GREY MATTERS

Dick Pountain/06 March 1998/Idealog 43

It scarcely seemed possible, but there it was on the front page of my morning paper: the BBC is to team up with BSkyB and some Oxford neurophysicists to develop a set-top box that will interface directly to the brain's laughter centre, recently discovered by Californian surgeons. The paper went on to suggest that the task of installing these units, which would be put out to private tender, could prove even more onerous than Channel 5's heroic VCR retuning exercise.

This news aroused in me distinctly mixed feelings. Certainly there might be serious implications for freedom of expression and personal privacy, but looking on the bright side, technology was finally delivering a way to make me laugh at BBC 1 sitcoms. For years I've suffered from chronic social exclusion, as the only person in Britain who doesn't find One Foot In The Grave even slightly funny - but now I could rejoin the mainstream of society. I was jolted out of this train of thought by the doorbell ringing, and I opened to find a stocky young man wearing an almost clean white boiler suit and a silver ear-ring. "Excuse me sir, I've come to install your new PhunPhone(TM) connection, and I'd be obliged if you could assist me by boiling a kettle so's I can sterilise my instruments..." I was distracted from his request though, as my eyes were drawn to the carelessly stitched PhunPhone badge on his breast pocket, beneath which I could faintly discern the outline of the single word - DynoRod. At this point I awoke from my nightmare with an alarming snort, covered in a thin film of cold sweat. I really must refrain from consuming Stilton and Madeira after the 9 o'clock watershed...

Suddenly brain is everywhere in the news. One paper has dubbed 1998 the "Year of the Brain", to follow the "Year of the Gene" and the "Year of the Universe". Excellent books by Susan Greenfield and Steven Pinker - on brain and mind respectively - hover near the top of the non-fiction charts. Thanks to new tools like the PET scanner, scientists locate the seat of some brain function about every week, but now it makes the news pages of the dailies. The laughter centre was actually discovered by a rather older technique. A team of neurosurgeons was probing an epileptic girl's brain with electrodes, prior to corrective surgery, when they discovered that stimulating a walnut-sized region in her frontal lobe would cause her to burst out laughing. When quizzed about the experience, she told that "everything just looked funny to me". The laughter region turns out to be in a motor area, close to the seat of speech production.

The reporting of this discovery by the daily papers illustrated just how far we have to go in grasping the relationship of brain and mind. Several reporters wondered aloud how long it would be before we learn exactly how this brain area makes things funny. Consider this little parable. My doorbell rings. Outside there may be standing one of these persons: a) a delivery man bringing a case of 25-year old Glenfarclas b) a Jehovah's Witness or c) a secret policeman come to attach electrodes to my genitals. To find out which of these it is I take the cover off the doorbell and start to examine its simple circuitry. I learn little.

Another recent discovery that babies can parse language into words and deduce grammatic rules even before they can talk provides good evidence for Chomsky's thesis that grammatical ability is hardwired into the brain before birth. Yet another discovery is that an brain region called the amygdala, which is responsible for detecting and responding to danger, confers a wholly automatic ability to guess other people's emotional states from their facial expressions - this may reveal the causes of phenomena from autism to certain gender differences in human behaviour. All of these discoveries feed into the great debate about whether or not the human brain is a computer. I believe they'll eventually lead to the answer No, the human brain is not A computer, it's many computers, most of them dedicated to very specific tasks; and No they are not digital computers like your average PC; and No they are not von Neuman computers whose program is entirely stored as software and can be replaced (or archived) at will. On the other hand these discoveries give no succour at all to those who believe that mind can't be simply an effect of a computer-like brain because it contains a non-material soul. Mind can indeed be the effect of the brain's working, but it is most certainly not just one big program (nor even lots of little ones) running on wet gray hardware.  

Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works argues that the human brain/mind mechanism that has arisen through evolution, and that therefore most of its attributes are ultimately controlled by genes, and I find his account compelling. Incidentally his Darwinian explanation of the differences in mating behaviour between men and women makes rivetting reading, and is far subtler than previous efforts of this kind. The brain in higher animals evolved by adding layers of new functions, while still retaining primitive layers that have barely altered from the earliest fish (so it is quite like an Intel PC after all). But more on this next month.