans, animals and boats are now
considered fundamental aspects of our cultural heritage, even though they
don’t come close to rivalling the artistic achievement of the ceiling of the
Sistine Chapel. Similarly, musical culture encompasses everything from
Don Giovanni to bawdy drinking songs. Indeed, almost anything can be
considered part of human culture, from our languages, manners, customs
and traditions to our rules, regulations and morals, to politics, religion and
sports. Society’s elders teach us about these things, which means they’re
passed down from generation to generation. But society consists of a
variety of groups, so there’s a variety of cultures. Norwegians aren’t born
with skis on their feet. I had to be taught about my culture.

Together we’re strong

We often think that human capacity is limited to what each individual brain
can achieve, but many heads are usually better than one. Our brains not
only enable us to make tools so that we can cultivate the soil more
efficiently but allow us to communicate and teach others what we know.
Once someone invents the wheel, the next generation doesn’t need to
reinvent it. Instead, they can work on improving the design. Then a later
generation can attach the wheels to a cart. Then bicycles, trains and cars can
be developed.
Many other species also use tools, but they rarely refine them over
generations. That’s because no other species has our capacity for
cooperation and empathy. We have so-called ‘mirror neurons’ in our highly
developed cerebral cortex that help us see ourselves in others. Those that
burst into life when I scratch my chin are also active when I see you
scratching your chin. We don’t even need to do it at the same time. Several
studies have suggested that these neurons also play a role in social
understanding, and possibly even in empathy.
Human interaction and cooperation are also facilitated by our unique
ability to talk, read and write. Our highly developed thought processes and
language skills mean we are no longer slaves to our instincts. They enable
us to ask questions, judge and adjust the way we behave towards ourselves
and others, formulate rules, and ultimately organise ourselves into civilised
societies. The ways in which we interpret, think and speak today are the
culmination of generations of social rules, norms and values that have
underpinned a series of cultures throughout human history.

Social networks
So, there would be no culture without our complex brain; but, in return,
culture gives that complex brain the perfect environment in which to grow.
It ensures the safety and security that our brains need if they are to continue
developing over the course of the lengthy human childhood (which, in total,
comprises almost a quarter of the average person’s lifespan). Genes provide
the foundation of the brain’s structure and the basic functions that it is able
to perform at birth, but immediately thereafter the newborn child’s
surroundings start bombarding its senses with new information that affects
and shapes its young brain. Neurons send this information to the regions of
the brain that are best equipped to interpret it, following paths through the
rudimentary communications network that the genes have constructed.
However, as the data continues to pour in, it creates denser, more numerous
and more complex neural connections. When we’re born, each neuron has
about 2500 points of contact in the form of synapses. By the time we’re two
or three years old, each neuron has about 15,000 synapses! And all of those
new points of contact develop in response to the sensory information our
brains receive, and therefore our environment.
It’s easy to see that the brain of a newborn baby – who can’t even make
eye contact – is not fully developed. Yet, in the first year alone, infants start
to react to facial expressions and tone of voice by smiling at happy faces
and crying in response to stern rebukes. Not long after, they learn to speak
and think for themselves, but always within the context of the norms and
rules that dictate what is right and wrong in their environment. Hence, the
outside affects the inside, and the inside affects the outside.
It’s precisely because so much of our brain develops after birth that
nature’s genetic grip over humans is looser than it is with any other animal.
We have the ability to re-examine our genetically instilled instincts on the
basis of what we acquire through socialisation, which has resulted in the
huge range of diverse cultures that coexist in the human population today.
The moment when children start to understand that some people have
utterly different thoughts and attitudes from their own is considered an
important milestone in the maturation of the human mind. In general, this
process begins at around the age of three or four, but I’m convinced that
some full-grown adults haven’t gone through it yet. Indeed, if everyone
throughout history had developed a full understanding and appreciation of
alternative cultures while still a toddler, maybe the United States would
have a chief instead of a president, and Australians would be throwing
boomerangs instead of cricket balls. The socialisation process means that
we see ‘our people’ as normal and civilised, and others as strange, alien,
maybe even uncultured. For instance, in some places, girls are taught it’s
unseemly to show their hair; in others, it’s considered improper to hide it.
Gradually, though, now that we are more familiar with a wide variety of
different cultures than at any time in human history, we are learning to
accept and respect them. Of course, we still have a long way to go, but we
are starting to realise that we live in a complex, densely populated social
world that will surely collapse without cooperation, negotiation and
tolerance.

The social code

Our cultural norms rein us in and control us. They lubricate the social
machinery. The rules relating to appropriate and inappropriate behaviour
have been imprinted on every one of us as we’ve grown up. We use them as
a template for our social conduct as we proceed through life, but we also
make our own, personal rules with the help of the foremost part of the
frontal lobe – the prefrontal cortex. The maturation of this part of the brain
relies on it receiving the optimal amount of dopamine, the reward
neurotransmitter – neither too much nor too little. If the level of dopamine
starts to vary, a person may become impulsive or distracted.
Similarly, people with a damaged prefrontal cortex lose the ability to
follow society’s rules. They often become uninhibited, entirely governed by
their own urges. If they want to pinch someone on the bum, they do so. If
they think an apple looks good on the supermarket shelf, they grab it and
start eating it; they don’t bother to take it to the checkout. They do whatever
occurs to them, whenever it occurs to them, regardless of how inappropriate
their behaviour might be. Several studies have shown that individuals who
don’t have a fully developed prefrontal cortex can develop antisocial
personality disorder and might even start to commit serious criminal
offences. This is becoming a major concern for the criminal justice system.
If someone’s criminality can be attributed to a malfunctioning or
undeveloped prefrontal cortex, is it right to punish them? After all, if
someone doesn’t understand the rules of the game, if they can’t tell the
difference between what’s right and wrong, should society hold them to
account for their actions?
Humans have learned to cooperate with each other to secure food, care
for our children and protect ourselves, among many other things. This
cooperation would be impossible without language. We are unique in the
animal kingdom in that we have made communication easier for ourselves
by using symbols. A semicircle with a straight line down the left-hand side
represents a lower-case ‘b’. Get rid of the top of the line and most of the
semicircle and you’re left with an ‘r’. Join a couple of curved lines together
and you make an ‘a’. Put a dot above a short line and you have an ‘i’.
Replace the dot with a line that curves to the right then goes straight down
and you’ve created an ‘n’. Before you know it, you’ve written the word
‘brain’. A few straight lines, curves and dots allow us to communicate our
thoughts and feelings in dozens of different languages. When musicians
decode other lines and dots, they are able to play precisely what a composer
intends them to play.

The creative brain

One way in which we enrich our everyday lives is by telling stories. Our
brain gives us the capacity to create, recite and understand all sorts of tales,
which in turn aids the brain’s development. The psychologist Donald Hebb
discovered that rats who were raised as pets were better at solving problems
than those that grew up in a cage. Other researchers have continued to
explore this phenomenon and have proved that the brain benefits from a
stimulating external environment. Given this research, it’s reprehensible
that ever more primary schools are being built like barracks around a small
patch of tarmac with no consideration for architecture that would help to
optimise the children’s brain development. If laboratory mice and rats are
provided with something as simple as a bundle of sticks in their sawdust,
and especially if they are given a running wheel or a ladder to a second
floor, they start to form more synapses between the neurons in their brains
and their cerebral cortices thicken. Moreover, it’s now believed that they
also create new neurons. So just imagine what a more stimulating
environment would do for human children. Similarly, there are many
indications that the external stimuli which our culture offers in the form of
books, music, theatre shows, architecture and interactions with other people
can delay the onset of dementia, simply because it gives the potential
sufferer greater intellectual reserves.
‘Chop? That’s a great name! That’s going to be your name. You’re going
to be my friend, because there’s no one else here. You and me, we’re
friends.’ In this extract from one of Anne-Cath. Vestly’s children’s books, a
young boy is talking to a plant that looks like a miniature person. No other
species possesses the amount of creativity that’s necessary to think in this
way. Chimpanzees don’t find sticks on the forest floor and befriend them,
and dolphins don’t chat away to dolphin-shaped lumps of coral. Part of
what makes us human is that we have the imagination to do these things.
Whenever you come up with something new, you’re exercising your
creativity, which demands a certain degree of intelligence, critical thinking
and selectivity. However, you don’t need a high IQ to make your mark in a
creative field. Andy Warhol – whom many people would term an artistic
genius – had an IQ of just 86. As was discussed earlier, our brain filters out
much of the constant stream of information from our senses before it
reaches our consciousness. This enables us to focus on the most important
tasks – an important aspect of everyday life. However, creativity rests on
opening ourselves up to sensory information and memories that seem to
have no immediate value or use. This process helps us make connections
between things which, at first sight, seemingly have nothing to do with each
other.
Modern technology such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and
positron emission tomography (PET) allows us to witness the brain’s
creativity in action. The former lets us see which regions of the brain
receive the most blood supply during problem-solving, while the latter
shows us which parts use the most sugar. Specific regions are highly active
when a subject is set tasks that involve motor skills, skin sensation or
language. By contrast, when creativity is tested, many sections of the
cerebral cortex are involved. This is understandable, because creativity
requires cooperation between many different functions that are located in
various parts of the brain, including in one or other of the hemispheres.
For many years, scientists have insisted that creativity is located
primarily in the right half of the brain. However, there’s little hard evidence
for this. While certain parts of the right-hand prefrontal cortex seem to play
a more active role in creativity than their counterparts on the left, this may
be due to the simple fact that much of the left side is devoted to language.
In any case, the rest of the frontal lobe on the left seems to be just as active
as the right during creative tasks, and the same is true of the parietal lobes.
In other words, creativity resides in both halves of the brain.
Does Mozart make you smart?
Many studies have explored the effects of music on the brain. For instance,
does listening to Mozart make people more intelligent? In one study, the
performance of a group of students who were set problems that required
good spatial perception improved for the first fifteen minutes after listening
to Mozart, which led to a rush for his CDs after newspapers reported the
results. Pregnant women started playing Mozart to their bellies in the hope
that doing so would produce smart babies. Indeed, the Governor of Georgia
went so far as to ensure that every newborn in the state received his or her
personal CD of classical music. Other studies suggested that rats’ ability to
make their way through mazes increases if they are played Mozart as
foetuses. Some water treatment plants even started to pipe Mozart through
their facilities because of claims that this stimulates the bacteria to break
down the waste at a faster rate.
However, despite their best efforts, several groups of researchers have
been unable to substantiate the claims of the first study. Sceptics now claim
that the so-called ‘Mozart effect’ is actually just a clever marketing ploy to
boost the sales of CDs, teaching materials and books that champion the
alleged intelligence-promoting properties of his music. One particular piece
– the Sonata for Two Pianos (K448) – has received special attention. Those
who have faith in the Mozart effect claim that this piece harmonises
especially well with the body’s natural rhythms, including brainwaves and
heartbeat. Moreover, several small studies have suggested that it should be
played to patients with a specific type of epilepsy that cannot be treated
with conventional medication.
Although further investigation is needed, at least listening to Mozart
doesn’t have any known negative side effects. And while we cannot
conclude that listening to his sonatas is sure to make you smarter, musical
education does seem to have a role to play in increasing young children’s
general intelligence. This should come as no surprise, since all learning has
a positive impact on intelligence. It probably doesn’t make much difference
whether they try to remember all the words to the latest Taylor Swift album
or learn how to play ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’ on the recorder.
Preference for a particular type of music is a significant component of
individual identity. What sort of people listen to classical music? Actually,
the question should be ‘What sort of people claim to listen to classical
music?’ because scientists have no option but to trust that the subjects they
test in their studies are telling the truth. Anyway, people who say they listen
to classical music tend to have better qualifications and drink more wine
than, for example, hiphop fans, according to British research. But does that
mean that listening to classical music guarantees high educational
achievement, or is this a case of people with a high level of education
simply adopting the habits of their immediate social circle? We know that
the brain is susceptible to influence, and of course one of those influences is
music. How can a single piece of music move one person to tears of joy and
leave another hearing nothing but discordant noise? Many unanswered
questions remain, but musicians and brain researchers are starting to
collaborate on a number of exciting projects in a bid to find the answers.
In the meantime, we already know that the brain does not interpret
singing and speech in the same way. This means it’s possible to lose the
ability to speak – following a stroke, for example – yet retain the ability to
sing. People used to believe that this was because the music zone was
located in the right half of the brain, while the language zone was in the left
half. Now, though, we know that, in general, the left half looks after the
lyrics and the rhythm when we sing, while the right half deals with the
melody. Sound waves that reach our eardrums are interpreted first in the
auditory cortices in the temporal lobes, then further interpretation follows in
other regions of both hemispheres. These regions work as a team to help us
recognise and understand what we have heard. Meanwhile, the limbic
system links emotions to the sounds, which is obviously important for
whether we enjoy listening to them or not.
Therefore, music affects how we feel. Our musical preferences aren’t set
in stone – they depend on what we’re doing and what kind of mood we’re
in at any given time. Regardless of whether you’re listening to Lady Gaga
or Mozart, it has an effect on the human brain that we do not find in other
animals. Whenever you listen to music, the portion of the basal nuclei
known as the nucleus accumbens – the brain’s centre of love and desire – is
activated, which triggers the release of dopamine from a group of neurons
in the brainstem. This signal pathway is called the reward pathway and it’s
activated in a variety of situations. For example, dopamine is released when
a chocoholic eats chocolate, when an addict injects heroin and when you
see that someone has liked your latest upload on Instagram, although the
amount that’s released and hence the degree of happiness you feel depend
on how surprised you are. Consequently, if you stumble across a new song
that you immediately love, your brain releases more dopamine than it does
when you listen to a favourite song that you’ve heard a hundred times
before.
Several studies have shown that we perform better at boring, repetitive
tasks – and finish them faster – when we listen to any sort of music,
regardless of personal preference. But you should hit the pause button
before trying to learn something new. Mentally demanding tasks require
focus, so if you’re studying a new language or trying to solve a difficult
Sudoku puzzle, it’s probably best to turn off the music. However, a group of
nurses told me that a former colleague used to listen to music in the
operating theatre while performing brain surgery. If you’re good at what
you do, then it’s fine to have music on in the background, even during a
demanding task. Indeed, studies in the Journal of the American Medical
Association and other esteemed journals found that surgeons who listened
to their favourite music in the operating theatre worked both faster and
more accurately than when they operated in complete silence. Similarly, a
little background music seems to boost creativity.
This may be linked to the fact that tension is relieved when we listen to
favourite pieces of music, again irrespective of the type of music the
listener prefers. For instance, my little sister has heavy metal blasting out of
the earphones while she studies. Each to her own. But if you need to
concentrate, you should always choose music you know well. As mentioned
above, hearing new music for the first time prompts a massive release of
dopamine, which draws most of your attention to the music rather than the
task at hand. So try to stick to your favourite playlist whenever you’re
working or studying. If you just can’t wait to hear something new, choose
an instrumental or something with very few words as these are less
distracting than songs with lots of lyrics.

The same almighty God

Almost every culture around the world has developed some form of
religion. Some people argue that societies which practise religion have an
evolutionary advantage because they rein in egotistical, antisocial behaviour
by promoting belief in eternal, watchful ancestors and vengeful gods. In this
explanatory framework, the gods take the form of powerful, overprotective
parents who see and hear everything we do and think. People fear them and
obey society’s rules to avoid their censure.
In the period when the ancient Greeks were establishing the world’s first
democracy, the ancestors of the Vikings were holding big parties during
which they sacrificed animals and poured the blood over themselves. How
can two groups with identical brains create such contrasting cultures? Well,
the fact of the matter is that they were not so different after all. The Greeks
also sacrificed animals; and while the Vikings drank copious amounts of
beer, the Greeks probably matched their alcohol intake through their
consumption of wine. Moreover, both of their pantheons of gods – and
many others besides – were associated with important events or phenomena
that humans didn’t understand. Take thunderstorms, for instance. The
Norsemen believed that thunder was heard whenever Thor wielded his
hammer while driving across the sky in his goat-drawn chariot. Greek
children were taught that the Cyclops fashioned thunderbolts for Zeus to
use as weapons in his war with the Titans. The Romans believed that Jupiter
was throwing lightning bolts at his enemies every time there was a
thunderstorm. In Hindu mythology, the storm god Indra summons lightning
with a club as he is pulled across the sky in a golden chariot. While his
chariot may be more ornate than Thor’s, there’s no denying that the human
brain managed to create astonishingly similar myths in very dissimilar
environments at almost exactly the same time.
Eventually, as belief in the old mythologies started to fade, new gods
emerged, although some religious historians claim that the God of Judaism,
Christianity and Islam was originally just one member of an earlier
pantheon – a volcano god who controlled thunder and lightning. Either way,
most people once again conformed to a single pattern, this time by placing
their faith in one almighty God.

Different cultures, similar stories

Similar patterns also emerge in the world’s myths and fairy tales. For
instance, the Brothers Grimm’s Cinderella bears a remarkable resemblance
to the Norwegian Katie Woodencloak, who also entrances a prince to
escape from a life of gruelling domestic servitude. Our heroine is helped by
a dove in the German version, a bull in the Norwegian version … and a
fairy godmother in Charles Perrault’s French version, which Walt Disney
preferred when he decided to turn the story into an animated feature film. In
each of these versions, Cinders/Katie has improbably petite feet, so when
she loses a shoe after meeting the prince, he knows he is on fairly safe
ground when he promises to marry whoever it fits. This is a legacy of the
Chinese version of the story – Yè Xiàn. Tiny feet were so revered in
medieval Chinese culture that girls were forced to suffer the agony of foot-
binding, so the paragon of beauty Yè Xiàn had to have the smallest feet in
the land. Of course, Cinders/Katie/Yè Xiàn always marries her prince and
lives happily ever after at the end of the story.

Understanding the abstract

Can geometrical figures be works of art? In Guernica, Pablo Picasso
managed to evoke the horrors of the Spanish Civil War in a series of
triangles, semicircles and jagged lines. He represented a human face with an
asymmetrical triangle, a curlicue (for an ear) and two arcs (for eyes). If I
saw such a creature in reality, I’d be really scared! But when I look at
Guernica, I see a fellow human in anguish. Our ability to interpret and
understand abstract art, musical compositions and installations in this way
reveals the immense complexity of the human brain and the power of its
reasoning.

Crazy or brilliant?
Our brain is so complex that misconnections can occur, however. We’re
already familiar with this problem from our dealings with modern gadgets:
the more complicated they are, the more likely they are to malfunction. In
humans, this complexity is most apparent in highly creative artists, who are
often condemned as crazy and praised as brilliant in equal measure.
Under normal circumstances, the human brain – specifically the cerebral
cortex and the thalamus, which sits at the top of the brainstem (see Fig. 1) –
sees to it that we receive essential information about what’s going on
around us in manageable portions by filtering out all of the extraneous
detail. For instance, this filtering process allows us to understand the
essence of a message without any need to analyse each word individually. It
also lets us conduct a conversation in a shopping mall while our ears are
bombarded by twenty or thirty other conversations, a cacophony of songs
blaring from every store, the rattle of escalators, babies crying and countless
other sounds.
However, it should be remembered that the thalamus is not the most
sophisticated part of the human brain. In most of us, it tackles the problem
of sensory overload as it always has – by blocking the vast majority of the
information we receive – which is one reason why so many people share a
similar world view. Recently, though, a team of Swedish researchers found
that both highly creative and schizophrenic people have far fewer receptors
for dopamine in the thalamus than the rest of us. Hence, their filters are
relatively inefficient, so they are able to draw on information and feel
emotions that the rest of us never experience, which may explain their high
levels of creativity as well as their atypical view of the world. Exploring the
link between creativity and mental illness in this way is a new, exciting
field of research. The sample group in the Swedish project was too small
for the team to draw any firm conclusions, but its findings are already
shedding light on why some people are creative geniuses, why others hear
non-existent voices or see hallucinations, and why some have a foot in both
camps.
Vincent van Gogh painted some of his most audacious works during his
confinement in a psychiatric hospital, while Edvard Munch acknowledged
that his poor health and nervous disposition were prerequisites for his art.
The Starry Night would have looked very different had the former not
suffered a nervous breakdown, and the latter never would have painted The
Scream had he been calm and content rather than beset by anxiety at the
time.
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 CHAPTER 8

EATING WITH YOUR BRAIN

We’ve all grown up knowing that we have taste buds on our tongues that
detect sweet, salty, sour, bitter and savoury (otherwise known as umami)
flavours. And it’s now thought that our intestines are also able to detect
sweet substances, while some studies have suggested that much of what we
call our sense of taste is actually located in the palate rather than the taste
buds. But it should be remembered that we wouldn’t be able to smell or
taste anything without the brain. Taste buds, no matter where they’re
located – on the tongue, in the palate or even in the intestines – do not
provide us with a taste experience on their own. Both taste and smell
become meaningful only when the brain has interpreted the sensory
information it receives. Only then do we taste in the true sense of the word.
All of the choices you make about what you should put in your mouth are
made by your brain. You eat with your brain.

Ancestral eating habits

But if that’s the case, why don’t we eat better, healthier food? Why is every
trip to the supermarket a battle to resist the temptation to buy junk food and
sugary treats? The answer is simple: the older and more primitive parts of
your brain make you crave sweet and salty foods. Moreover, they conjure
up excuses for why you are entitled to a little treat every once in a while.
So, you can blame your ancestors the next time you feel yourself drawn to
the rack of sweets at the checkout. Evolutionarily speaking, it was
beneficial for us to crave salty foods as they provided essential minerals,
umami flavours to ensure we got enough protein in the form of meat, and
sweet and fatty foods, which provided an immediate energy boost and
helped us build up reserves to see us through leaner times. The ability to
store fat was a distinct advantage for our ancestors, not a health risk. When
the next meal depended on a successful hunt rather than the corner shop or
the local takeaway, they had to be prepared for an empty table – maybe for
weeks on end.
Nevertheless, our highly developed cerebral cortex – and especially our
prefrontal cortex – allows us to resist these primitive urges. For instance, we
can use our memory to remind ourselves that chocolate and potato chips
aren’t healthy. Learning is key to banishing our ancient cravings for sweets
and fat.

Food and sex

The Norwegian neurologist Are Brean begins many of his lectures by
pointing out that we all depend on two liminal activities – that is, activities
during which something penetrates the human body’s boundaries. Both of
them are essential to our survival: eating ensures that the individual
survives; and sex ensures that the species survives. Allowing something to
enter the body is always potentially risky, but our brain can draw on several
million years’ experience to keep us safe. It works hard to ensure that
whatever we put in our mouth is not poisonous, and also tries to guide us
towards food with some sort of nutritional value.
Smell plays a crucial role in this gatekeeping process. Our sense of smell
is often unfairly criticised. Although dogs have twice as many olfactory
genes as we do – and therefore much more sensitive noses – our brain is
still able to use the information our nose provides to avoid food that might
hurt us. Indeed, in many ways, our sense of smell is more sophisticated than
any dog’s, because our brain has much more capacity to interpret all of the
olfactory information it receives. So, while dogs can smell little more than
‘food’, ‘potential sexual partner’ and ‘competitor who has strayed into my
territory’, we can smell ‘Christmas’, ‘summer holidays’ and ‘spring
planting’.
Moreover, our sense of smell has an ally in its constant mission to protect
us from poisoning. It’s not only the smell of mould that sets off alarm bells
in most people, but the sight of the blue-green fungus. Yet our brain is so
highly developed that it doesn’t just impose a blanket ban on anything with
that colour and odour combination. At some point in human history,
someone must have eaten some mouldy cheese – probably by accident –
and discovered that they suffered no ill-effects. In fact, they found it
delicious. Once that barrier was crossed, the rest of us could learn from
their example and overcome our inherent aversion to mould – at least in a
slice of Stilton or Roquefort. The same is true of fermented foods. Just
because most Norwegians enjoy some traditional salted, fermented trout
every now and then, that doesn’t mean they’re going to wolf down rotten
bread and apples. It just means that they’ve learned that one particular dish,
when it’s prepared under controlled, hygienic conditions, won’t do them
any harm … despite its rancid smell!

The joy of food

In an evolutionary sense, the eating habits that are causing so many health
problems today helped our brains to grow larger and ever more complex.
So, to some extent, they’re the reason why we’ve been able to become the
dominant species on the planet. Our early hominid ancestors ate foods with
low energy densities, such as root vegetables, leaves and fruit. If their
brains had been as large as ours, they would have had to eat all day long.
Then along came Homo habilis, who mastered the use of fire and thus could
eat meat without the fear of dying from infections. Plus, heating food
dramatically increases the amount of energy that can be obtained from it.
This allowed Homo habilis to meet all of their energy needs with fewer
meals, which in turn meant that all of their thinking didn’t need to focus on
where they might find their next dinner. Since then, all the way up to our
own species, Homo sapiens, the hominid brain has continued to grow
primarily because of our increasing consumption of ever more energy-rich
food. Unsurprisingly then, as far as it’s concerned, the more calories, the
better.
In other words, the human brain is constantly hungry. That’s the price we
pay for being the world’s smartest species. Pound for pound, the brain
needs more energy than any other organ, so it bathes itself in dopamine
whenever we eat – or even see – sugary or fatty foods. This happens
because the primitive parts of the brain are under the misapprehension that
these foodstuffs are still in short supply, as they were 200,000 years ago. In
that sense, it hasn’t been keeping up with the times. Our brain is a product
of evolution, and evolution is a slow process – far slower than advances in
agriculture, which have made ever more energy-rich food available to ever
more people over the last 10,000 years. So it continues to reward what is
now an unhealthy lifestyle, even though this harms rather than benefits
modern humans. Fortunately, the more sophisticated parts of our brain
understand this and have the capacity to do something about it. We know
what’s healthy and what’s unhealthy. So, even if your primitive reward
centre urges you to keep gobbling down sweets, salt and chips, you can
resist the pressure, because the more sophisticated parts of your brain are
able to override the dopamine effect. If this weren’t the case, every last one
of us would be an obese slave to the food industry.
The foods that the primitive parts of the brain crave can ruin not just our
teeth and our waistlines but the brain itself. Fat is stored as plaque inside the
arteries throughout the body, including those within or leading to the brain.
If a lump of plaque comes loose and blocks a cranial artery – or if the build-
up of plaque is so extensive that no blood can get through – you have a
stroke. Ultimately, this can lead to vascular dementia.

Addicted to sugar
So, in the short term, the brain rejoices whenever we consume a little sugar,
salt or fat. Over the long term, however, we need to eat ever more of these
foodstuffs to feel the same effect. Ironically, then, people who routinely try
to increase their pleasure by eating lots of cake tend to get very little
enjoyment out of doing so because they become desensitised to the constant
release of dopamine. Indeed, rather than eating the cake to feel happy, they
have to eat more and more of it just to stop feeling sad. On the other hand,
if you can manage to resist the craving and restrict yourself to one small
slice a week, you will experience unmitigated joy the moment the cake
touches your lips and dopamine is released in your nucleus accumbens (see
Fig. 20).

Marketing experts know their neuroscience

The food industry is well aware that we crave fat, salt and sugar. Over the
years, it has crammed ever more of these substances into its products in a
deliberate attempt to send the brain’s reward system into a frenzy and
demand more. And it is helped by the fact that not all of this craving is an
automatic hormonal response in the most primitive parts of the brain. Some
of it is learned. Many parents not only allow but actively encourage their
children to reward themselves with unhealthy food. For example, primary-
school children are often told they can have a chocolate biscuit as soon as
they finish their homework. Of course, once this system of a sweet reward
for virtuous behaviour is firmly established, it is very difficult to break,
even in adulthood.

Figure 20: The brain’s reward system consists of neural networks in which dopamine acts
as a neurotransmitter. The dopamine signals radiate out from the midbrain to the basal
nuclei, the limbic system and the cerebral cortex. Those that reach the limbic system travel
via the nucleus accumbens, the brain’s principal centre for love, rewards and desire.

On the other hand, while the food industry is adept at exploiting the
human brain’s inherent susceptibility to temptation, we are astoundingly
well equipped to resist. In addition to ensuring the success of our species by
guiding us towards high-energy food, our brain has helped us find a varied
diet. It tells us when we’re full and even when we’ve had too much of a
particular ingredient. The food industry – which never wants us to realise
when we’ve had too much of anything – has researched this extensively and
come up with a partial solution. It has learned that our brains cannot tolerate
too much of any strong flavour, so its products tend towards the bland. Like
most Norwegians, I would have no hesitation in saying that my mum’s
moose steak with homemade gravy tastes infinitely better than any
hamburger. Yet, while I could easily eat a quarter-pounder, I would never be
able to consume that much moose meat in one sitting – the flavour is just
too rich. By contrast, my brain doesn’t emit a ‘stop’ signal or tell me I’m
sated when I’m halfway through a burger because there’s scarcely any
flavour while I’m chewing and absolutely no aftertaste. While our brain
encourages us to eat small portions of a wide variety of ingredients, the
food industry counteracts this by serving up slabs of largely tasteless fodder.
However, simply being aware of this strategy can help us make more
carefully considered food choices.
At least a hamburger eventually fills you up, whereas we seem to be able
to consume other modern foodstuffs, such as potato chips or ice cream, in
almost limitless quantities. That’s because the brain reacts to a host of other
factors in addition to total calories when assessing whether we’ve had
enough or should just keep munching away. For instance, if you eat
something that melts rapidly on your tongue, your brain is fooled into
thinking that you’ve eaten less than you actually have. Similarly, high-sugar
fizzy drinks are dangerous because the brain is less proficient at totting up
the calories when they’re consumed in liquid form.
The end result is that we consume far more calories than we need. And
this problem is exacerbated when we start to look at food combinations. For
instance, drinking alcohol increases the chance that you will opt for fatty
foods, and eating fatty foods increases the chance that you will want a beer
rather than water with your meal. At least, that’s how it works with rats.
Advertising
If you don’t want to be a passive consumer who just pigs out on whatever
those wily marketing experts have decided to promote this week, you
should learn a bit more about your brain. After all, as we have seen, the best
marketeers are already one step ahead of you.
Robert Woodruff, president of Coca-Cola for more than thirty years, once
said that his happiest childhood memory was attending his first baseball
game with his dad. And what did he drink during the game? Why, an ice-
cold cola, of course. Given that he associated a particular product with one
of his fondest memories, Woodruff guessed that others would probably do
the same. Armed with this realisation, he tried to increase the chances of
that product being Coca-Cola by pursuing a strategy of ubiquity. The idea
was to make Coke available wherever there was a reasonable chance of
someone experiencing a special, memorable moment in their life – ball
parks, seaside resorts, movie theatres, you name it. The strategy worked
because the human brain has a tendency to link numerous different
elements in a single memory – sights, sounds, emotions … and tastes. So
Coke became directly associated with millions of happy memories.
Advertisers are constantly attempting to influence our food choices, and
all of their strategies rely on neuroscience and psychology. Commercials
simply wouldn’t work if they didn’t affect our brain and the way we think.
Little children are naive. They believe in Santa Claus because their
parents say he exists, and they think they should eat Frosties because Tony
the Tiger says they’re ‘gr-r-reat’. I grew up at a time when the public
broadcasting company still enjoyed a monopoly on Norwegian television,
so I managed to hold on to my naivety for a little longer than my
contemporaries in America and the United Kingdom. I still feel
embarrassed when I think about how much I spent the first time I tuned in
to a shopping channel. Luckily, I soon learned to resist the slick ads and
clever sales tricks. However, times are changing. Today’s marketing
campaigns don’t need to adopt the same scattergun approach. If you’re a
member of a supermarket’s loyalty scheme, you’re probably already aware
that you receive advertising that’s targeted specifically at you. For instance,
you may receive special offers on cartons of beer and snack foods in the
run-up to your local team’s appearance in the Cup Final, or details of the
store’s range of cakes, party bags and decorations just before your son’s
birthday. It’s very difficult to resist this type of targeted advertising, which
is why marketing departments spend so much time and money gathering as
much information as possible about their customers. How much and what
we put on our tables at home becomes a perpetual struggle between the
advertising campaigns and our own reasoning, which usually tells us that
we don’t actually need any of the stuff they’re offering. We can gain the
upper hand in this battle by reflecting on what influences us and how.
The food industry knows that taste is only a fraction of the overall eating
experience. For instance, it has invested millions in making the perfect
French macaroon – crispy on the outside but chewy in the middle. And
many fizzy drinks would be unrecognisable if the manufacturers dared to
meddle with the amount of carbon dioxide they contain. The feel of food in
our mouths is more important than many of us realise. Similarly, smell
alone can be enough to induce a craving. Just the aroma of freshly baked
bread is sufficient to make people’s mouths water. That’s why you’ll often
smell it as you wander around your local supermarket – in-house bakeries
boost sales.
Mouth-watering is no insignificant matter. Saliva production is important
because any liquid in the mouth helps the food to reach every single taste
bud, resulting in stronger signals to the brain. Food manufacturers are well
aware of this, so it’s hardly surprising that so many of their products feature
sauces and dressings. Similarly, it’s not just the combination of fat, sugar
and starch in chocolate that we find so appealing but the fact that it melts on
the tongue, which promotes the release of saliva, powerful signals to the
brain and ultimately the sense of euphoria that dopamine creates.

Food make-up
It’s rather strange that we think chocolate looks tasty. If it had just been
discovered, it’s extremely doubtful that the modern food industry would
trust us to accept that little brown clumps could be delicious. The
manufacturers probably wouldn’t be able to resist adding artificial dyes in
the hope of stopping consumers’ brains from making all sorts of unfortunate
associations.
Sweet manufacturers usually take the biscuit when it comes to the use of
artificial dyes. They add vivid colours which capture our interest and dangle
the tantalising promise of strong flavours. But even people who steer clear
of sweets and try to eat healthily can’t escape this culinary cosmetics
industry entirely. For instance, some bread manufacturers add malt to the
dough to make their loaves look more wholegrain and therefore more
healthy. Meanwhile, the fish-farming industry has developed a colour chart
to boost the sales of its salmon. Wild salmon flesh can be anything from a
vivid pink to red because the fish eat shrimp and other crustaceans, whereas
fillets of farmed salmon are naturally white. There is supposedly negligible
difference in taste, but consumers have learned to associate colour with
flavour, so the farmers add the synthetic pigment astaxanthin to their fish
feed. As some countries prefer pink and others red, the farmers consult the
colour chart and adjust the amounts accordingly, depending on the intended
market.
As we’ve seen, when we eat food we desire, whether it’s healthy or
unhealthy, we feel a surge of happiness due to the build-up of dopamine in
the nucleus accumbens. But before that happens, many other parts of the
brain have an influence on what we desire. For instance, the amygdala and
hippocampus work together so you remember the pleasure you felt the last
time you treated yourself to a juicy hamburger or a bag of potato chips, and
the insula contributes by enhancing the reward effect. Meanwhile, the
frontal lobe puts everything into context and explains that, since you’ve
been so busy and are feeling so tired, you both need and deserve the energy
boost that a burger will provide … or it tells you that you’ve been eating far
too much junk food lately, so you should opt for the salad instead.

The problem with artificial sweeteners

Dopamine isn’t the only hormone that floods through your brain when you
eat sugar. The appetite-suppressing hormone leptin tells you that you’ve had
enough once you’ve consumed a certain number of calories. But what
happens when you eat something that tastes sweet yet contains hardly any
calories? Artificial sweeteners activate the brain’s reward system in exactly
the same way as sugar, so you feel the dopamine hit; but there’s no build-up
of calories, so no leptin is ever released. As a result, your brain continues to
crave real sugar. This means that artificially sweetened soft drinks aren’t
necessarily the best option when your sweet tooth rears its head, no matter
how many cans you drink, because you’ll have to eat some sugar eventually
if you want to feel sated.
Chocoholic in the womb?
If your mother ate a lot of garlic while she was pregnant, you’ve probably
liked the taste from an early age. Human foetuses are able to taste and smell
substances in the surrounding amniotic fluid from a very early stage of
development, and as we become accustomed to certain flavours, we start to
like them. For instance, mothers who drink a lot of carrot juice during
pregnancy and while they are breast-feeding tend to have children who love
carrots. Thus, while people often say they’ve liked something since the day
they were born, in reality they probably developed a taste for it even earlier
than that.
After a pregnant woman eats something sweet, the foetus swallows much
more amniotic fluid than it does when the mother eats something bitter. And
infants who have never eaten anything other than their mother’s milk
usually adore sugar or sugar-water from their very first taste of it. For
instance, those who wake up from anaesthesia and are totally inconsolable
will often calm down immediately if their dummy is dipped in a little sugar-
water. This does not mean that all crying infants should be pacified with
sugar-water, but it illustrates an important point.
It’s a very different story with salt. Infants don’t like the taste, and they
shouldn’t be fed salty foods. However, their brains can be trained to tolerate
– and even crave – ever larger quantities of it. Our intake of salt has
skyrocketed as our consumption of prepared food has increased
exponentially over the last few decades, and it has been identified as one of
the chief culprits in the prevalence of high blood pressure, heart attacks and
strokes in the Western world. People who eat prepared foods for the first
time usually find them incredibly salty, but their brains soon get used to the
taste. Eventually, they come to expect it, and find meals with ordinary
levels of salt bland. Hence, children who are served ‘grown-up food’ – that
is, with a high salt content – will gradually demand ever more salt, while
those who are routinely served food with a low salt content tend to avoid
excessive saltiness. Fortunately, though, if you force yourself to avoid salt
for a while – either as a child or as an adult – you will soon stop missing it.
In contrast to salt, we are preprogrammed to like fat as well as sugar
from the very beginning. So, to some extent, we are all chocoholics even
before we’re born. However, the amount of fat we crave is open to
influence. For instance, mothers who eat a lot of fatty foods during
pregnancy and while breastfeeding tend to have children who need to
consume a great deal of fat before their reward centres start releasing
dopamine. This means that a mother’s antenatal and post-natal nutrition is
one of the most important non-genetic factors in a child’s brain
development.

Brain food
Pregnant women can sing as many lullabies or play as much Mozart as they
want for the babies in their tummies, but they should really focus on
increasing their consumption of fish, and especially oily fish, because our
brains need the type of fat that these creatures have in abundance. The brain
is the fattiest organ in the human body, but it doesn’t use its fat reserves for
energy. Rather, they are utilised in the production of neurons and other
cells, especially those that insulate the axons with layers of fat-laden
membranes so the signals will travel quickly and efficiently.
There are two main categories of fatty acid: non-essential, which our
body can manufacture; and essential, which we can only get from the foods
we eat. Several essential fatty acids – including omega-3 – are especially
important elements in the brain’s physical structure. Omega-3 is found in
countless foodstuffs, but we have learned that some of these sources are
better than others. The long-chain omega-3 that the brain really needs is
most prevalent in oily fish like salmon, trout, mackerel and herring, as well
as fish products like cod liver oil. By contrast, while some plant products –
such as flaxseed – have high concentrations of omega-3, it is the short-chain
variety, and the human body is not very good at converting this into the
required long-chain form. So the answer is clear: eat more fish.
Brain development is linked to much more than brain size, but it’s
difficult to do safe, detailed studies of babies’ brains, so head circumference
is often used as a proxy measure. A Swedish research team found that
infants whose mothers had high levels of omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids
in their milk tended to have larger heads than those who were deprived of
these nutrients. Another study found that the children of mothers who
supplemented their diet with cod-liver oil (omega-3) during pregnancy and
while breastfeeding had larger heads than those whose mothers took corn
oil (omega-6) instead. Moreover, when these two groups were tested at the
age of four, on average the omega-3 children were found to be more
intelligent than the omega-6 children.
But it’s not just children who benefit from omega-3. We all need this
essential fatty acid to keep our brains in shape. Remember, the brain
continues to develop throughout life: new neurons and new neural
connections are continually formed, while others die and disappear. Several
studies have shown that regular, high consumption of oily fish reduces the
risk of developing memory problems in later life, whereas a low level of
omega-3 in the blood seems to be a risk factor for Alzheimer’s and other
forms of dementia.

Diets
It’s only when we take the plunge and go on a diet that most of us put some
effort into learning a little more about nutrition and exploring what the
various products on offer in the supermarket actually contain, and
especially how many calories they contain. In terms of losing weight, pretty
much any diet will do. As long as you stick to it and consume fewer
calories than your body uses, you’re guaranteed to shed the pounds because
you’ll start to convert your reserves of fat into energy. However, you must
always meet your minimum energy requirements, because your brain will
start to consume itself if your reserves fall too low. This is rarely an issue
for people on regular diets, but it is a factor among those who develop
serious eating disorders, such as anorexia nervosa.
The type of food from which we obtain our energy is an important
consideration for all of us, though. In several popular diets – including
Atkins – most of the energy comes in the form of fat. In short, these diets
steer people away from carbohydrates but allow them to wolf down as
much fat as they want. The idea is to stimulate a process called lipolysis, in
which the body meets its energy needs by burning fat, rather than
carbohydrates. In the secondary phase of lipolysis – ketosis – the body
produces fatty compounds called ketones, which become its principal
source of energy. In a normal, balanced diet, ketosis is the body’s natural
reaction to a crisis situation, so a number of people have claimed that we
should not induce it artificially. On the other hand, many studies have found
that the adult brain continues to function just fine on ketones and suffers no
lasting damage. The only problem is that you don’t enter ketosis as soon as
you start the diet, which can leave the brain temporarily starved of energy;
and if you don’t have much energy, you tend to do poorly in intelligence
tests. However, this normalises after you’ve been on a low-carb diet for a
while.
Crucially, though, all of this only applies to adults. Developing brains are
another matter entirely, especially during pregnancy, when the foetus’s
neurons are forming. In experiments with rats, if the mother is fed a fat-
laden diet, the foetus produces more neurons in the area of the brain that
regulates hunger. Consequently, after birth, the infant mouse has a larger
appetite, prefers fat, has a high level of fatty acid in its bloodstream and a
tendency to become overweight.
When it comes to food, we must remember that the primitive part of the
brain rewards the consumption of all sources of energy, without any
consideration of the long-term consequences. Fortunately, though, the
cerebral cortex can override the primitive reward centre, so we aren’t forced
to gorge on fat and sugar until we suffer an early heart attack or stroke. Eat
everything in moderation, and be extra careful if you fall pregnant. After
all, in the course of those nine months, you will have responsibility for the
development of someone else’s brain.
OceanofPDF.com
 CHAPTER 9

ADDICTION

After the long, dark Norwegian winter – when a hot cup of coffee always
feels like an essential start to the day – it always seems sensible to reset my
system. So, every summer, I abstain from drinking coffee for a whole
month. Thereafter, I limit myself to an occasional cup, which has an instant
impact and helps me feel more awake and focused. However, as the autumn
draws to a close, I feel the need for more and more coffee, until I’m back to
starting every day with a cup. Before long, I wake up each morning with
what seems like a deficit – I need the coffee just to make it back to zero.
And if I’ve had trouble sleeping, one cup just won’t cut it; I need two. This
is an example of dependency and addiction.
Every substance you consume that has a direct impact on your brain can
be defined as a drug. According to this definition, coffee is the most widely
used drug in the Western world. It stimulates your nervous system, so it is
known as a central nervous system stimulant. Others include cocaine,
amphetamines and nicotine. Substances that depress your brain activity are
known as central nervous system depressants. The most common of these is
alcohol, but heroin and cannabis are in the same category.

Dependency
What causes a person who was once a little darling to start stealing from her
parents to get her next fix? There are many natural motivation and reward
systems in the brain, and they reward us whenever we achieve specific
goals. In addition, humans have learned that smoking, eating, drinking or
injecting certain substances can trigger the same reward systems without
any need to reach those goals. It’s cheating, but most of us do it to some
extent.
Addictive drugs have an impact on the brain’s chemistry in three ways:
they can resemble one of the human body’s natural neurotransmitters and
block its path to the brain’s receptors; they can stimulate the release of one
or several of those neurotransmitters; or they can prevent the reabsorption
of a neurotransmitter into the neurons that released it. When the brain is
affected by one of these substances, it tries to regain balance by activating
its defence mechanisms. For instance, after a drug has stimulated the release
of dopamine for a certain period of time, the brain will start to shut down
some of the receptors that are available to that hormone. This reduces the
overall efficiency of the brain’s reward system, so you experience less of a
dopamine rush from sex, food or exercise. You also need to smoke, snort or
drink more in order to enjoy the kind of high you have come to expect. In
other words, both natural and artificial highs are harder to achieve. This is
called ‘tolerance’, and it is due to physical changes in the brain.
Therefore, what people call psychological addiction has a physical
dimension, too. An example of the psychological aspect is when a smoker
feels her stress melting away the instant she places a cigarette in the fingers
of her right hand – before she’s even lit it. Many smoking cessation
methods try to break this kind of mental association, for instance by
encouraging smokers to hold the cigarette in their ‘wrong’ hand, which
generates much less expectation of relaxation and pleasure. Some of these
techniques have proved highly successful, but the physical addiction has to
be addressed, too.
By definition, the neural networks that transmit the signals relating to
habitual behaviour are activated time after time, so they tend to be
extremely strong and stable. However, you can override them. For instance,
the neural networks relating to smoking will eventually deteriorate if a
smoker repeatedly resists the temptation to reach for a cigarette every time
she feels stressed and instead learns to handle the tension in some other
way.
But the best way to avoid addiction is never to start!

Coffee
The first time I decided to give up coffee for a month, immediately after my
final exams, I tried to do it cold turkey and spent the next two days with a
splitting headache. I should have known better.
Because caffeine resembles the neurotransmitter that helps you feel tired,
and blocks its path to the receptors that it usually acts upon, you feel more
awake and alert for the first few hours after you drink a cup of coffee. In
addition, some of the brain’s other neurotransmitters, including dopamine,
work more effectively when the one that makes you feel sleepy is kept
away from your receptors. This prompts your adrenal glands to release
adrenaline, which heightens your alertness and sharpens your focus. All of
this can come in handy if a sick child has kept you up all night and you
have to give a presentation at work the next day. However, if you try to
replicate the trick every day, you should know that your brain will soon
start to make allowances for your behaviour. Once the sleep-inducing
neurotransmitter has been blocked a certain number of times, your brain
will set about making more receptors for it. As a result, if you keep drinking
the same amount of coffee, you will end up feeling just as tired as you did
before. So begins a vicious circle: to experience that familiar coffee pick-
me-up, you simply have to drink more … and more … and more. On the
other hand, if you stop drinking coffee altogether, you will put yourself in a
deficit situation. With no more caffeine blocking any of your receptors, the
sleep-inducing neurotransmitter is suddenly able to act on both the new and
the old receptors, which will leave you feeling not only tired but absolutely
shattered. This is an indication that you’re addicted to caffeine. If your habit
has spiralled to the point where you need numerous cups of coffee each day
just to function normally, then you’re sure to have a correspondingly large
number of receptors for the sleep-inducing neurotransmitter, so you’d be
wise to reduce your intake gradually instead of going cold turkey.
Every time I give up coffee, I comfort myself with the knowledge that
my receptors will start to normalise in a week or so. Nevertheless, even
once I’m well beyond that point, whenever I smell the aroma of freshly
brewed coffee, there’s nothing I want more. That’s a manifestation of the
learned aspect of addiction and it’s harder to shake than the physical
craving. In this case, my neural pathways are telling me that I ‘need’ coffee
because my alarm clock went off so early.
Even when I’m not in a caffeine-free month, I make it a rule never to
drink coffee after lunch. It’s not that coffee stops me from sleeping (I’m one
of those people who can fall asleep anywhere at any time), but I know that
caffeine continues to affect the body for much longer than you might think.
For instance, if you drink a cup of coffee at lunchtime, about 25 per cent of
the caffeine will still be in your system at 10 p.m. While that’s not enough
to prevent me from falling asleep, it will reduce the quality of that sleep.
And that will mean I’ll need even more coffee the next day.

Cocaine and amphetamines

Cocaine is a natural substance, derived from the coca plant, while
amphetamines are manufactured synthetically. Like caffeine, they are both
central nervous system stimulants, but while caffeine resembles and
therefore blocks the neurotransmitter that makes us tired, cocaine and
amphetamines alter the quantities of some of the body’s other hormones.
Cocaine increases the levels of the fight-or-flight neurotransmitter
noradrenaline and the reward hormone dopamine by preventing their
reabsorption into the neurons that have released them. Similarly,
amphetamines (and methamphetamines) increase the level of dopamine.
However, it’s not just the increased level of dopamine that’s important, but
where it occurs. We have already seen that the nucleus accumbens in the
basal nuclei releases dopamine naturally as a reward for achieving some
sort of goal or target, such as providing the brain with much-needed energy
(see Fig. 20). Cocaine’s and amphetamines’ effectiveness rests on the fact
that they trick the nucleus accumbens into issuing a dopamine reward for
something as insignificant as taking a drink of water when you’re thirsty.
Consequently, if you take one of these drugs, you are overwhelmed by the
reward sensation, even though these substances are bad for you.
Put simply, noradrenaline makes you more alert and dopamine makes
you happier – at least initially. Gradually, though, your brain will become
desensitised to both of these hormones, so the things that once gave you
pleasure or triggered your excitement will leave you cold. Ultimately, if you
become an addict, only cocaine will make you happy.

Nicotine
After each drag on a cigarette, it takes only ten seconds for the nicotine to
reach your brain. Once it’s there, it replicates the action of the
neurotransmitter acetylcholine on the neurons of the limbic system, which
promotes the release of the reward chemical dopamine. So it’s actually the
hit of dopamine that smokers crave when they think they’re longing for a
cigarette. Further afield, nicotine also prompts the adrenal glands to release
the stress hormone adrenaline. Hence, it is considered a stimulant.
Nevertheless, if smokers don’t have access to cigarettes, they start to feel
more, rather than less, stressed and agitated because their brains are
deprived of nicotine’s sedative effects. That’s why, paradoxically, smokers
often say they need a cigarette to get going in the morning but also need one
to relax before going to bed at night.
Smoking tobacco has undoubtedly shortened the lives of millions of
people who have died from cancer, heart attacks or strokes. Yet, in light of
its powerful impact on the brain, a number of studies have explored the use
of nicotine in the treatment of Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s. Some
of the results have been encouraging. This is just one of many examples of
a toxin having a positive effect if it is administered correctly.

Alcohol
Alcohol has some influence in most regions of the brain because it binds to
the receptors for a variety of neurotransmitters, including those for
serotonin, which helps explain its numbing effect. Hence, under normal
circumstances, communication between the neurons slows to a crawl under
the influence of alcohol. But if the brain grows accustomed to alcohol due
to long-term use, it tries to increase the signal speed between the neurons by
releasing activating neurotransmitters. So, if an alcoholic suddenly stops
drinking, their brain is left with far too many of these activating
neurotransmitters, which continue to stimulate it until it’s totally out of
control. This is why it’s so dangerous to quit cold turkey if you drink large
quantities of alcohol. You could have vivid hallucinations or even suffer
seizures.
Alcohol would probably be banned immediately if it were discovered
today. Foetuses with alcoholic mothers suffer more harm than those with
mothers who are heroin addicts. That’s because alcohol can cause serious,
irreversible brain damage in unborn children. Moreover, in spite of dozens
of studies, nobody has been able to establish a definitively safe low limit for
alcohol consumption during pregnancy.
Of course, alcohol can also cause brain damage in adults. And this
problem is probably more widespread than you realise. In the Western
world, a good 10 per cent of the population will meet the criteria for
alcoholism at some point in their lives (usually under the age of twenty-
five). When a heavy drinker starts to experience jerky body movements,
eyes that droop to the side, memory problems and confusion, they might be
in the early stages of Wernicke–Korsakoff syndrome, a condition in which
the brain shrinks due to vitamin B1 deficiency. The regions of the brain that
are most affected are two parts of the limbic system that resemble a pair of
breasts – the ‘mammillary bodies’ – the thalamus and the white matter. The
cerebral cortex shrinks too, but that’s probably due to the toxic effect of the
alcohol itself, rather than the shortage of B1. Alcoholics lack B1 because
alcohol prevents the vitamin’s absorption in the intestines, as well as its
storage and conversion into the usable, active form in the liver. Deficiency
is extremely serious because B1 facilitates the brain’s use of blood sugar for
energy, and it also plays a role in the production of some neurotransmitters
and myelin, the neurons’ insulation material.
People who are under the influence of alcohol stagger because of its
effect on the cerebellum, and they lose their inhibitions because of its effect
on the frontal lobe. For instance, after a few drinks, you might not feel any
of your usual fear of rejection when seeing someone attractive in a bar. You
will simply wander – or stagger – over and ask them back to your place.
Moreover, this lack of fear is usually accompanied by a heightened interest
in sex, again because the frontal lobe is unable to perform its usual
constraining function. Unfortunately, though, alcohol has another couple of
tricks to play. It inhibits the centres in the hypothalamus and the pituitary
gland that control sexual function, so while your brain might want sex, your
body might not be so keen (see Fig. 18). And if you pass out before the act
is finished, you can blame that on the booze too, because you feel sleepy
when the brainstem is flooded with alcohol.
The long queues for the bathrooms in your local nightclub are also a
consequence of alcohol consumption. The pituitary gland usually releases a
hormone that causes your body to retain liquid so you don’t get dehydrated.
However, alcohol inhibits the release of this hormone, so you feel the urge
to pee more. As a result, you dehydrate, which is one of the chief causes of
the splitting headache you suffer the next day. Your brain actually shrinks
because of the water loss, so it tugs painfully on the surrounding
membranes.
There’s more to a hangover than just a headache, though. When you pee
too often, you excrete many of the salts that play important roles in the
transmission of nerve signals and muscle control. You also become
nauseated and exhausted, which is exacerbated by poor-quality sleep. Some
people drink to help them fall asleep, which seems logical enough, as
alcohol has a sedative effect and inhibits the brain’s activating
neurotransmitters. Indeed, everyone falls asleep eventually if they drink
enough alcohol. However, when you stop drinking, your brain compensates
by producing more of the activating neurotransmitters than it needs. This
prevents you from falling into a deep, rejuvenating sleep. Moreover, the
overproduction of activating neurotransmitters can lead to uncontrollable
trembling, a sense of uneasiness and even increased blood pressure the
following day. Finally, alcohol is absorbed directly through the stomach
wall and contributes to the formation of hydrochloric acid. If you produce
too much of this acid, the nerves around your stomach will send a warning
signal to your brain that your body is under threat, and your brain will
respond by initiating your vomiting reflex.
How hungover you feel also depends on what you were drinking the
night before. Hangovers are milder if you stick to clear liquids, such as
white wine or vodka, because coloured drinks, such as red wine and tequila,
contain additional toxins, like tannic acid. Of course, if you want to avoid a
hangover altogether, it’s best to avoid alcohol completely. If that’s not an
option, you should at least drink a glass of water for every alcoholic drink,
as that will counteract the effects of dehydration.

Endorphins, morphine and heroin

Endorphins are the brain’s own narcotics. These neurotransmitters are
released when you experience stress or feel pain, and they are particularly
active in the limbic system. They are released during exercise – and
childbirth – to give you a natural high. Yet it is impossible to get addicted to
them. Like other hormones, they are released into the spaces between
neurons and then received by the receptors on the other side of the gap. But
the instant an endorphin binds to one of these receptors, it is broken down
and recycled.
Morphine and its chief derivative, heroin, are chemical compounds that
closely resemble endorphins and therefore fit neatly into the brain’s
endorphin receptors (see Fig. 10). However, unlike endorphins, they aren’t
immediately broken down, so they continue to activate the receptor over
and over again. Other drugs have a similar effect, but heroin and morphine
resemble a number of different neurotransmitters, so they affect a wide
variety of receptors. The brain tries to normalise this overstimulation by
gradually reducing the number of functional receptors. As a result, a heroin
addict needs to use more and more to feel the same effect. Similarly, a
patient who receives regular morphine injections will become habituated
and eventually experience no pain relief from the drug without an increase
in the dose. Moreover, if the morphine or heroin is suddenly withdrawn, the
brain’s endorphins will be unable to compensate because of the shortage of
functional receptors. This results in restlessness, muscular pain,
sleeplessness and nausea. Fortunately, all of these withdrawal symptoms
cease when the number of receptors returns to normal a few weeks later,
although the psychological addiction remains. Even a fully functioning
endorphin system cannot provide the same high as heroin.
While heroin is less harmful to foetuses than alcohol, neither it nor
morphine is harmless. Heroin is particularly detrimental to the brain’s white
matter, which affects addicts’ decision-making ability, stress regulation and
overall behaviour. However, its most obvious and immediate effect is due to
the fact that it sedates the brainstem’s breathing centre at high doses. This
results in serious, life-threatening injuries because the brain and the body’s
other organs are starved of oxygen.
The possession of heroin (let alone its production or distribution) is
illegal in all but a handful of countries around the world, whereas doctors
routinely prescribe morphine for pain relief. Most countries require
medications that can impair an individual’s ability to function normally –
such as morphine – to print a large warning on the packaging. Many
different categories of legally prescribed drugs bear this warning, but it’s
important to remember that most of these medicines are also addictive, and
that they can be abused in much the same way as heroin. Indeed, there are
more fatal morphine overdoses each year than fatal heroin and cocaine
overdoses combined.
Hash
Hash and marijuana – which are both derived from the cannabis plant –
resemble neurotransmitters called endocannabinoids. As we have seen
throughout this book, most neurotransmitters are released from neuron
number one and travel across the synaptic gap to neuron number two.
Endocannabinoids are different because they travel from the neuron that is
usually the recipient to the one that is usually the sender. Some
neurotransmitters activate and others inhibit the brain’s neurons, and a
signal won’t be sent unless the former outnumber the latter.
Endocannabinoids help this process by inhibiting the inhibitors. They affect
your mood via your amygdala, your memory via your hippocampus and the
general functioning of your cerebral cortex. Cannabis overstimulates the
receptors for natural endocannabinoids in all of these regions of the brain,
which leaves them unable to do their job of regulating the signals that the
neurons send between themselves. Given that cannabis’s zone of influence
is so wide, it’s hardly surprising that it has multiple effects – from altering
the user’s perception of time to leaving them feeling relaxed, giddy or
euphoric, and from inducing panic and paranoia to impairing concentration,
learning and memory. In rare cases, it may even result in acute psychosis.
We know that foetuses who are exposed to hash tend to become overly
impulsive as they grow up, and they can also develop learning difficulties
and memory problems. Thus, hash clearly damages the young, developing
brain. Yet many users insist that smoking weed causes no lasting harm to
the adult brain. At least one group of researchers disagree, because they
found that the use of hash greatly increases the risk of developing
schizophrenia.
Schizophrenics struggle to distinguish between their own imagination
and the real world. They are delusional and may see hallucinations and hear
voices. ‘Schizophrenia’ is used as a loose, umbrella term for a number of
different brain disorders that manifest in a variety of symptoms. However,
all of these disorders are chronic: that is, once you develop one of them,
you will have to live with it for the rest of your life. The aforementioned
research project found that 10 per cent of the hash smokers in the study
group developed some form of schizophrenia, as opposed to 3 per cent of
the general population. Now, it should be pointed out that schizophrenia can
be triggered by a wide variety of factors, so it’s impossible to say for certain
that the drug was entirely to blame. But would you really want to run the
risk of tripling your likelihood of developing it?
The marijuana lobby also often argues that it is not addictive. However,
studies have shown that up to 10 per cent of regular smokers become
addicted (compared to 20 per cent of heroin users). This should come as no
surprise because all addictive drugs have a much stronger influence on the
brain’s reward system than natural stimulants like food, sex or exercise. The
brain learns that it can gain trigger euphoria – or gain some respite from
difficult situations and troubling emotions – through intoxication. Just as
Pavlov’s dogs started yearning for food when they heard a bell, smokers
crave a cigarette after dinner because they know it will heighten their
pleasure and contentment. And the same is true of alcoholics who yearn for
their next drink, and heroin addicts who long for their next fix. All addicts
build new synapses between the brain’s neurons as well as whole new
neural networks, and these strengthen the urge to smoke, drink or shoot up.
And the networks don’t disappear overnight when you quit. Indeed, some of
them remain for the rest of your life as unwelcome reminders of what
you’ve given up.
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 CHAPTER 10

REALITY VERSUS PERCEPTION

Look around. Do you think you perceive the world precisely as it actually
is? In the movie The Matrix, Neo is given a choice between taking a blue
pill and remaining in a dream world, or taking a red pill and following a
white rabbit down a hole to the real world. He chooses the red pill, but soon
learns that, in many ways, the dream world is far preferable to reality.
There’s certainly much less chance of imminent death.
Since antiquity, philosophers have pondered whether what we feel, smell,
taste, hear and see is real. If it is, then reality is just a series of electrical and
chemical signals that our brains interpret in a particular way. But what
alternative do we have, because we only have access to the physical world
via our senses?
Thinking about this leaves you feeling a little like Neo in The Matrix.
You realise that the brain only ever provides an adapted image of the world,
and that what the human eye sees isn’t some sort of universal, absolute
reality. Rather, the brain uses the information from our senses to draft its
own personal interpretation of the world. We call this ‘perception’.

Your amazing sense of smell

As we saw in Chapter 3, our sense of smell plays a crucial role whenever
we choose to remember a particular incident. But it’s also often the first
sense to react to a dangerous situation. For instance, it warns us of the threat
of fire long before we see the flames; and it makes us gag or even vomit
before we have a chance to eat rotten food. So what we call ‘smell’
comprises much more than a group of molecules making their way up our
noses. In addition to eliciting a powerful memory, a familiar scent can
prompt us to set higher goals for ourselves or find more effective solutions
for a particular task. You can test this by standing outside a bakery. Studies
have shown that people who are exposed to the scent of freshly baked bread
(or freshly brewed coffee) are more inclined to help strangers. This seems
to be because we associate lovely smells with good memories, and good
memories put us in a positive frame of mind.
Of course, some people will make very different associations. For
example, if, as a child, you gorged on freshly baked bread until you were
violently ill, every time you smell it now, your mood will probably worsen,
not improve. On the other hand, researchers have discovered that the
children of mothers who smoked, drank alcohol or ate a lot of garlic during
pregnancy find those smells appealing. In other words, when our brain
receives and interprets olfactory information relating to a particular smell, it
does not provide an objective impression of reality; rather, it makes a
subjective assessment on the basis of personal experience.

Fooling your taste buds

‘Wow, that was so good!’ exclaimed the biology student who ate a whole
lemon after first sucking on a tablet containing an extract from the so-called
‘miracle berry’. The lemon tasted so delicious because a certain protein
from the berry had bonded to the cells on his tongue. Then, when he
reduced the acidity in his mouth by eating the lemon, the protein was
activated and sent signals to his brain that he was eating something sweet –
even though he wasn’t.
All of our senses can be tricked, which can distort our image of the world
around us. The food industry knows this and fools our sense of taste by
inhibiting bitter aftertastes and promoting sweet flavours, and it will
probably find a host of new ways to do so in the future.

The taste of crunch

We’ve already seen that taste is closely linked to smell. If you’ve ever had a
blocked nose, you’ve surely eaten a meal that seemed to have no taste
whatsoever. But taste is connected to more than just smell. The way food
feels in your mouth and even the sounds you hear when you bite into it both
have an influence on how it tastes.
Whenever I went to the movies as a child, my parents would insist on
decanting my crisps from their packet and into a soft plastic bag, so I
wouldn’t disturb the other cinema-goers. The experience just wasn’t the
same. The rustling of the packet generates an expectation of what’s to
come: namely salty, crispy, fried slivers of potato. By the same token, soggy
day-old crisps are no fun either, even though the taste and the smell are
exactly the same. On the other hand, research has shown that I would have
perceived the crisps to be even more delicious than usual if the sound of
their crunch had been amplified.

The taste of red

In addition to smell and sound, taste depends on sight. That’s why sweets
are often dyed vivid colours: the colour stimulates expectation. In an
experiment, a group of children was given identical-tasting red jelly beans
and yellow jelly beans. The children generally thought that the yellow bean
was sour and the red bean was sweet, based solely on their respective
colours.
So, our sense of taste is not objective, either. Rather, the brain gathers
information from our senses of smell, touch, hearing and vision then
combines that with the signals it receives from our tongue before assigning
a particular taste to anything.

What you don’t feel

Your skin is full of receptors that collect information about where your right
hand is currently located, or how it feels to wear a ring on your finger. If
you’re not used to wearing a ring, at first you’ll be constantly aware that
something unfamiliar is wrapped around your finger. That’s why
newlyweds often fidget with their rings. Eventually though, as you get used
to it, your brain filters out all of the somatosensory (sense of touch)
information relating to the ring.
It’s like that with everything. Your brain receives constant signals from
your skin about the clothes you’re wearing, the chair you’re sitting on, the
hairs that are touching your forehead and the book you’re holding in your
hands. But if you had to respond to this information all the time, you
wouldn’t be able to concentrate on reading these words, so your brain filters
out all the superfluous, unimportant details. In other words, your perception
of reality is censored by your own brain.

Selective hearing
What we call ‘sound’ is actually just a series of variations in the air pressure
next to your eardrums. Moreover, we only hear those pressure variations
within a certain – quite limited – range. So what seems like a quiet room to
us might sound like a cacophony to a mouse. Our ears are specifically
attuned to hear other people and imminent danger. That’s enough. Just think
how unbearable it would be if they could detect every single sound.
We don’t really hear anything until the brain interprets the ears’ signals
relating to those changes in air pressure. So you need your brain in order to
listen to music or chat with friends. For instance, it tells you that the sounds
that are coming from your friends’ mouths are language. If we hear a word
in a language we understand, it’s more than just a sound to us: it has
meaning. And we interpret that meaning regardless of the quality of the
sound or the amplitude and frequency of the sound waves. That is, we
understand a word regardless of whether it was spoken by a deep or a high
voice, and regardless of whether it was screamed or whispered.
If the brain didn’t filter out unimportant sounds, we would all want to
live like hermits. Certainly, no one could bear to live in a big city or next to
a busy road. And no one would ever visit a shopping mall. Yet, because
your brain’s filter is so efficient, you can conduct an intimate conversation
even while doing your Christmas shopping. At least until you hear a
familiar voice calling your name. And that particular sound doesn’t even
need to be loud, because your brain will recognise its importance
immediately and let it straight through the filter and into your
consciousness.

A world without depth and contrast

How many muffins could you make in this muffin pan?
 Do you see the top one in the middle as sticking up instead of down? If
you invert this book and look at the picture again, you’ll see it the other
way around – the one in the middle at the bottom now seems to be concave
rather than convex.
Your vision has evolved to help you recognise objects, and even though
the images on your retinas are flat, your brain helps you see the world in
three dimensions. However, its visual cortex expects just one light source to
illuminate everything you see – shining down from above, like the sun or
the moon, which would cause three-dimensional objects to cast familiar
shadows. Hence, although the muffin pan picture is two-dimensional, your
brain sees the familiar shadows and automatically interprets each muffin
cup as either a three-dimensional convex shape (curving up, like a bump) or
a concave shape (curving down, like a hollow). Again, your brain interprets
the information it receives to generate what it believes to be the most
accurate version of reality, but sometimes it can be fooled.
Which of these squares is darker?
 You probably think the square on the right is darker, because your
eyesight automatically increases the contrast with the background. That is,
your brain steps in to help you see more. Actually, the two squares are
exactly the same shade of grey, which will become apparent if you cover
the background so that you see only the squares themselves.

Infrared and ultraviolet light

The picture of the world that your brain paints for you is slightly different
from the one that other people see, and radically different from the one that
other animals see. If nocturnal animals’ senses were as bad as ours, they
would starve to death in a week. Several snake species, for example, have
infrared sensors that allow them to hunt at night. Meanwhile, bees can see
ultraviolet light, which allows them to perceive nectar guides on the petals
of flowers.

Facial recognition
Do you see what’s wrong with this picture?
 When we look at faces, we usually recognise what they’re expressing
almost immediately. We do this by focusing primarily on the eyes and
mouth. That’s how we work out if someone is feeling angry or happy. In
this (mostly) inverted picture of Professor May-Britt Moser, her eyes and
mouth are the right way up, so it was probably a few seconds before you
noticed anything untoward.
Now invert the book and look at the picture again. The most important
parts of her face – her eyes and mouth – are now upside down, so you
immediately see that something is wrong. You realise that your brain took a
shortcut and overlooked a few crucial details. It used cognitive reasoning
and assumptions about the visual information it received to save time and
energy and create a tailored picture of the world.

These simple visual experiments prove that we don’t always see the world
how it actually is. Rather, our brains ensure that we see a refined – but more
useful – version of it.

Why perception is better than reality

Indeed, the brain interprets the signals from all our senses and then delivers
the results to our consciousness in the most useful way. These results aren’t
necessarily exact representations of how the world actually looks, sounds,
smells, tastes or feels at that precise moment, but rather how it should look,
sound, smell, taste or feel. Through this process, our brain helps us
understand what we’re seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and feeling. It
helps us perceive the world around us.
It’s perception that allows us to convert decibels and hertz into music. It’s
the reason why flowers smell good and sewage farms smell bad. It’s the
reason why chocolate is delicious and mouldy food turns our stomach.
Perception is better than reality. But, in another sense, our perception is our
reality. While you can never be quite sure that your brain’s interpretation of
the information it receives from your senses is totally accurate, you can rest
assured that it creates the best reality for you.
Without the brain’s gift of perception, we wouldn’t understand art. In
fact, there would be no culture of any kind. We would live in a world
without music because sound would be nothing more than continual
variations in air pressure.
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 CHAPTER 11

THE WAY FORWARD

In this book, we have seen how important the brain is to our species’
success and that, fundamentally, we are our brain. The brain makes it
possible for us to love, but it can also make us afraid or jealous. All of our
thoughts and emotions are physical processes in the brain – the result of
signals sent by neurons through their networks.
Human intelligence is also a consequence of how our brain is constructed
and how our neurons communicate with one another. This is true regardless
of whether you measure intelligence in terms of IQ or use psychologist
Howard Garner’s definition, in which it is divided into various types, such
as linguistic, musical or social intelligence.
Learning is physical too, because the structure of the brain changes as we
learn. And it is surprisingly flexible. We can learn to seek solace in drugs,
alcohol or unhealthy food, but we can also learn to speak new languages or
find our way around in new places. May-Britt and Edvard Moser are
continuing their research in this area because they know that we have barely
touched the surface so far.
While I hope that this book has provided many answers, some of the
questions I posed at the beginning remain unanswered. Where do thoughts
begin? What is free will, and do we really possess it? In addition to these
philosophical questions, there are others that relate to more pressing issues.
What causes Alzheimer’s disease? And can we do anything to prevent its
progression?
One in three Westerners will be afflicted by a disease or injury to their
nervous system at some point in their life. This makes it the most important
cause of illness in the Western world. But we can’t understand the big
picture of brain diseases without first understanding the intricate workings
of the brain itself. Scanning the brain of a person who is suffering from
depression won’t provide all of the answers about what is causing their
illness. Indeed, if we were to define depression on the basis of its causes,
rather than its symptoms, we would probably discover that it’s actually a
combination of many different brain disorders. So, if we want to understand
an illness like depression, we need to start looking at the small –
microscopic – picture, rather than the big picture. My work concentrates on
the small picture, but it will eventually bring the big picture into sharper
focus. By figuring out how neurons communicate with one another, we are
moving closer to understanding the brain and developing the tools we need
to tackle conditions like epilepsy, depression and Alzheimer’s.
I sometimes feel jealous when my colleagues are able to relate their
research projects directly to well-known diseases that affect millions of
people: ‘I’m working on solving the mystery of cancer,’ they might say. By
contrast, I have to explain why it’s important that N-acetylaspartylglutamate
is released from postsynaptic vesicles in excitatory synapses. It’s tough, but
it’s also challenging and exciting. Brain and nervous system diseases cost
society as much as cardiovascular disease, cancer and diabetes put together.
So funding research into what causes these diseases is money well spent.
Moreover, as our knowledge of the brain continues to grow, we will not
only develop better treatments but also learn more about who we are and
how the human mind works.
Increasing our understanding of this fantastic organ demands both
clinical research into brain diseases and further neuroscientific research into
how it performs its routine functions. In the future, if doctors, psychologists
and neuroscientists join forces and work together, we should finally start to
see the big picture and your superstar brain will be revealed in all its glory.
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 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book would never have come about without the wonderful people at
the University of Oslo’s Institute for Basic Medical Research, the
Neurosurgery Department at the University of Oslo National Hospital, the
Neurology Department at Akershus University Hospital, everyone at Kagge
Publishing and my ever-supportive family. I thank them all, but I would like
to take this opportunity to mention a few of them by name.
I grew up in a home where the natural urge to explore and investigate
was encouraged. So I have to thank my parents, Grete and Bjørn, for letting
me know that I could achieve whatever I desired from the very beginning. I
also wish to thank many people in the scientific world for encouraging my
curiosity and instinct to explore. In particular, I would like to mention
Emeritus Professor Jon Storm-Mathisen, former chair of the Synaptic
Neurochemistry Laboratory at the Institute of Basic Medical Sciences and
the Anatomy Department, and neurologist and senior researcher Vidar
Gundersen for placing their trust in me when I first walked into the lab at
the age of nineteen in the hope of giving brain research a try. As a
dissertation adviser, Vidar was also a knowledgeable sparring partner for
the duration of my research work. The person with whom I have
collaborated most closely during my subsequent research is Associate
Professor Cecilie Morland. Although she was far more experienced than me
when we met, she has always treated me as an equal partner in all our
projects. She has made the grey days lighter, and the light days brighter. I
also wish to thank Professor Tormod Fladby at the Neurology Clinic,
Akershus University Hospital, for welcoming me into his research team. I
look forward to taking that research a step further in the future and making
a contribution to solving the mysteries of Parkinson’s disease.
With respect to this book, I especially want to thank my little sister Guro,
who drew the illustrations for the book. I’ve always known she is a highly
skilled artist, but I never dreamed that she would take on the role of
illustrator alongside her principal responsibilities as a project manager in
the healthcare sector. So I feel incredibly lucky that she volunteered. She is
the one person I know who is even more of a perfectionist than I am myself,
so I never felt as if I was being too pernickety when we discussed the
illustrations. Moreover, in addition to creating all the images, she read the
book chapter by chapter and gave me tremendously valuable feedback.
Thank you so, so much, Guro! My mother and my other sister, Birte, also
read the manuscript, and Birte edited the captions for all the illustrations
and photos. I definitely lucked out with my whole family!
For scientific guidance, I was fortunate to secure the help of Professor
Emeritus Leif Gjerstad, from the Neurology Department at Oslo University
Hospital’s National Hospital. His feedback has been incredibly helpful.
Clinical nutritional physiologist Christine Gørbitz and clinical consulting
neurologist Are Brean, who is also editor-in-chief of the Journal of the
Norwegian Medical Association, helped with the chapter ‘Eating with Your
Brain’. Many thanks to both of them.
I also wish to express my sincere gratitude to Nobel Prize-winner May-
Britt Moser for agreeing to write the Foreword. In a field that has
traditionally been dominated by men, she is a wonderful role model for the
next generation of brain researchers. I am tremendously honoured that she
has been so supportive of this project.
I was fortunate to receive both a first-time author’s grant and a grant to
popularise the natural sciences from the Norwegian Non-Fiction Writers
and Translators Association (NFF) as well as a grant from the Fritt Ord
Foundation to write this book. Karen Agnes Inglebæk Thue, whom I met at
Kagge Publishing’s autumn party in 2015, came up with the book’s original
Norwegian title. I also want to thank Kagge Publishing and my editor Guro
Solberg for the invitation to write this book, and all the help they provided
to turn it into a product of which we can all be proud.
Of course, I want to thank my husband, Carl Christian, for supporting me
in all my endeavours, no matter how many balls I have in the air. And
finally, I need to thank our little daughter, Aurora, as she has given me a
personal perspective on everything I know, and everything I am still
learning, about brain development.

Kaja Nordengen, summer 2016

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I have not included sources for any information so established that it is

found in textbooks. New or less well-known research, however, is included
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Li, H. and Durbin, R., ‘Inference of human population history from
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Culture © the brain

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OceanofPDF.com
 INDEX

Page references to illustrations are in italics,

A
abstract, understanding 146 (see also culture)
addiction 165–77
to alcohol 171–3
to cannabis 175–7
to cocaine and amphetamines 169–70
to coffee 165, 167–9
and dependency 166–7
to endorphins, morphine and heroin 174–5
to nicotine 165, 170
adrenal glands 108, 109, 110
and stress 95
adrenaline 95–6 (see also brain: and emotions)
advertising of food 155–7 (see also food)
alcohol:
and blacking out 70
and brain damage 171
and fatty foods 155
and hangovers 173
and vitamin B1 171–2
Alzheimer’s 71, 72, 73, 90–1 (see also dementia)
amphetamines 165, 169–70 (see also addiction)
amygdala 97
and anxiety 112
location of 6, 7
and motivation 7–8
and sex 103
 and stored memories 54
Ancient Egypt 1
anger 107–8
anxiety 111–14
Aristotle 1
artificial intelligence 130–1 (see also intelligence)
artificial sweeteners, problem with 159 (see also food: sweetness of)
autonomic nervous system, and emotions 94–5

B
bad moods 99–102
Bandura, Albert 52–3
basal nuclei 48, 49, 85
as ‘friend’ of hippocampus 47 (see also hippocampus)
low dopamine levels in 106
blacking out, and alcohol 70
Botox 98–9
brain (see also individual brain components):
and abstract/symbolic thought 13
alcohol can damage 171 (see also alcohol)
in apes 9–11
comparative sizes of, in different species 11, 14
and culture 41, 132–47
and abstract, understanding 146
and creativity 137–40
and Grimms 145
and music and intelligence 140–3
and religion 144–5
and social code 136–7
and social networks 134–6
in Stone Age 132–3
and strength in being together 133–4
various, but similar stories from 145
death of 2
and dementia 71–3, 152
described 5–6
and development of intelligence 11
emergence of 5–6, 6
and emotions 92–117, 97
falling/being in love 114–15
pathways for expressing 93
and envy 102
evolution of 5–16, 6 (see also mammalian brain; reptile brain)
and falling/being in love 114
as fattiest organ in body 161 (see also food)
filtering process in 146–7
and food, see food
genes at foundation of 134
and genetic transmission 15
as global positioning system (GPS) 77–91, 81, 82, 83, 85
and boundaries and borders 83–4
brain as map and compass 80–3
and brain’s grids 77–8, 79
and cab drivers 88–9
located not only in temporal lobe 85–6
and men versus women 86–8
and place cells 78–80, 81
and sense of direction 87–91
‘herd-wired’ 31–4
human, animals’ compared with 11
injury to, and sexual behaviour 103
left–right, and creativity 139–40 (see also creativity)
lobes division of, see lobes and lobotomisation 37
location of 6
misconnections in 146
and moment of birth 12–13
and Mosers’ experiments 77–8, 84, 85
neurons in 58
and Alzheimer’s 91 (see also Alzheimer’s)
Botox poisonous to 98
constantly changing 61
functions regulated by 6
as grid cells 77–8, 79
‘mirror’ nature of 133
 and older brains 71
olfactory 69
Parkinson’s kills 101
as place cells 78
and points of contact 57
and reticular activating system 38
and shaping of young brain 134–5
size of 12
and spatial orientation 85
and SSRIs 100
stress kills 108–11
and personality, see personality
rate of evolution of 151
and sense of direction 87–91
and cab drivers 88–9
improving 89–91
and men versus women 87–8
speech areas of 20–2
and 10 per cent myth 61
and transplantation 2
weight of 10, 11
brainstem:
location of 6
as part of reptile brain 6
brainwashing 32
Brean, Are 149
Breivik, Anders Behring 35
Bucy, Paul 103

C
cab drivers 88–9 (see also brain: as global positioning system)
cannabis 175–7 (see also addiction)
cerebellum 48, 86
as ‘friend’ of hippocampus 47 (see also hippocampus)
location of 6
as part of reptile brain 6
cerebral cortex 8
 alcohol’s effect on 172
amount of, employed according to intelligence level 125
cingulum region of 97
and creativity 139–40
development of 5
and emotions 93–5
and essential information 146
and food 149
and human intelligence 6
and interpretation and meaning 15
lobes division of 20
and mathematical understanding 9
memories spread across 46 (see also memory)
and stored information 54
Challenger 34
cingulum 97
classical conditioning 51
Clooney, George 51
Coca-Cola 155–6
cocaine 165, 169–70 (see also addiction)
coffee, addiction to 165, 167–9 (see also addiction)
‘Cogito ergo sum’ 17
Columbia 34
conditioning:
classical 51
operant 52
corpus callosum 27, 27, 96
cortisol 110
creativity 137–40
and left–right brain structure 139–40
and MRI and PET 139
culture 41, 132–47
and abstract, understanding 146
and creativity 137–40
and MRI and PET 139
and Grimms 145
and social code 136–7
 and social networks 134–6
in Stone Age 132–3
and strength in being together 133–4
various, but similar stories from 145

D
Darwin, Charles 14
dementia 71–3
statistics concerning 73
vascular 72–3, 152
depression 37, 99–101
Descartes, René:
and ‘Cogito ergo sum’ 17
and physical versus mental 36
and seat of the soul 1, 18
dieting 162–4 (see also food)
Disney, Walt 145
dopamine 97–8, 101–2, 106–7, 114, 136, 142–3, 147, 151–3, 153, 158, 167,
169

E
eating, see food
Egyptian pyramids 14
Einstein, Albert 124
emotions 92–117, 97
and anger 107–8
and bad moods 99–102
envy 102
falling/being in love 114–17
parental love 115–16
pathways for expressing 93
and sex on the brain 102
and smiling 98–9
endocannabinoids 175–6 (see also addiction)
endorphins 174–5
envy 102
epilepsy 27
and inhibitions 104
and ‘Kevin’ case 104
and memory 41–3
Eratosthenes 14

F
falling/being in love 114–17
false memories 74–5 (see also memory)
Farah, Mo 125
fatty acids 161–2
omega-3 161–2
omega-6 162
Finding Nemo 42
food 148–64
and addiction, see addiction
and advertising 155–7
ancestral habits concerning 148–9
and artificial sweeteners 159
for brain 161–2
diets 162–4
dopamine from, see dopamine
fatty acids 161
and Homo genus, development of 151
joy of 151–2
make-up of 158–9
and marketing 153–5
and mother’s preferences during pregnancy 159–61
and sex 149–50
and smell 150 (see also olfactory system)
and sugar highs and lows 152–3
sweetness of:
artificial, problem with 159
and sugar highs and lows 152–3
and taste, see taste
forgetfulness, celebrating 75–6 (see also memory)
‘Four Fs’ 7
frontal lobe 20, 21, 22–3, 25, 36
and alcohol 172
as hippocampus’s ‘best friend’ 46 (see also hippocampus; memory)
low dopamine levels in 106
and reticular activating system 38
and sex 103

G
Gage, Phineas 18–19, 38
Galen 20
Garner, Howard 187
global positioning system (GPS):
brain as 77–91, 81, 82, 83, 85
and boundaries and borders 83–4
brain as map and compass 80–3
and brain’s grids 77–8, 79
and cab drivers 88–9
located not only in temporal lobe 85–6
and men versus women 86–8
and place cells 78–80, 81
and sense of direction 87–91
grey matter 7, 8 (see also white matter)
Grimm Brothers 145
Guernica (Picasso) 146

H
hallucination 37, 73, 147, 171, 176
hangovers 173 (see also alcohol)
hash, see cannabis
Hávamál 118
Hebb, Donald 137–8
herd thinking 31–4
heroin 142, 171, 174–5, 177 (see also addiction)
hippocampus 47, 97
and anxiety 112
in cab drivers 88–9
 and dementia 71
and information conversion 96
location of 6, 9
and memory 45–8
and spatial orientation 9
and stored information 54
and training for sense of direction 88
Hitler, Adolf 32
H.M., see Molaison, Henry
Homo erectus, appearance of 10
Homo habilis:
appearance of 10, 151
and food 151
Homo sapiens:
and abstract/symbolic thought 13
appearance of 10, 132
and food 151
hypothalamus 50, 109, 110
and alcohol 172

I
intelligence 118–31
and appearance 123
as art 13–14
artificial 130–1
and cerebral cortex 6
‘crystallised’ 128–9
development of, in humans 11
‘fluid’ 128
high, downside of 129–30
and IQ 119–24, 120
of adopted children 126
critics of testing of 121
high versus low, significance of 122
by nature or nurture? 126
original calculation of 120, 129
and music 140–3
 by nature or nurture? 126–9
and phrenology 124–5
various ways of defining 119
IQ 119–24, 120 (see also intelligence)
of adopted children 126
critics of testing of 121
high versus low, significance of 122
by nature or nurture? 126
original calculation of 120, 129

J
Janis, Irving 34
Johansson, Scarlett 61
Jones, Jim 31–2
Journal of the American Medical Association 143

K
ketosis 163
Klüver–Bucy syndrome 103, 104
Klüver, Heinrich 103

L
‘Law of Jante’ 118
learning (see also memory):
absorbing from others 52
and acquisition versus storage 50
‘classical conditioning’ 51
focused 53–5
habituation 52
and Pavlov’s dogs 51
leptin 159
limbic system 46
and alcohol 172
as early mammalian brain 5 (see also mammalian brain)
and emotions–sounds link 142
human, structure of 7
 as seat of all emotions 96
lipolysis 163
lobes:
and cerebral cortex, see main entry
frontal 20, 21, 22–3, 25, 36
and alcohol 172
as hippocampus’s ‘best friend’ 46 (see also hippocampus; memory)
low dopamine levels in 106
and reticular activating system 38
and sex 103
and insula 25, 25
high dopamine levels in 106–7
occipital 20, 21, 25, 36, 86, 103
parietal 20, 21, 22, 24–5, 25, 86
and prefrontal cortex, see main entry
temporal 20, 21, 22, 24–5, 25
and Klüver–Bucy syndrome 103, 104
and music 142 (see also brain: and culture)
and sexual urges 103
lobotomisation 37
Loftus, Elizabeth 75
Lømo, Terje 57
long-term memory 44–5
data and motor 45
and short-term, difference between 43
long-term potentiation (LTP) 57–9
LTP (long-term potentiation) 57–9
Lucy 61

M
magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) 139
mammalian brain 6 (see also limbic system)
make-up of 7–9, 8
marijuana, see cannabis
marketing of food 153–5 (see also food)
mathematical understanding 9
The Matrix 178
memory (see also learning):
associative nature of 54
and celebrating forgetfulness 75–6
and colour 66
concentration necessary for 65
and epilepsy 41–3
false 74–5
for future 48–50
and hippocampus 45–8, 47
how to improve 65–7
key centre for 24
Loftus’s studies into 75
long-term 44–5
data and motor 45
and short-term, difference between 43
and mnemonics 54–5
and Molaison case, see Molaison, Henry
and national language 66
and recall 62–4
short-term 42–4
and long-term, difference between 43
and smell/taste 67–70
and storage 55–7
versus acquisition 50
unlimited 61–2
suppressed and/or repressed 70
Mensa 120
Milgram, Stanley 33
mirror neurons 133
mnemonics 54–5
Molaison, Henry (‘H.M.’) 41–3, 44–6, 67, 80
Morrow, Barry 67
Moser, Edvard 77–8, 84, 187
Moser, May-Britt 77–8, 84, 185, 185, 187
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 140–1, 161
multitasking 29
Munch, Edvard 147
music, and intelligence 140–3 (see also creativity; culture)
myelin 7, 59, 60

N
Nansen, Fridtijov 2
Nazi Party 32–3
nervous system:
autonomic, and emotions 94–5
parasympathetic 95
sympathetic 95
neuron islands 7
neurons 58
and Alzheimer’s 91 (see also Alzheimer’s)
Botox poisonous to 98
constantly changing 61
functions regulated by 6
as grid cells 77–8, 79
‘mirror’ nature of 133
and older brains 71
olfactory 69
Parkinson’s kills 101
as place cells 78
and points of contact 57
and reticular activating system 38
and shaping of young brain 134–5
size of 12
and spatial orientation 85
and SSRIs 100
stress kills 108–11
neurotransmitters 30, 58, 96, 98
and alcohol 173 (see also alcohol)
nicotine 165, 170
noradrenaline 169, 170
Nordengen, Guro xv
nucleus accumbens 142, 153, 153, 158, 169

O
occipital lobes 20, 21, 25, 36, 86, 103
O’Keefe, John 78
olfactory cortex 46, 69 (see also memory: and smell/taste)
olfactory system 46, 67–70, 150, 178–9
and food 150
omega-3 161–2
omega-6 162
oxytocin. 97–8
as ‘love hormone’ 114–15

P
parasympathetic nervous system 95
parietal lobes 20, 21, 22, 24–5, 25, 86
Parkinson’s 101–2
Pavlov, Ivan 51, 177
Peek, Kim 66–7, 76
perception and reality 178–86
and facial recognition 185–6, 185
and infrared and ultraviolet light 184–7
perception as the better of 186
and selective hearing 182–3
and smell 178 (see also olfactory system)
and taste 180–1
and what you don’t feel 181–2
and world without depth, contrast 183–4, 183, 184
Perrault, Charles 145
personality 17–40
in animals 38–9
and attitudes and choices 26
in brain’s every corner 24–6
and changing yourself 30–1
and multitasking 29
and psychological as physical 36–8
and schizophrenia. 37
and seat of the soul 18–20
sickness of (personality disorders) 35–6
split, and split brain 26–8
 and Jekyll and Hyde 28
tests of 39–40
and traumatic brain injury 18–19
phrenology 124–5 (see also intelligence)
Picasso, Pablo 146
pineal gland 19
Descartes identifies 1
pituitary gland 109, 110
and alcohol 172 (see also alcohol)
positron emission tomography (PET) 139
prefrontal cortex 21, 22, 23–4, 37, 97 (see also lobes)
as enigma 38
and food 149
and lobotomisation 37
Price, Jill 76
procrastination 105–7
Proust, Marcel:
passage quoted from 67–8
phenomenon named after 69
psychological as physical 36–8

R
Rain Man 67
reality and perception 178–86
and facial recognition 185–6, 185
and infrared and ultraviolet light 184–7
perception as the better of 186
and selective hearing 182–3
and smell 178 (see also olfactory system)
and taste 180–1
and what you don’t feel 181–2
and world without depth, contrast 183–4, 183, 184
religion 144–5
Remembrance of Things Past (Proust) 67–8
reptile brain (rhombencephalon) 5–6, 6
most fundamental 6
reticular activating system 38
reward pathway 142
rhombencephalon, see reptile brain

S
Sandemose, Aksel 118
savants 66
Schadenfreude 102
schizophrenia 37, 147, 176–7
Science 88
The Scream (Munch) 147
selective hearing 182–3
selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) 100–1
serotonin 97–8, 100–1, 171
short-term memory, and long-term, difference between 43
smell, see olfactory system
smiling 98–9
social code 136–7
social networks 134–6
soul, seat of 18–20
and Descartes 18
and Galen 18–19
spatial orientation 9, 80, 85, 87
SSRIs 100–1
The Starry Night (van Gogh) 147
Stevenson, Robert Louis 28
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Stevenson) 28
stress 109
and concentration and memory 65
neurons killed by 108–11
strokes, mini- 72
sympathetic nervous system 95
synapses 30
and human preferences 2
and long-term potentiation (LTP) 57–8, 58
and personality 30

T
tasks, procrastination concerning 105–7
taste 68, 69, 148, 156, 157, 180–2 (see also eating)
and colour 158, 181
and crunch 180
fooling buds for 180
taxi drivers 88–9 (see also brain: as global positioning system)
temporal lobes 20, 21, 22, 24–5, 25
and Klüver–Bucy syndrome 103, 104
and music 142 (see also brain: and culture)
and sexual urges 103
thalamus 53, 69, 85, 109, 110
and essential information 146–7
location of 9
The Third Wave 33
Third Wave 32–3
transient ischemic attack (TIA) 72

V
van Gogh, Vincent 147
Vestly, Anne-Cath. 138
vitamin B1 171–2

W
Warhol, Andy 139
Wernicke–Korsakoff syndrome 171
white matter 7, 8, 27, 59 (see also grey matter)
and IQ 125
Woodruff, Robert 155–6
OceanofPDF.com
* May-Britt Moser is a psychologist, brain researcher and professor of
neuroscience at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology
(NTNU). In 2014 she received the Nobel Prize in Medicine, along with
Edvard Moser and John O’Keefe.
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