Secrets of The Human Brain (Full Documentary)

Secrets of The Human Brain (Full Documentary) .







2013
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>> The human brain, one of the last great frontiers.

>> The brain is the most complicated device we've

found in the universe.

>> We've learned more about it in the last five years

than in the last five thousand years.

>> In the last few years we've come out of the

Stone Age.

>> For the first time, we're actually seeing what

goes on in the brain during sex.

>> Everybody knows sex is between the ears

so there must be something very strong happening

in the brain.

>> What makes some brains evil.

>> I wrote a list of things to do: Clean room,

stop seeing girls, stop killing.

>> And is there really such a thing as ESP?

Technology is finally unlocking

the secrets of the brain.

It's explaining why we behave the way we do.

It's helping experts develop new methods

and machines to boost our brain power.

And it's revealing the untapped abilities we all have

inside our heads.

The brain controls every aspect of our lives.

As humans have evolved, it's doubled in size.

It weighs only three pounds but it consumes

20 percent of all the fuel our bodies take in.

Generating enough energy

to keep a light bulb burning.

>> You have to consider the brain having evolved

like an old house.

Where we've just added different rooms

so there's all these stairways and connections.

>> In the basement is the oldest part called

the brain stem.

It is something we share with reptiles

and other mammals.

It's what keeps us alive.

Governing vital functions like

heart rate, respiration, digestion

and blood pressure.

Things that happen without having to

think about them.

The next level up, the first floor,

more evolved.

Hundreds of thousands of years later

it is called the Limbic System.

This is very important in the processing

of emotions.

>> Within the Limbic System are the amygdala -

two nuggets of tissue, one in each half of the brain.

They are no bigger than a fingernail yet they are

the brain's central command center for our

emotional reactions.

One of the simplest and strongest of these is fear,

a primal emotion we all share.

>> If you had to pick one brain region that was

most important in fear, it would be the amygdala.

>> There's no better place to explore how fear

affects the brain than here at the

Navy Seals Special Warfare Command

in San Diego, California.

Recruits are put through specialized training

to change the way their brains react to fear.

>> We introduce our students almost from day one

to absolute chaos.

And they will struggle.

When you look at historic mistakes on the battlefield,

they're almost always associated with fear

or with panic.

So, the capacity to control these impulses

is extremely important.

>> Out of 140 candidates who start each class,

on average only 36 make the final cut.

Successful recruits seem better able to adapt

their brains to the demands of the job.

>> It's not really necessarily the physical people

who get through there.

There have been Olympic athletes

who have drop out of training

and there's this 140 pound farm kid from Nebraska

who had never seen the ocean before

and he graduated.

Why is that?

>> To answer that question,

the Navy turned to neuroscience.

When confronted with fear,

it's the amygdala that responds to information

from our senses and instinctively presses the

body's panic button.

>> The amygdala is actually one of the most

interconnected regions of the brain.

So it actually will both send signals to

parts of the brain stem that now illicit a range

of bodily responses as you start to sweat,

your heart races, you might freeze for a while,

you might run away.

>> This exercise known as the Hooded Box Drill

is part of the Close Quarters Defense System

and is one of the ways the U.S. Navy conditions

its recruits to control these amygdala signals.

>> Our students are deaf and blind.

Our instructors will set up a scenario.

And then the hood comes off and the student

has to respond.

>> Well, when you're under that hood you have just

a moment to gather your thoughts and think of

scenarios that could come your way.

>> Sometimes the correct response is swift and lethal.

Sometimes it's nonviolent.

>> It's supposed to simulate those quick snapshot

situations, those high risk situations that just

happen in an instant.

>> They're trying to introduce you to the fact

that panic is going to be less and less an option

throughout your career.

>> So, the right way to do training is to

expose people to scary situations where they can

get used to them and know how to react

when they're confronted with it.

>> Through constant exposure to fearful situations,

recruits learn to suppress fear

that could otherwise make them react the wrong way

and get them killed.

But how do their brains do that?

What scientists discovered is that as humans

evolved, another part of the brain called

the Cortex, also become involved in processing fear.

>> The part that makes us most human

about the brain is our frontal cortex.

>> If the amygdala is the first floor,

the cortex is the second floor of the brain.

It's the brain's thin, wrinkly outer layer that's

divided into four sets of lobes.

>> If you unfolded the cortex of a monkey,

it would be about the size of the piece of paper.

If you unfolded our cortex, it is about four sheets

of paper - large - and the reason it is wrinkly is

because you have to squish that all inside

of the skull.

>> The Frontal Lobes comprise the area just above

our eyes and these are the newest rooms

of the brain.

As humans evolved, the frontal lobes became the

place where conscious rational thought

is processed.

It's where we do our problem solving.

>> The frontal lobes are so interesting

because they're really the conductor of the brain.

They synchronize all activity.

>> Scientists made a major breakthrough

in fear research when they found that information

from our senses reaches the amygdala almost

twice as fast as it takes to get to our frontal lobes.

The speed of the different brain signals means

unless we instinctively know how to react

to a potential threat, we may freeze in fear

waiting for the frontal lobes to catch up

to figure out the right response.

>> Part of what happens with fear and panic is

the unknown, is the not knowing what to do next

and so your brain essentially freezes

the way a deer freezes in a headlight.

>> So, the amygdala may get very fast signals

about fear but sometimes they're wrong

and quickly the situation may say to you,

no it's not a fear situation and you're not afraid.

So, these very quick amygdala signals that you get

can be controlled in sort of a top down way.

>> This is where the Navy's training comes in.

It teaches recruits to minimize that delay by

generating fast, accurate reactions to situations.

With demand for special forces increasing,

the Navy continues to develop

brain training techniques to see if they can

improve the pass rate.

But there are some fears that scientists

believe are pre-programmed into our brains,

primal fears or super fears that few

people can overcome.

The Navy makes its trainees tackle these

head on.

It's why their most dreaded exercise happens

under water.

As recruits face the fear of drowning.

>> There's almost nothing more scary

than not being able to breathe.

>> We are learning more now about the brain

than at any other time in history.

How it's put together and how it operates.

Breakthroughs in brain science are helping

the Navy to rethink how they train Seal recruits.

Specialized exercises can improve their brains'

reactions in fearful combat situations.

But the candidates need something more to cope

with a super fear like drowning.

Experts believe evolution has hard-wired

our brains to dread being trapped under water.

As a result, it's almost impossible to control

the brain's overwhelming impulse to surface for air.

And it is why recruits struggle so much to pass

the Underwater Pool Competency Test.

>> Pool Comp is a very important milestone

in their career here.

They're being tested how they can deal with

fear under water.

And there is controlled harassment,

planned harassment projected at them

under water and we see how they can cope with that.

>> Students must spend up to 20 minutes under water

enduring repeated attacks on their breathing

equipment by an instructor.

Half of the time they are without air.

>> Their air is shut off,

their breathing hoses are wrapped around in

difficult positions and they need to respond

to those problems with a series

of emergency procedures.

>> Step by step instructions for untangling their gear

are drilled into the recruits' heads beforehand.

They must follow these to the letter.

But putting theory into practice isn't easy.

>> You go down to the bottom and the instructors

they come down and will start attacking you,

taking your mask off,

just creating all this stress

and the more the stress builds up,

they want to see how you'll handle it.

>> As the trainee begins running out of air,

his brain's amygdala pushes the panic button

that urges him to surface.

His frontal lobes must win this battle in the brain

if he is to stay in control.

>> Physically it is very challenging.

You have to hold your breath for longer than

you normally would.

The instructors just take you kind of to that

breaking point to see how you'll respond.

>> No sooner has the candidate untied one set of

knots then his instructor is back attacking

him again and again.

>> The more the stress builds up they want to see

how you'll handle it.

Will you want to go to the surface and get air,

which you want to do,

or will you take the little air you have

and all the problems and solve them and do

what's necessary to pass the test?

>> More Seals fail Pool Comp

at this stage in their training than anything else.

The Navy wanted to know what was going on

inside their recruits' heads to cause this.

>> And there's almost nothing more scary

than not being able to breathe.

That creates a tremendous stress response.

You have this huge release of stress hormones

that make controlling things with thought

more difficult.

>> Under normal conditions, the brain communicates

with the body using minute electrical signals.

The brain sends out electrical impulses

from its nerve cells to others that travel at over

270 miles per hour.

This is one way your brain can tell your body

to do something.

But under extreme duress,

the brain releases chemical hormones.

The part of the brain that senses fear,

the amygdala,

triggers a chain reaction that sends

adrenaline and cortisol hormones

into the body's blood stream.

These stress hormones act as a SWAT team,

quickly preparing the body for action.

They increase breathing, heart rate,

and blood pressure.

Senses become keener,

memory sharper,

and the body becomes less sensitive to pain.

But even in this heightened state of alertness,

Pool Comp is still too challenging for many trainees.

>> Your mind is going everywhere and you're seeing

your friends swim up from up the water -

they've passed or they've failed.

And you're kind of sizing yourself up

saying, well he failed can I pass?

And vice versa.

So, your mind goes everywhere and it is key

just to stay focused on what you have to do.

>> Eventually, the student completes the series of tasks

and can touch the bottom and then surface

to learn from the instructor

whether he's passed the test.

>> I feel fine!

>> Few Seal candidates succeed at Pool Comp

the first time.

They get four attempts and there's more

at stake with each try.

>> The most common reason for failing Pool Comp

is panic, losing composure under water.

Some of our students, that's it,

we will performance drop them from training.

>> The Navy wanted to help borderline

candidates who had the potential to pass

these crucial phases in training.

After consulting with experts,

they came up with a ground-breaking

mental toughness program.

A set of techniques to boost the trainees'

ability to control fear.

Even in the most extreme situations.

>> You guys need to stay fired up while

you're out there.

The pain, the cold, and all that stuff

it's going to eat away at you

but you got to keep going.

>> The techniques that we're most interested in

are what I call the Big Four:

Goal Setting,

Mental Rehearsal,

Self Talk,

and Arousal Control.

>> Scientists think goal setting works by

assisting the frontal lobes.

As the brain's supervisor, the frontal lobes

are responsible for reasoning and planning.

Concentrating on specific goals,

let's the brain bring structure to chaos

and keeps the amygdala, the emotional center

of the brain, in check.

>> I got up every morning and I said,

I'm going to make it to breakfast.

And then at breakfast I said,

OK, I'm going to make it to lunch.

And then I'm going to make it through

the run this afternoon.

And then you take it in these little sort of chunks.

>> The second technique, Mental Rehearsal,

or Visualization,

is continually running through

an activity in your mind.

So when you try it for real, it comes more naturally.

>> If you practice in your mind first

and imagine and rehearse how you might do

in these stressful situations,

the next time in reality you're faced with

these situations is actually in effect,

the second time you've faced it so you'll have

less of a stressful reaction.

>> The third technique, Self Talk,

helps focus the trainees' thoughts.

The average person speaks to themselves at a

rate of 300 to 1000 words a minute.

If these words are positive instead of negative,

'can do' instead of 'can't',

they help override the fear signal

coming from the amygdala.

>> The frontal lobes are always on so it is very easy

to think about something difficult, something bad,

like I'm going to fail, what am I doing here?

I didn't practice enough.

What you're trying to do is you're trying to replace

those bad thoughts with good thoughts.

>> The final technique, Arousal Control,

is centered on breathing.

Deliberate slow breathing helps combat some of the

effects of panic.

Long exhales in particular, mimic the body's

relaxation process and get more oxygen to the

brain so it can perform better.

>> Breathing is a great focusing strategy

but you can only do it so much because

in a response to fear,

your brain will get jacked up.

>> On it's own, arousal control wouldn't work.

The amygdala sends out such a powerful signal

it's tough to suppress if we're still feeling fearful

but combing the four techniques

made a big difference to the trainee Seals

pass rate, increasing it from a quarter

to a third.

The idea of pushing boundaries may not be new

but here is positive proof that you can train

your brain and now science knows how.

>> It goes back to a lot of much earlier sort of

warrior traditions where you're sort of transcending

whatever it is you thought your limitations were.

>> I am a different person, actually.

Your confidence goes through the roof.

You see things and do things that you wouldn't

have imagined before.

>> But it's not just the battlefield where brain science

is having a big impact.

It's also unlocking some tantalizing secrets about

what happens in the bedroom.

>> Everybody knows sex is between the ears

and we wanted to find out what is really going on.

>> While the brain has evolved a fear response

to keep us out of danger,

it is also equipped with a strong sexual impulse

to ensure the survival of the species.

>> Having an orgasm is one of the most powerful

human experiences so begin to creep into the mind

and find out exactly how the brain is producing

this overwhelming ecstasy is exciting.

>> In the Netherlands neuroscientist,

Dr. Gert Holstege,

is blazing a trail in sex research by revealing

for the first time what happens in the brains

of men and women during orgasm.

>> 15 years ago it was not possible

but now with newer imaging techniques,

it is very well possible to see what's happening.

>> To find out, he needs volunteer couples.

The man or woman agrees to be injected

with a radioactive oxygen tracer and then stimulated

to orgasm by their partner.

While this happens, they lie with their head

in a 3D imaging machine called a PET scanner.

>> The PET scanner is measured in only blood flow.

It is measuring the amount blood going to different

parts of the brain.

>> The brain has many miles of blood vessels.

When nerve cells are busy firing,

they need lots of energy-laden

and oxygen-rich blood.

When they're not, they need very little.

>> So you see what brain regions take part

in this whole thing of ejaculation or orgasm.

>> Aside from the obvious challenge

facing the volunteers to reach orgasm in a laboratory

setting, there is a time constraint, too.

The oxygen tracer has a half-life of just two minutes.

>> I think would be tough to have an orgasm

under these circumstances,

under any of these circumstances.

Everywhere in the world we have the vast majority

of our sex in private unlike almost all other animals.

>> Fortunately, 11 men and 13 women did manage

to get the timing just right.

And what this ground-breaking experiment

revealed was a startling difference between

male and female brain activity during sex.

>> The outcome was very surprising.

When you look at the male brain during ejaculation

or orgasm then you see several parts activate.

>> During male orgasm, blood gushes to the top

of the brain stem.

As well as being one of the oldest parts

of the human brain, it's the area that controls

the release of dopamine across the brain.

Dopamine is a type of hormone

called a neurotransmitter.

Scientists know dopamine generates very strong

feelings we associate with pleasure.

>> What became clear is that the dopamine

is released a little bit in advance of these things

like food and sex and drugs.

So it's not strictly speaking of a chemical

of pleasure, it's a chemical of anticipation.

>> So, you're getting a flood of dopamine.

Dopamine is the same chemical that becomes

active when you feel the rush of cocaine

and the other stimulant drugs so it is an

overwhelming experience of ecstasy and energy.

>> The experiment showed that in men,

blood was flowing away from areas of the brain

that had to do with anxiety but other areas

remained alert.

>> In men, you will find deactivation of the amygdala

and the region that has to do with anxiety

or fear.

>> It is not surprising that other parts of the brain

become deactivated so that you don't feel

anxious, you don't feel scared,

you're not thinking about anything

except the orgasm.

>> Dr. Holstege found that women enjoy a similar

dopamine experience to men but what surprises

him the most is how much a woman's brain shuts

down during orgasm.

>> The deactivation was the most important finding.

In women there was an enormous deactivation

of all the centers of the brain that had to do with

anxiety and fear, alertness.

Apparently, women let it go.

>> Women can even go unconscious during orgasm

whereas men don't.

Experts believe the difference between men and

women may date back to prehistoric times

when we were hunter-gatherers.

>> This may have an evolutionary purpose.

For millions of years we had our sex

on the grasslands of Africa where there were

dangerous animals roaming around.

Somebody had to be alert enough to jump up

and run or defend the group and it's logical that

that would be men.

So the female brain tends to shut down

more than the male brain does.

>> In a future set of tests,

Dr. Holstege hopes to increase the time he can

monitor what happens in our brains during sex.

He's intrigued to see how rapidly the

dopamine-induced feeling of euphoria drops away

after orgasm.

>> I still think that there will be big differences

between men and women just before, during,

and after orgasm.

What exactly then is the difference in the brain?

And that is what I want to know.

>> Aside from sex, dopamine plays a major role

in motivating our brains to do all kinds of things.

Even something that seems the opposite of sex,

not furthering life,

but risking it.

What is it about the pursuit of pleasure that would

make these base jumpers in Moab, Utah

want to throw themselves off of a cliff?

>> Pretty much all the cliffs out here have a pretty

high danger scale.

On a one to ten, they're all about an eight.

>> Mistakes can be fatal.

>> When you run off a 500 foot rock,

you've got about six seconds to live

and is that extreme?

Yeah, you're darned right that's extreme.

>> And if this is the ultimate thrill for some

people's brains, why not for everyone's?

>> This thrill is just basically essential

for us to be happy.

To have that feeling alive inside of you

so then life is worth it.

>> Science tells us that as a base jumper is thinking

about the jump their brain begins releasing

dopamine.

As with sex, dopamine plays the role of building

anticipation.

But unlike sex,

the amygdala doesn't shut down.

Instead, it is sending out fear signals.

>> Before a jump I'll get the jitters and I will get

nervous and palms might get sweaty,

and a million thoughts race into my mind.

>> Most of your mental preparation is,

OK, what if my parachute opens backwards?

What if I have a problem with one of my toggles?

>> Even though the jumpers are focused on the jump

itself, you know, what they might not realize

is that the dopamine kick is happening all along

during this process.

>> Kresta Christensen is a newcomer to base jumping.

>> I'm feeling excited.

My heart is going a little bit faster

because I know that the gear check means

that it's getting a little bit closer.

Three.

Two.

One.

See ya.

Ohh, I get so nervous!

(laughing)

It is unlike anything else that I've ever done.

Especially for someone that's scared of heights.

>> Kresta is nervous because her amygdala,

where she harbors her fear of heights,

is pressing the panic button at the site of a

400 foot drop.

>> Ahh! OK!

>> It's about as physiologically aroused as a person

can be.

You've got the stress system going so you've got

adrenaline being released, that gets the heart going.

You've got hormones being released.

You've got stress hormones like cortisol going.

You've got neurotransmitters like dopamine

being released in anticipation of the euphoria.

But at the same time, Kresta's frontal lobes

weigh in.

Making her question if she is doing the right thing.

The fear, the pleasure, the potential risks -

all these competing signals get processed

into action, experts believe, in the striatum,

in the middle of the brain.

>> And the striatum is kind of like a switching center.

It is also the part of the brain that has the densest

concentration of dopamine receptors.

>> As Kresta's dopamine rush bombards her

striatum, her motivation for pleasure

battles the other impulses but will it be enough

to make her jump?

Inside the brain of a novice base jumper,

there's a battle waging as she makes

a life-threatening decision.

Will Kresta risk everything for pleasure?

>> And just launch? OK.

(laughing)

OK.

OK.

>> Clearly the decision to jump means that the

anticipated reward has won the battle between

the good outcome and the potentially bad outcome.

If it was the other way around,

they would back away from the cliff

and call it a day.

>> Ah, it was awesome!

It was great!

I'm ready to go up and do it again!

Gotta back first, thought!

(Laughing)

>> No sooner have these jumpers survived

one death wish then their getting ready for the next.

They seem addicted to finding new locations

with fresh dangers and more challenging conditions.

Scientists say there's a reason for this.

>> When we look at what happens in the brain,

we see that on repeated exposures to pleasures

whether it's food or drink, whatever, or sex even,

that we see the dopamine response gets a little bit

less each time.

You get a little less bang for the buck.

>> Which for thrill seekers means

either doing an entirely new activity

or taking bigger and bigger risks

with the familiar one.

>> Novelty is really big jolt for the dopamine system

and so when we look at base jumping,

it kind of mixes both of these things

and really maximizes the pleasure response

and that's what keeps it addictive.

>> The base jumpers would appear to agree.

>> By keeping things new and different,

it keeps the excitement there.

>> There's people who do it one time and decide

that it's too risky to do it so they stop.

Most people continue to do it and they'll

do it at least once a week if not more than that.

There's very few people who dabble in base jumping.

Three, two, one!

See ya!

>> Scientists think we find danger seeking

pleasurable because it's been necessary

to our evolution.

If humans didn't take risks, they say,

we'd still be living in caves.

But they're fascinated to know why some people

will risk more than others.

Even in an every day situation like a restaurant,

there are some people who will always order

the same thing.

And others who will try a new dish each time

and gamble on it tasting good.

Experts at Emory University in Georgia

wonder if some people's brains are preprogrammed

to gamble or take bigger risks than others.

They asked volunteers to play a gambling game.

The object is to avoid receiving a shock to the foot.

>> Oh, that one hurt.

>> Each time they play, the volunteer must choose

between two options.

>> So, I'm gonna try the first option because

I really don't want to get a shock.

Ah!

Got shocked that time.

>> When this test is carried out in a scanner,

Dr. Greg Burns can monitor brain activity

to see how much dopamine is released before

each decision.

>> What we're seeing are traits that are probably

genetically coded and people just have a biological

tendency to release more or less dopamine

in response to risk.

>> And his experiment suggests people's brains

are consistent in their decision making.

He's even perfected a computer program

to the point that it can predict which option

people will choose before they make it.

>> We can take a template of their brain response

to these different gambles,

we call it neural fingerprint,

and put it into a computer algorithm

and then predict with a high degree of accuracy

what they'll choose.

Although people are different,

it seems like people do have a fingerprint

for decision making.

>> But Dr. Burns says we're a long way from

predicting anything complicated.

>> The great thing about neuroscience is that

the deeper that we dig in terms of decision making,

the more questions that come up.

>> One of the being questions that scientists are

studying is how particular personality types

make moral decisions.

New discoveries are offering clues

to understanding why psychopathic brains

let them do evil things.

>> We all do something wrong once in a while.

Most of the times when we do something wrong

we not just know it but we feel it.

We feel bad, we feel guilty,

we feel remorse and it is the feeling of what's wrong

that stops most of us from misbehaving in the future.

>> But what happens when someone doesn't feel

any guilt or remorse?

And there's no battle happening in their brains

to prevent them from committing, repeating,

and even enjoying what are unspeakable

acts of horror for the rest of us.

Men like Ted Bundy who murdered at least

35 women.

Jeffrey Dahmer who tortured 17 men and boys

to death.

And Joel Rifkin who beat and strangled 17 women.

Scientists are fascinated by these real life

archetypes of evil.

>> Ted Bundy was, if you will, the motivation that

got me interested in this career.

Ted Bundy actually grew up down the street.

So when I was growing up I was hearing

these stories of how he ended up like this,

it just mystified everybody.

>> Surprised? I don't know, I didn't know what to expect.

I've never been in a jail before.

I've never been arrested before.

>> I just combined the two things I wanted to

understand the most

and one was how the brain works

and how does it work in the people

who do these bad things, in psychopaths?

>> Research suggests as many as

one person in 100 is a psychopath.

Most are not the violent kind.

Rarer still are those who turn into serial killers.

But they all share common traits.

>> Ted Bundy actually exemplified almost all of the

characteristics of the psychopath.

He was very glib and superficial.

He was very charming.

He convinced many people.

He even got married in prison when he was older.

>> No one imagined he was capable of being

a cold-blooded killer.

According to Dr. Kent Kiehl,

the overriding characteristic of a psychopath

is that they lack conscience.

>> They often say, I just don't understand

why there's such a big fuss about all of this.

>> Bundy and Dahmer are dead but Joel Rifkin

is still alive and behind bars in upstate New York.

>> Did you feel guilty after any of these homicides?

>> No, not really.

Um.

There were one or two maybe I felt bad about

but, no not really guilty, guilty about it.

I would have had to care.

(Laughing)

I didn't care then, that's the sad thing.

>> What we really want to understand is why

they don't ever appreciate why

they're doing these bad things

and how these things impact other people.

>> Scientists hope that by looking inside the brains

of psychopaths they might finally identify the

reason for their twisted thoughts.

>> Once upon a time Joel Rifkin was this innocent

little baby with this beautiful smile on his face.

He didn't have one sense of evil in him.

Or did he?

>> What makes some brains evil?

The answer may lie in ground breaking

experiments being carried out at

New Mexico prisons.

Scientists estimate one in 20 inmates

has a personality disorder that could be

psychopathic.

So, there's no shortage of potential test subjects

where Dr. Kiehl carries out his research.

His aim is to develop new treatments

but to do that he needs to find out what's

different about their brains.

>> The ideal goal is to be able to help us reduce

the impact the disorder has not only on the individual

but also on society.

>> First he interviews the prisoners to identify

those that exhibit psychopathic tendencies.

>> So this is going to be an interview that we kind of

cover different aspects of your life.

So, we're going to start out with like school history,

we'll talk about employment history,

we talk about your family,

we'll talk about criminal activity,

things that you've done, things like that.

>> Psychopaths have remarkably similar patterns

of behavior.

>> Did you ever get in trouble when you were a kid?

>> All the time.

>> They have an impulsive nomadic lifestyle.

They move from place to place.

Relationship to relationship.

They're very sexually promiscuous.

They tend to get themselves in trouble.

>> Dr. Kiehl sends the prisoners he's diagnosed

as psychopathic for brain scans.

In the first test he wants to see how they react

to making mistakes.

>> I've scanned over 300 inmates so we've actually

collected one of the largest brain imaging data

sets in the world and by far and away the largest

brain imaging data set that's ever been

collected in psychopaths.

>> All right, this is obviously the magnet.

It doesn't sound like much now but it will get

very, very loud.

>> The scanner uses magnetic fields and radio

energy to monitor blood flow in the brain while

the inmate is thinking and reacting.

>> During this test you are going to see a series of

X's and K's on the screen.

What I want you to do is press the first button

with your first index finger whenever an X appears

on the screen but do not press

when a K appears on the screen.

>> All right.

>> The two letters flash by so quickly

that the challenge is near impossible for anyone

to get right.

>> It is very difficult, people tend to make a lot

of mistakes.

They tend to press buttons when they're not

supposed to and what we want to know is how does

their brain learn to appreciate a mistake

and does it recover from that mistake?

>> By observing brain activity during this test,

Dr. Kiehl can see that psychopaths don't care

as much as normal individuals when they

make a mistake.

But that doesn't mean they're unintelligent.

Serial killer, Joel Rifkin for example,

has an IQ of 128 which places him in the

top three percent of the population.

>> What's really kind of dumbfounding is that

they're above average intelligence compared

to the rest of the inmate population.

They're very hot headed and impulsive

but they are very manipulative and conning.

>> There were times I got pulled over with bodies

in the vehicle and I would lie

my way out of the situation.

I was basically looking for a place to dump

my little package and he's -

why are you wandering around suburbia?

And I'm like, well I'm lost how do I get on this road?

I had no idea what road I was pointing to but

I had the map and I was very convincing.

>> In a second test, the New Mexico inmates

are asked to rate photos on whether they are

morally objectionable.

>> A moral volition is an action or an attitude

that is considered to be wrong.

You should make your decision based on your own

system of moral values not what you think

others or society would consider to be wrong.

Does that make sense so far?

>> Yeah.

>> OK.

>> We're trying to understand how inmates

process information that has a moral value.

And there are different brain systems that we

believe are deciding whether or not something

is a moral violation or not and whether or not

those systems have not developed normally

in a psychopathic inmate.

>> This pioneering research is proving what

scientists have wondered for years.

Whether psychopaths have an impaired ability

to reason.

What they found is that their frontal lobes,

the brain's most recent addition,

and the amygdala,

one of the more primal parts of the brain,

are not communicating properly.

What's more, in a recent study,

Dr. Adrain Raine found that the brains

of psychopaths are physically different.

He was able to show for the first time that they have

a shrunken amygdala.

On average, 17 percent smaller than most people's.

And this is another crucial piece of the puzzle

in understanding why psychopaths are not

afraid to commit evil acts.

>> Psychopaths know it's wrong to kill someone

but why do they do it?

They don't have the feeling of what's moral.

I'm not going to stick a knife in you

because I'll feel the pain myself.

I'll experience the pain.

I've got empathy.

I can put myself into your shoes.

Murderers like Joel Rifkin can't do that.

He killed those prostitutes because he didn't

care about what it might feel like to be strangled.

>> How did you feel while you were strangling them?

>> Uh, just intensely focused on that.

And, uh, not thinking about much or much else.

>> Rifkin committed so many murders he was bound

to get caught eventually.

But what about all those other psychopaths,

that one in one hundred,

why don't they end up in jail?

Dr. Raine's research has pinpointed the difference

in the brains of white collar psychopaths.

The kind who think nothing of swindling people

out of their life's savings.

Yes, they have the smaller amygdala but it

appears to communicate with their frontal lobes

normally.

They have less capacity for empathy but

have the brainpower to be a good liar and a cheat.

Successful psychopaths showed very good

executive functions.

Very good planning ability.

Very good ability to regulate and control.

They have good awareness of themselves.

They have very good stress reactivity.

And frankly, you need these executive functions

to successfully con and manipulate individuals.

With scientists now sure that psychopaths

have impaired brains, it begs the question of

when they go wrong?

>> We believe that in large part the feeling

of what's right and wrong is wired into the brain.

The brain is set to be somewhat less moral

or more moral depending on your genetic

and your biological background.

>> In other words, it's in our genes.

And it's how our brain grows in the womb.

But according to Dr. Raine,

that's still only half the story.

>> Of course you can't rule out the environment,

that's 50 percent of the equation.

It's like two sides of a coin,

it's both genetic and environmental.

>> If finding the location of good and evil

in the brain has been a challenge for scientists,

there is an even bigger mystery waiting

to be unlocked - memory.

Thanks to memory,

the brain is constantly traveling through

time, pulling fragments of the past

into the present.

This ability is key to a human's existence.

>> The reason we have memory is so that you can

make better decisions the next time around.

So, all of your thinking and your future planning

is dictated by your memory.

>> While the workings of an organ like the heart

are well understood, scientists are still figuring out

memory in the brain.

The big breakthrough came 80 years ago.

>> So in the 1920's,

a neuroscientist named Karl Lashley,

taught rats to run a maze.

And then he damaged parts of their brains

selectively to see where the memory of how to

run the maze was stored.

Now what he found is that it is not stored

in any particular place.

And you have an extremely complicated,

very networked system.

>> The system is so complex in fact,

the most advanced super computers don't

even come close to the storage capacity of the brain.

10 trillion bytes of memory.

>> The brain is the most complicated device

we've found in the universe.

It has 10 billion cells just in the cortex

which is the outer part and in a single tiny

piece of cortex, a cubic millimeter,

you have more connections than you have stars

in the Milky Way Galaxy.

>> All those connections make the brain capable

of storing and retrieving massive amounts

of data in some amazing ways.

Perhaps none more incredible and extreme

than what's called photographic memory or

mnemonism.

>> As we try to understand vision and memory

in neuroscience, we're really fascinated by people

who are mnemonists.

They have a untaxable memory that can remember

everything going in.

>> British artist Stephen Wiltshire,

has this extraordinary ability.

He can remember complicated cityscapes

and reproduce them in staggering detail.

For his latest sketch, he's climbing to the top

of Tower Bridge for a bird's eye view of London.

He need only stay a few minutes since he claims

his visual memory of the scene will never fade.

>> I'm just looking at the buildings and skyscrapers.

Usually I like to take about 20 minutes

and then do it from memory.

>> To appreciate how incredible Stephen's skill is,

it helps to understand how vision works.

Sight is processed at the back of the brain

in the occipital lobes or visual cortex.

Two eyes give a field of vision of about 200 degrees.

They can detect 2.3 million different shades

of color.

And experts estimate they send 72 gigabytes

of information to the brain every second.

That's like 18,000 songs on an IPod.

Back at his gallery, Stephen begins to draw

what he saw.

He's using several areas of his brain.

His parietal lobes in particular are working to

control his spacial manipulation

and hand-eye coordination.

Cross-checking his sketch with the view

reveals just how uncannily accurate it is.

In little more than an hour he's recreated

the panorama.

This picture will sell for $4,000.

Stephen's talent is almost super human.

But his skill comes at a cost.

He is an autistic savant

which means his brain has developed differently.

>> Most of us don't have the capacities he does

because our brains are doing 57 other things.

We're thinking about our careers, our mortgages,

our futures, and what we're doing at the

grocery store later on, and so on,

and as a result, the neural real estate

is divided up among lots of different tasks.

In a savant's brain, essentially all of that

real estate is devoted towards one thing like

solving that Rubik's Cube or playing the piano

and as a result they have they deficits in

other aspects of their life.

For example, in their capacity to socialize.

>> Geniuses like Leonardo Da Vinci,

Mozart, and Monet all had incredible memories

and there is speculation they may have been

autistic, too.

While some brains can remember nearly everything

they see, other brains can barely remember

anything at all.

Welcome to the life of Clive Wearing,

a man with the worst case of amnesia

in the world.

>> What were we doing before we sat on the bench?

>> No idea.

>> Well! Yay!

Even though Clive Wearing has seen his wife,

Deborah, numerous times today,

every time he meets her, it's like he's seeing her

for the first time.

Clive has the worst case of amnesia in the world.

His memory span is at most 30 seconds long.

>> What were we doing before we sat on the bench?

>> No idea.

>> Do you know what this building is?

>> No.

>> Have you seen it before?

>> No.

>> He said to me it's like between before waking up

and waking up.

It's like the in-between stage,

you haven't yet grasped where you are.

What do you know?

>> Nothing at all.

>> Nothing?

>> Never had a thought or a dream.

Day and night the same.

>> Day and night the same?

>> Yeah, blank all the time.

>> Clive was an acclaimed British conductor

and musicologist until a viral infection

developed into encephalitis in his brain.

When the acute inflammation subsided,

his brain had been severely damaged.

It's left him with only a very limited

short-term memory.

>> Clive has absolutely no memory of anything

that's happened in his life since the ambulance

took him away in March 1985.

And his autobiographical memory is so vague

it's to be almost not there.

Who's that?

>> I can't remember.

>> That's him.

>> My son.

>> Your son, that's right.

That's Antony and that's his children.

>> His children?

>> Yeah.

>> I see.

>> Only they're much bigger now.

Although memories are spread across the entire

brain, there is one part that acts like a key

to the storage and retrieval process,

the hippocampus within the limbic system.

We know this because without the hippocampus,

new memories do not form.

There are at least two types of memory

in the brain and most generally we divide that

into short and long-term memory.

So, short-term memory is if I tell you my

phone number and you have to remember that

for a few seconds while you go over to dial it.

Long-term memory involves things like

where you grew up and where you went to school

and what you did today.

That's all stored in long-term memory.

What's happening with Clive is that he has a very

short-term window of memory.

He is not able to translate the short-term

into long-term.

He's not able to cement down the activity in

the short-term into something in the physical

structure in his brain.

>> Neurologists who have examined Clive

have found severe damage in his hippocampus

and they think that's what preventing his brain

from storing memories.

>> Clive Wearing suffers from both

anterograde and retrograde amnesia.

That is he can't learn new things but he also

has a hard time recollecting old things.

And it primarily seems to be affecting his ability

to recollect information at will.

>> Watch what happens when Clive's wife asks

him what his son does for a living.

>> Do you know what Antony's profession is?

>> He's an electrical engineer.

>> Oh, is he?

>> Yes. And do you know what he designs?

>> No.

>> Have a guess.

>> No idea. Not the faintest idea.

>> Car motors.

>> Oh, car motors!

>> Yes, electrical car motors.

>> What a good idea that is.

>> Yeah, yeah.

>> Stop the poisonous gas coming out

the petrol engine.

>> That's right. It does, doesn't it?

>> Yeah, that was a very disastrous idea -

>> That's right.

Do you know anyone who designs

electrical car motors?

>> No, I don't.

>> Do you know anyone who does that?

>> No.

>> Your son does.

>> Oh, I see!

>> Antony does.

He's actually got his own business.

>> Oh, well done!

>> Yeah.

>> Oh.

>> Do you remember what Antony's doing

these days?

>> No idea. Still at school last time I was conscious.

>> What makes Clive such a unique case is that while

he can't remember details about his family,

he can recall other things.

>> The fact that his language is preserved so well

and he is articulate illustrates the procedural

memory for how to speak and how to construct

words is stored separately than the issues

about episodic memory, what you did, the facts

about your life.

>> Different types of memories are stored very

differently in the brain.

Experts believe language memory could live

in one of the temporal lobes,

the one responsible for sound and speech

on the left side of the brain.

What's even more amazing is that Clive can still

play the piano.

His procedural memory for playing the piano,

on the right side of his brain,

is undamaged.

>> When he is performing music,

that is where Clive finds a continuum.

He has a momentum that kind of carries him

through time.

>> It's a great illustration of the way that these

different types of memory can be separated out.

>> Do you know what month this is?

>> No.

>> It's April.

>> April?

>> Mm-hmm.

It's your birthday next month.

>> Yes.

>> Clive today appears upbeat but that was not

always the case.

This was Clive in 1988, three years into his

amnesia when he was frustrated and angry.

>> For the first ten years, Clive lived in a world

where he said the same few things over and

over again because of the anxiety,

the fear,

the terror,

the horror of his situation.

>> Each new moment he felt he was awake

he wanted to write it down.

>> Well, it was such a compulsion that he would

have written it on the table,

on the wall,

on any available surface.

>> So how do you think you got there?

>> I don't know.

I presume the doctors don't know.

>> But you must have -

>> No! I haven't!

You listen to me please for Heaven's sake!

>> Sorry.

When I say no, I mean exactly that!

>> The pages of his diary are filled with

exclamations and words crossed out.

Eventually though, his anger subsided.

>> He started to change

after about the first 14 to 15 years.

He began to remember things for longer.

His mood changed.

>> Deborah attributes this change to her faith

and her prayers.

Scientists have their own explanation.

>> We do know that your brain physically changes

and that's what we mean by plasticity.

It's always rewriting it's own circuitry.

With children the brains are extremely plastic.

That's why children can learn language

so much more easily or learn how to play

a new instrument.

What we are now discovering is that the

adult human brain is much more plastic than

we previously thought so when people get

brain damage, other parts of their brain can

shift around and take over the missing functions.

>> This year, Deborah wondered whether Clive

still needed his diary.

>> When he looks through the previous

days and weeks and months and saw that he'd

just written the same thing over and over again,

it tended to upset him and we thought,

well, let's just take it away and see whether

he misses it.

>> To everyone's surprise, after writing in his

diary every single day for 23 years,

Clive didn't ask for it back.

That compulsive need to record each moment

of awakening must have passed.

Scientists have learned a lot about memory by

studying Clive.

But they've also gained valuable insight on

other brain functions that contribute

to a person's identity.

>> A lot of people say memory makes us who we are

and boy did I find out how wrong that was.

Clive's personality, thank God,

is intact.

>> Fancy a cup of coffee?

>> Oh, I'd love it! That would be marvelous!

>> I thought you'd be pleased.

He's funny.

He's also very compassionate.

>> Lead the way to Heaven on earth.

He has no knowledge about himself.

But he is who he is.

Unchanged.

Pure Clive.

>> Memory plays a pivotal role in everything we do

including sports.

It's finally dawning on athletes that it's not only

brawn but also brain that makes a champion.

>> Well, in the 80's we developed a lot of muscle

training methods to increase sports performance.

And now, in the 21st Century,

we're taking the brain to the weight room.

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>> The more we learn about the brain,

the more it informs every aspect of our lives

including professional sports.

>> Sports performance is all about the brain

but it wasn't like that all that time.

For a long part of history of sports,

people didn't care about the brain.

They would consider an athlete a good player

if they had good muscle definition and they were

very coordinated.

Just within the last ten years,

we think that about 50% of all sports performance,

and sometimes the most important part,

that elite performance,

is related to brain functioning.

>> Now, athletes have caught on to how important

the brain is to their performance on the field.

>> 90% is mental, it's a tough game, ya know?

You really have to have control of your mind

to play this game.

>> So, how does the brain improve the game?

>> Almost all of sports is dynamic and requires

millisecond to millisecond decision making

and if you miss it by a small percentage,

you miss the put.

You're a tenth of a second too slow.

Your shot falls off the rim.

That's that little differentiation between

super world class and good.

>> At a basic level, it's about hand-eye coordination

and practice, practice, practice.

And there's no better place to see this than at the

Cirque du Soleil where performers

must practice constantly.

We use our frontal lobes to learn how to carry

out an activity but the area of the brain that

benefits most from practice is the cerebellum,

at the back of the brain.

It helps to think of the brain as an old house

with new rooms slowly added over time.

The brain stem is the basement because

it evolved first.

The cerebellum came next.

>> It's an old part of the brain,

it's sort of set off, off the first floor

in the basement.

It's almost entirely responsible for movement,

complicated sequencing of movements.

>> The cerebellum sends out signals to the

100 billion nerve cells in our bodies

which in turn tell the muscles what we want

them to do.

>> The frontal lobe is monitoring the activity

but most of the time gets out of the way

and allows the cerebellum and the rest of brain

to engage in this behavior that's been practiced

over and over and over again.

>> Scientists think that the frontal lobe

simply cannot keep up with the speed

of information processing necessary to perform a

high level skill.

Which is why the cerebellum takes over.

Its procedural memory, the same kind

Clive Wearing uses to play the piano.

>> It's the idea that you can go into a filing cabinet

and pick out a motor memory that you've

already practiced.

>> And experts now know why practice makes perfect.

The more you practice, the better the cerebellum

becomes at knowing exactly which nerves

and muscles to trigger each time.

>> In sports psychology there's suggestions that it

takes 10,000 hours of deliberate practice

in order to achieve the level of expertise.

>> Such extreme levels of ability may actually

lead to memory within the muscle itself

guiding a sequence of contractions and relaxations

but the brain is still essential.

>> You damage your brain, there is very little activity.

Of course you need an intact body.

You need physiology that works.

In basketball it helps to be tall.

In racing horses it helps to be small.

But every of those athletes has a brain

that has to be synchronized

with their athletic activity.

>> But beyond practice and having the right body

type, the brain plays another vital role in sports.

Just imagine a weight lifter who's trying to lift

an amazing amount of weights.

They have to be extremely pumped up.

>> The navy seals use a breathing technique

to calm down whereas athletes need to vary

their level of excitement.

Sports scientists call this process

arousal modulation.

>> We think of arousal modulation as the volume button

of the brain.

>> Once again, it's the amygdala in the limbic system

that controls our emotional response.

In this instance, it gets us psyched up to compete.

Back when the brain was evolving,

it's how early man would get ready for the hunt.

But the amygdala needs to be triggered.

One simple way is by using sensory stimulation

such as cheering and clapping.

>> You can control it externally through loud noises,

by slapping a person.

Why?

Because those sensory mechanisms go into the

first floor of the brain.

So, you'll see in sports a lot of times people using

this intuitively, a lot of noise -

C'mon! C'mon! C'mon! Go! Go! Go!

Athletes need to get themselves into a position

where when the game starts,

they're at the right level of arousal because

basketball is a contact sport.

You gotta push out.

You have to fight for the rebounds.

And it's almost this simulated war.

Once you're in a higher arousal level and you

gotta come down, it's just as difficult as it is

to go up.

It might even be more difficult.

All of a sudden the game stops and they have to

shoot a free throw.

>> The player needs to turn from pumped

to quietly focused in seconds.

Inside the player's brain the frontal lobes

must quickly muffle the amygdala response

to calm emotions, relax the body, breathe slower,

and lower heart rate so that he stands a better

chance at making the shot.

This is tough because the player's body

might be too pumped.

Or the frontal lobes might be distracted by

other nervous thoughts like the fear of failure.

If these thoughts are strong enough,

they could feed back to the limbic system

and trigger the fear response.

This would then make it extremely difficult to

focus on performing a complicated action well.

It's a situation experts call performance anxiety.

>> Performance anxiety is the largest culprit

of poor athletic performance and the successful

athlete has complete control over that.

>> It is tough to get your heart rate down

and get focused

and get concentrated on what you have to do

because everything is so chaotic

that all you want to do is go as fast as you can

and you just need to relax and just try to stay cool.

>> Stay away from that white line, Graham.

Stay way from that white line.

>> Get it wrong and the consequences can be fatal.

>> If you're concentration slips

for any moment of time

most often it would result in a crash.

Top speeds can be up around 230 miles an hour

and at those speeds anything can happen

and when you hit the wall, you hit it hard.

>> Few sports demonstrate performance anxiety

better than golf.

>> People love golf because you'll see a

world class athlete miss a two foot put to win a

major tournament and lose hundreds of thousands

of dollars.

Putting requires a very low volume of activity.

It's a small motor movement and the frontal lobes

should probably be turned off.

We know that Tiger Woods can do this because

he's done it many times but what is it about his

brain that he's able to put the ball into the hole?

What we found is that the brain can either

help you succeed in this athletic activity

or it can help you fail.

And we think Tiger Woods has found a way to

succeed most of the time because of his ability

to modulate his own brain functioning.

>> Scientists can't scan Tiger Woods' brain

in action.

He would need to lie motionless which would

make playing golf impossible.

So instead, they must make an educated guess.

>> Because he's blinking so little during a putt,

we think that his anxiety is very low

because eye blinking is usually related to anxiety.

So he's very relaxed.

Like a drowsy state, a drowsy sleepy level

but yet enough concentration that you can

focus on the task.

>> Athletes call this special feeling

being in the zone

when their movements seem to flow without

conscious effort.

It is the supreme combination of practice

involving the cerebellum,

concentration in the frontal lobes,

and low anxiety of the amygdala

within the limbic system.

>> Zone, it's very hard to get into.

I really feel like if I can control my breath

and I can get it as slow as possible,

that will slow down my heart.

As soon as that happens, I feel like I get total

consciousness of everything.

All five senses are working the best they can

possibly work.

>> Experts think the brain gets so focused

it's somehow able to block or ignore

any irrelevant input.

Brain and body begin working in perfect sync.

>> Athletes and everybody else for that matter

all want to be in that zone and there's something

special about it.

Everything gets aimed at the one task at hand

and when you do that, incredible things can happen.

You have real clarity of thought and decision making.

>> When I'm in that moment, everything around

me is slow and I can control what I'm thinking,

I can control what I look at,

I can control what thoughts enter my mind,

and in turn that gives me the greatest chance

for success.

>> Being in the zone could be the brain's

ultimate control over the body.

But there are some people who claim its

ability extends even beyond that.

>> I am being pulled here.

>> The notion that the brain has a sixth sense.

>> He's also telling me to talk about -

either Staten Island or -

>> That's where we live.

>> Okay, let me tell you exactly what he's showing

me then so you know where.

If you were to go over the bridge and through the

toll and then take that first long road down the left -

>> That's where I live.

>> OK.

>> Our five senses are the gateways between our

brains and the outside world.

We receive signals from our skin, eyes, nose,

tongue, and ears.

The different areas of the brain interpret

this sensory information as touch, sight, smell,

taste and hearing.

But what if there were a sixth sense that enabled

our brains to see into other people's minds,

anticipate events

or pass on messages from the dead?

Although one in four Americans say they believe

in extrasensory perception,

only a handful of scientists entertain this possibility.

Dr. Dean Radin, researches psychic phenomena

at the Institute of Noetic Sciences

in northern California.

His working theory is our brains might all have

some extrasensory ability though we may call

it something different.

>> One thing that people commonly talk about is

a gut feeling and a way it expresses itself

often is while driving.

They get a sense there's something wrong about

this corner and more often than not,

a car is coming from the other direction.

So, I've learned to pay attention to my gut feelings.

It's like pushing your attention a few seconds

into the future.

Other things are the feeling of being stared at

which is very commonly reported effect

typically by women feeling that a man somewhere

is staring at them.

There's also telephone telepathy without looking at

your caller ID, sometimes people will hear the

phone ring and immediately know who it is.

And these are not cases where only one person

ever calls but somebody unusual is calling.

So, these are ways that these kinds of events

appear in the every day world.

>> Move your hand a little bit.

Yes. Ooh, that's a very good signal.

OK, I think we're ready to go!

>> Dr. Radin has tested more than 300 volunteers

in electromagnetically shielded rooms.

He shows them a series of images and

measures their reactions.

We were sent in a random sequence,

pictures which are calm or emotional.

And also pictures in between.

The more emotional pictures

evoke a stronger response.

What Dr. Radin found is that

while his pool of subjects is randomly chosen,

he always finds people who respond

accurately before they see the image.

They seem to know ahead of time the kind of picture

they'll see.

Though their degree of psychic ability appears

to vary.

>> Not everybody is going to be able to play golf

as good as Tiger Woods

but everybody can play golf a little bit.

So, what we tend to see in the laboratory

is everybody playing golf a little bit.

And occasionally we are lucky and we get

the equivalent of Tiger Woods.

>> Somebody is claiming they were buried with gum.

Somebody was buried with gum.

You buried somebody with chewing gum?

Take the mic, please.

>> John Edwards' success as a TV medium

would suggest he's in the Tiger Woods category.

>> In the history of science, we've often been wrong.

We used to think the earth was flat.

We were wrong.

We used to think the sun revolved around the earth.

We were wrong.

We used to think physical objects were solid

and static.

We now know that was wrong.

So, I start from a point of view when anybody

makes a claim whether it's a medium or a healer

I approach it as I don't know.

Could be yes.

Could be no.

Show me the data.

I'm open.

>> You only put a couple of sticks in?

>> His old secretary, they used to chew

the same gum and we put it in the casket with him.

>> A couple of sticks?

>> It was, I think they're like individual packet,

like um, like the Bazooka,

the one with the comics.

>> OK, so that's why I'm feeling.

>> They're individual.

>> Right. Would this be like a father figure to you?

>> It's my dad.

>> OK.

And do you still see his assistant?

>> Yes.

>> He wants you to tease her, like what she

couldn't spare a few more slices or what?

Like I couldn't have the whole pack?

[Audience laughing]

>> The way the process of mediumship typically

operates is that the mediums get little pieces

of information.

>> Because he's making me feel like,

wasn't he already kind of gone?

>> Yes, he was.

>> Not because the other side is fragmented

but because they're just able to pick up little

snippets.

It's like you've got a semi-good connection

on your cellphone and get a piece of information

here and a piece of information there.

>> People say well, where are they and how do you

do this?

It's like, well where's the Internet?

It's a place that exists but you can't go there

with a physical body.

You have to have a conduit of some sort,

some sort of connection to get to it.

You've got to be plugged in somehow.

>> Anybody have a plastic frog with them?

I'm being pulled here.

So like from here over, you guys are safe.

Over here - no.

When I've doing an event I will get a pull

to the section of the room or specific area

of the people.

>> My nephew asked for Christmas a toy frog

and it was his dad who passed away.

>> And his dad passed before Christmas?

>> Yes.

>> When I'm hearing something I don't hear it in my ear.

I fell like I'm hearing it outside of me but

it's a thought that I'm hearing.

>> John is one of several psychic mediums who

agreed to undergo scientific testing

at the University of Arizona.

>> We're going to put a cap on you

that has 19 electrodes.

>> I did three experiments with John Edwards.

Each one more controlled than the next.

The most controlled of them involved fitting

the mediums and the volunteers with EEGs

on their heads and EKGs on their chests.

One of the ways to address the question,

is the medium reading the mind of the sitter

versus reading the mind of the deceased

is to record the brainwave activity and the

cardiac activity, the heart and brain,

of the medium and simultaneously record

the brain and the heart of the sitter.

>> The medium never meets the subject

and they sit separated by a screen.

John and the other mediums have to get

whatever information they can

about the subject's deceased loved ones.

>> I'm going to tell you what I'm seeing, hearing,

and feeling and basically ask you to confirm

and verify simply by yes's and no's.

>> OK.

>> OK, the first thing that's coming through is

they're telling me to talk to you about a male

figure to your side.

A male figure to your side would be

a husband or a brother who has crossed over.

Do you understand that?

>> Yes.

>> OK, actually there's two.

There's three.

There were a couple occasions that I sat

with people and got nothing.

You know, and like I got absolutely nothing.

So, and they'd be like why is that happening?

I'm like, I don't know.

I'm like maybe it's me.

I don't know.

So I got zeroes for that.

>> But sometimes John will get accurate information,

the sitter will either think he's wrong and later

discover he's correct, or the sitter won't know the

answer and they'll have to then contact some

of the family members and friends

and low and behold discover that it was correct.

And we found that in that experiment as well.

>> John's accuracy rate typically averaged

80-90%.

And the monitoring machinery showed his

brainwaves and heart rate were not mimicking

the subject's.

>> We discovered that John's heart actually went out

of sync with the sitter which implied, of course

that his attention was somewhere else.

>> They're also telling me to talk about the dog

that's named after a drink.

So, I don't know if there's like a -

>> My dog Jager.

>> Jager?

>> Yes!

>> By the way, apparently he needs a bath.

>> Yes, he smells right now, he does.

>> Based on the laboratory experiments

that I've done with John,

I am clearly led to the conclusion

that John is a real medium.

>> The so-called Afterlife Experiments

remain highly controversial within

the scientific community

in part, because they raise more questions

than they answer.

>> At the present time, scientifically, we don't

know how real mediums like John Edwards

do what they do.

The working hypothesis that we entertain

in our laboratory is that we all have energy.

This energy continues like the light from

distant stars.

And what John does and others do

is that their brains and consciousness

serve as an antenna and receiver

and what they do is they learn how to tune

into the signals that are present and keep

their noise low and then receive these subtle signals.

>> The concept of a connected fabric of reality

of which we are part of that,

by virtue of being here,

is similar to something like The Force from Star Wars.

Obi-Wan at some point suddenly feels a disturbance

in The Force when a planet is blown up.

And in a sense he's feeling ripples through this

space time medium that he's able to sense directly.

The phenomena that we call ESP,

probably operate on something like that.

>> Physics has a name for this

distant connectedness,

it's called the quantum entanglement.

At the moment it's just a theory being applied

to electrons and molecules.

Scientists don't know yet if it could apply to the brain.

But the breakthrough that confirms

extra sensory perception could come sooner

than we think.

>> It's always very difficult predict.

when such things happen.

I would guess maybe 20 years.

Sometime between tomorrow and 20 years.

>> The next two decades promise to unlock many

mysteries about the brain.

Neuroscientists are already working on smart

technologies that could change our lives

in ways we'd never imagine.

>> We will get to a point, I believe,

when there will be instantaneous communication

from the web to our brains.

That I'm sure.

>> What if we could supercharge our brains using

machines and take the next leap of evolution

within a single lifetime

instead of over many lifetimes?

Radical innovation is the goal of programs

being funded by the semi-secret DARPA,

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Their mission is to be kind of the blue sky thinkers

of science for the National Security Establishment.

And they've produced some amazing technologies

that we take for granted.

Besides the Internet, the computer mouse,

and of course the Stealth Bomber.

They take some of the smartest scientists

in the country and they ask them to push

current science 30, 40 years into the future.

To take big leaps.

>> DARPA is funding one such leap

at Columbia University in New York.

Scientists there are developing a computer program

that helps the brain process visual information

at lightning speed.

>> In our modern society

we are bombarded with information.

Whether it's images from television,

images on the web,

from one's job and it's starting to be overwhelming.

And we need to figure which images we really

need to spend time looking at

and which we can ignore.

The idea behind Cortically-Coupled Computer Vision

is to create the best of both worlds.

The versatility of the human brain

enhanced by the speed of computer.

>> It's very hard to tell a computer vision system,

find something that's funny or out of the ordinary

or suspicious.

It's much easier to have a person do that.

Of course, computer vision systems are very fast

so the question is, how can we actually make the

human visual processor faster?

>> In this example, the images are aerial shots

of Seoul in South Korea.

The analyst is looking for helipads.

The old slow method would require a methodical

search of thousands of individual photos

before marking each helipad.

The new method involves the analyst wearing

an EEG cap.

Dozens of electrodes can now detect electrical

brain activity just below the surface of the skull.

In normal brain processing, the visual cortex

extracts detail from a scene.

Information is sent forward to the frontal lobes

for decision making.

Then the motor cortex generates a response;

the click of a mouse or the movement of the eyes.

The prototype program intercepts the signals,

filters out irrelevant brain activity,

and focuses on the subliminal "aha" moment

when the eyes spot a helipad.

In just a few seconds, the analyst can sift through

the thousands of images.

Although he may not be consciously aware of it,

his brain is remarkably accurate at identifying

the few shots that have helipads in them

so they can be marked up later.

So essentially we're going to tap into the signals

that are involved in deciding whether there is

something interesting and without having the subject

having to make a response, use that to now reorder

or resort image databases to improve search.

>> This boosted vision technology helps the

image analyst work up to four times faster.

It could be adapted to help fighter pilots

make better split second decisions

or to improve the sifting of surveillance footage

by police or security personnel.

And then there are possibilities beyond

defense and intelligence.

>> One potential application that is of interest

in which there's high-throughput of information

might been in the stock market or in trading.

Many times traders are assimilating this information

across different screens,

something might catch their eye but they can't

actually act on that at that moment.

So that information can be tagged that it grabbed

the interest of the trader and processed by

some other person down the line.

>> Medical research might be interested in these

devices, too.

And marketing teams could use them to record

people's first reaction to a product

or advertising campaign.

A video game company in California

is already ditching the joy stick in favor of

brain power.

A headset similar to an EEG picks up

electrical activity from the brain as well as

twitches from facial muscles.

The signals get translated into onscreen

commands.

Players raise rocks and vanquish villains

not with a click but with a thought.

The future potential for implanted

Personal Data Assistance or PDAs

is almost mind-boggling.

>> As we get older, we all worry about our

inability to remember names and faces.

We're going to find ways to compensate for that

loss of natural evolved memory revolving in the

direction where we will have devices

that will do that for us.

And I think ultimately we will have a Facebook

in our heads.

At that point, it's going to be pretty hard

to see where we end and the technology begins.

At Duke University in North Carolina,

neuroscientists are taking that next step already.

They've implanted electrodes into a monkey's brain

and isolated the brain signals for walking.

During one recent experiment,

a monkey paced on a treadmill while her brain

activity was sent via the Internet to Japan

to instantly control the walking of a five foot

humanoid robot.

The monkey got raisin treats for making

the robot walk.

Then her treadmill was switched off.

In her desire for more treats,

the monkey kept the robot walking

using only her thoughts.

And there's been a similar breakthrough

at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania.

Monkeys fitted with tiny sensors in their brains

have learned to control a mechanical arm

and use it to reach for snacks.

It will have tremendous applications for medicine,

for people who are amputees,

for people who are quadriplegic;

giving them the ability to move a robot

prosthetic arms and legs in ways that will allow

them to interact with their environments

which they have not been able to do before.

>> Could there be hope in the future for someone

like Clive Waring whose brain damage means

he can't process new memories?

>> I don't remember sitting down on this seat.

That was unknown to me.

>> There's work being done currently with rats

that might one day create a synthetic

hippocampus for humans.

>> If you could do that in theory,

you could actually introduce instantaneously

new memories as we do in computer chips

every day these days.

But what if instead of taking months and months

to learn a language we could download

a basic dictionary of a language?

Or what if having never been somewhere

instead of having to carry that tour guide

or book around, that clumsy book,

and stopping in the middle of the sidewalk

every few minutes to see where we were going,

we actually had a rudimentary map that had been

downloaded into our brains of that new city

that we're visiting or those monuments

that we're looking at?

>> Drugs are being developed for combat troops

that would allow them to stay awake

for two or three days with no ill effects.

A new class of chemicals called ampakines,

are thought to help the neurotransmitter glutamate

work better in a tired brain

and so improve memory, learning, and cognition.

These could eventually find their way into

everyday use.

>> Lack of sleep historically has meant that you are

inclined to make mistakes.

I think we're going to be able to resolve

that problem.

Shift workers, people that have to work all night

might be able to do without sleep and function

very well.

Students who are studying for exams,

people who have to travel across time zones

as part of their work.

>> In the near future, scientists expect to perfect

portable brain scanners.

Light-emitting diodes fitted in a headband

would bounce light into the frontal lobes

to detect brain activity.

That information would be fed into a unit

no bigger than a pack of playing cards.

Instead of lying motionless in a giant MRI machine,

wearers could discover what's going on in their

brains while, for example, playing sports.

>> We will be able to look into a super athlete's

brain like Federeror or Agasi or Tiger Woods

and see not that they're different anatomically

necessarily, but functionally they are different

in terms of how they process information.

The second application is that you can use this

new technology to help athletes perform better

or perform up to their capacity.

>> Imaging technology is still in its infancy.

In widespread use for less than 20 years,

compared with over 100 years for X-rays,

it's limited only by our imagination.

>> The pictures that we get of the brain right now

though there are several amazing technologies

are pretty gross, they're at a large level.

Now people are saying, wow it would be really

good if we could get a more granular,

more fine grained deeper images of the brain,

at the molecular level and I think that's the

next frontier for brain imaging.

>> For all that we have learned about the brain,

we still have so much to discover.

>> There are many unsolved questions that remain

about the brain and they're surprisingly

simple; how is memory actually stored and

how does it get reconstructed?

Why do brains sleep and dream?

What is intelligence?

Why do people have a variety of skills

and talents?

How do we perceive the world?

How does the brain represent time?

What is consciousness?

>> If we do manage to answer these questions,

over the course of perhaps one more lifetime,

what will this mean for the brain?

An organ that is so complicated and so often

driven by primitive instincts.

>> We evolved in a world very different than the

world we live in today so we have to adapt - now.

And this to me is the greatest mystery

of neuroscience right now-