In Our Time - The Brain

Episode Date: May 8, 2008

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the history of ideas about the human brain. Since time immemorial people have puzzled over the brain and its functions. In the 5th century BC the Greek physician Hippocrates confidently asserted:“Men ought to know that from the brain and from the brain only arise our pleasures, joys, laughter and jests, as well as our sorrows, pains, grieves and tears.” This might suggest that people have never doubted the importance of the brain, but for Aristotle the heart was the ruler of the body and the seat of the soul. Only in the 17th century, with new scientific advances, did the true importance of the brain begin to be appreciated. In 1669 the Danish anatomist, Nicolaus Steno, still lamented that, “the brain, the masterpiece of creation, is almost unknown to us.”How far have our perceptions of how the brain works and what it symbolises changed over the centuries? And, in amongst the matter or our little grey cells, are we still searching for our souls? With Vivian Nutton, Professor of the History of Medicine at University College London; Jonathan Sawday, Professor of English Studies at the University of Strathclyde; Marina Wallace, Professor at the University of the Arts, London, Central St Martin’s College of Art and Design

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, in the 5th century BC, the Greek physician Hippocrates confidently asserted, men ought to know that from the brain,

and from the brain only, arise our pleasures, joys, laughter and jests, as well as our sorrows, pains, griefs and tears. This might suggest that people have never doubted the importance of the brain, but for Aristotle, a hundred years later, the heart was the ruler of the body and the seat of the soul, and for centuries his view prevailed. And despite the sections of the brain, both human and animal, throughout the following centuries,

in 1669, the Danish anatomist Nicholas Stino, still lamented that the brain, the masterpiece of creation, is almost unknown to us. Why was the brain seen as a mystery for so long, and how did our perceptions of how it works and what it symbolises change over the centuries. With me to discuss the history of the brain, Vivian Nutton, Professor of the History of Medicine

at University of College London, John Lestaudet, Professor of English Studies at the University of Strathclyde, and Marina Wallace, Professor at the University of the Arts, London, Central St Martin's College of Art and Design. Vivian Nutton, people have been puzzling over the brain since ancient times. Let's start with Plato and Aristotle. Well, Plato had his own solution to a long problem,

namely what controls the body? and he said the soul, and he thought that the soul had three parts, one part in the brain, one part in the heart and one part in the gut. He himself never looked at the body. He was simply arguing from a whole range of presuppositions. But his pupil Aristotle decided on a totally new method of looking at the body dissection. and he dissected animals of every kind to see what they did, how they functioned. And one of his discoveries was that the heart, he believed, was the major organ of the body. It's the central organ of the body. From it run condits channels in which blood moves.

And blood he saw as something to do with life, and those channels provided, a way in which sensation could be transmitted from your fingers or your nose through to the central source, the heart. And for Aristotle, it was the heart that was important.

Did he, in his writings, does he contradict, does he take on Hippocrates what Hippocrates said? He doesn't contradict him directly. He contradicts other people who had thought that the brain or other parts of the body were the central source.

He himself has a view that the brain is simply a sort of refrigerator. It's the cooling system. And from his point of view, he was right, because he saw blood as crucial. Blood is hot. Blood it goes to parts of the body. And the brain, when you decept it, looks as if it has very little blood.

It's grey, it's squidgy. It doesn't look as if it has anything to do with, life. And so he thought it was a sort of refrigerator. It was necessary to cool down the body, so the body could keep at an even temperature and we could live normally.

A century later, there seems to be some progress in Alexandria when Herophilus and his pupil Erastratus did dissected living criminals, which seems a bit gory, and what did they find? The big move comes with

in Alexandria, Egypt, when certainly Herophilus and probably Erosistratus too carried out these incredible investigations. They were the first people to actually dissect a human brain,

though most of their dissections are done on animals. And there is a story that they actually dissected criminals. I think that's very likely to be true because they were under royal protection and criminals are seen as in a way inhuman so they're only one step

removed from animals. To be really gorry about this, I'm sorry to press but what I read was it was living criminals. The story is that it's living criminals and what we do know is that they dissected dead bodies and living animals and whether they included

living human beings is a debated question. So what did they find that took the argument that might have taken the argument on? Herophilus in particular mapped out the major structures of the brain. He discovered the nerves, he discovered the various major portions of the brain. He did, if you like, the first brain map. And Elyssistratus went further, and with the naked eye, traced the pathway,

not just of arteries, but of nerves into the brain. And Ereophysetrius also carried out experiments that seemed to suggest that the brain, not the heart, was the really important organ of the body. The next significant figure, Jonathan Sorda, is about 400 years later, the Greek physician Galen, who became, whose fame lasted, well, lasted his day, of course, but whose influence lasted for centuries and centuries. He, too, colored a lot of dissections, but not on humans or on animals, no.

And what did he bring? What did he add? Well, I don't know that he added a great deal more to what he even's been describing. The thing that Galen's influence, your right and right, goes on for 1,500 years and becomes the sort of standard account of how the body works. The thing that I suppose is relevant to, when we think about Galen and the brain, is the idea of the sort of distribution of the soul. Vivian's already mentioned something of this. The idea that the soul has its location in various points of the body.

And why this is important is because the brain, which I suppose we would think of, as being the sort of seat of all our mental functions, the brain doesn't have a particularly high place in that hierarchy when compared to the heart. Galen's argument is that, and the Galenic argument generally, is that the soul has its seat in the liver, in the heart, and a particular function of the soul has its place in the brain. Can we just stop that for a second if you that, John. We've introduced the idea of soul, which I'm glad you did.

Can you just, were people at that time thinking more in terms of the soul and the heart rather than the brain in the heart? Yes. I think what made you human... This is Plato from Plato onwards. What made you human was the sense of feeling that you had located in your breast, if you like. According to Aristotle, the heart was the seat of the passions. The brain had a function, but the function of the brain tended to be seen as regulatory. And the soul was therefore superior...

The soul is always hierarchical, isn't it? The whole thing is hierarchical. The whole thing is hierarchical. What happens in the brain, according to the Galenic theories, is it sort of inherited. What happens in the brain is that a particular part of the soul is, as it were, functioning. The phrase that's used is the animal spirits, the most pure kind of physical process in the body,

the thing that comes closest to that which is divine, the thing which is held to be the seat of rationality. All of that is thought of as taking place in the brain. But the brain is still understood as being somehow subordinate to the heart. The heart is a metaphor that kind of gets used for almost a thousand years. The heart is the kind of king in the body. The brain is a sort of wise counsellor. And that sort of idea of the politics of the body

kind of spread through a thousand years of thinking. Was Galen's respect for the soul reinforced by his respect for Christianity? That's a very good question. I don't know the answer to that. I don't know the answer to that. I mean, I mean, the sense I'm thinking about that, it's a good one. I mean, the sense that Christianity changes radically the way in which people think about the soul. But Galen's kind of idea of the soul, I think, is still essentially a pagan one.

So even though he has respect for Christianity, I don't think that it kind of radically shifts in the way maybe one might expect. There's this phrase, the retemirabella, Jonathan. Can you... The wonderful net. Address that, yeah. The wonderful net. It's a structure which doesn't exist in humans. It's a structure that I think is only to be found in cattle.

Galen had dissected animals, not dissected human beings, but it observed in animals this network of veins at the base of the animal brain and surmise that human beings must have the same thing, must have the same structure. And it's one of those kind of classic instances in which what you see in the body is determined by a theory of the body. and even though it's not there in human beings, the Rete de Marevallet is not there in human beings, it nevertheless is described again and again and again and again,

so it should be there. What the Rete Marevale was held to do was to take part in that process of concoction by which spirits, the animal spirits, came into being. But it's one of those functions which it takes an enormous kind of effort of thought to overturn something which doesn't actually exist. Yeah, but that's a marvelous thing. They're having to think through it.

They've got no microscopes. They're like chemistry. They don't know about electricity. And they're thinking through and forming systems, which even now sort of a whole... I'm not going to turn to Marina. People talk about the eyes being the windows of the cell, or they used to when people talked about such things.

But in this period, were the eyes thought of as the windows of the brain? Was that another way to get at what the brain might have been? Well, as you're saying, the idea of being able to visualize what goes on in your head is an extraordinary sense. It's very self-reflective. in whatever centuries you're talking about. And at a time when there is no microscope, when dissections are to be performed on bodies that are either dead or will die as a result,

in conditions where there are no refrigeration methods, of course one has to visualize as much as possible with one's own brain and imagine what goes on. Now, the preeminence of vision obviously would dictate and dictates for a very long time. If you think about it, if you're thinking about the brain, being contained in the head, you're also thinking about being able to see through it in some ways, that the eyes become a very strong metaphor, not only the organ of the eyes being able to see through the head, because there are holes. There is obviously a connection also with speech,

so it's what goes in and what comes out, what is recorded in the brain, but also various metaphors that are to do with the process of seeing. And the process of seeing, in the sense, of understanding, of knowledge, so that in fact we still say, I see, when we want to say, I understand. And the concept of idea is very connected to the idea of light. It actually comes from a Greek root,

which means light and illumination. So the sense of illumination, of seeing, of being able to bring light to areas which are contained in dark anatomically is a very, very strong one that pervades to our, days. Various systems of, particularly of concepts of categories of memory, for instance, in the West are very crucial, so that ways of remembering things, there is a whole art of memory

and visualization of where thoughts and concepts might be contained from Plato, from the image of the cave, which is dark, to a lighter image, which is the medieval image of flood of theatres of memory or being able to attach to the idea of objects outside ourselves so that the sense of something coming through our eyes

and registering immediately goes with a sense of a wax tablet, for instance, being able to enter through and impress itself and it impresses itself on the brain. Plato had the idea of the brain being a rather a waxy

substance whose grooves were deep through habit and use, only? Absolutely. And very interestingly, that is again referred to later, but also transposed as a living metaphor in the sense of being able to transcribe so that in the art of memory,

which was exercised very much in ancient Greece and in ancient Rome for the purpose of memorizing speeches, of memorizing facts, of memorizing histories, the process of recording was the metaphor for it was that, so that in fact at that time the sense of the brain being

or the soul of the eye of the image being able to contain and impress on itself is also an external metaphor. Are those the prevailing metaphors, are there the soul metaphors, the light and the illumination, the dark cave of Plato, the light that comes in through the eye and so on?

Those tend to be the strongest of the metaphors that in fact continue to our day. and, as I said, linked very much with sort of architectural features. The fact that it doesn't help that, as Vivian already said, that physically, anatomically, the brain is an indistinct mass, and you can't actually see through it. It's grey matter. It's not very clear.

It's convoluted. It doesn't look very interesting, does it? I mean, it didn't, to those people, compared to the great throbbing heart? Absolutely. It's not very colourful. it's squishy, it doesn't keep very long, and it's in a place that you need to enter with great care. So it's actually a very difficult thing to visualize in itself

until really quite late on. I mean, the dissections of the brain, or the head of the head that go on in the Renaissance, but later on with the possibility of visualizing through the microscope. Vivian Nutton, let's just take Aristotle, and Gael and those two out of ancient Greece and ancient Rome. These classical ideas, let's call them after. They prevail for hundreds of years.

Can you take us through, sorry about this, to the second century to the early or middle-middle ages, and these are the prevailing ideas in the West? In the West, in a sense, the prevailing ideas of Christianity, but Christianity, because of its belief in the soul, except Aristotle's view of a single soul, Galen is more difficult because he believes that the soul has three parts. And so there's a tension between those people who want to see the soul as one thing in one place

and doctors who believe that Galen has proved that there are three parts and that the most important part, what they later came to call the controller, is in the brain. in the 5th, 6th, 7th century AD in the West, most of these, if you like advanced notions disappeared with the collapse of learning. In the East, Gaelanism reigns supreme. I say Gaelanism, not Gaelan, because Gailen wrote so many books

that nobody could afford to buy them or very few. And so what you have is summaries, shorter versions, some of them by Gailen himself, telling you the results of his discoveries, not how to go on and discover. And this formed the basis for the understanding of the body, not only among late Greek scientists, but then in the Arab world, which had conquered parts of the Greek world and who took over Arabic science, they took over Aristotle's philosophy, they took over Gaiman's medicine,

and then gradually from the 11th century onwards, this amalgam comes into Western Europe in Latin translation, and it becomes part of the new Western Latin universities from the 12th century onwards. Jonathan Sourday, we're getting towards... Thank you very much for that, I mean you took us to save me a lot of bother that. We're coming to... Let's say we're coming towards the Renaissance,

And that one of the things strikingly was the interest in the human body and the external depiction of it by various great masters of the Renaissance. Did that stay with the external depiction? Did this bring back a focus on what is inside this body? How does this body work? This intensify interest in the brain heart. There's intense interest in the kind of internal, what would become known as the mechanism of the body,

and the kind of the beginnings of modern dissection. But all Renaissance attempts at, understanding the internal structure of the body is still mediated by the classical past, by the Grico, Romano and Arabic kind of influences. So that, again, there's this idea that when, you know, Vesalius, let's say, looks at the structures that he finds through dissection, he's still trying to understand them in the prevailing model that has been in existence for a thousand years, the Galenic model.

So it's only relatively late when you get on to people like Harvey and Descartes and so on, that you begin to get the sense that there's some careful thinking, through of what can actually be seen rather than what should be seen. I'll get under that in a minute, I hope. But just to stay there, Marina Wallace for a while, the interest is intense, even though it seems to be literally hovering around it.

I mean, Leonardo da Vinci's many drawings of, not in the human form, but the brain, which I believe at that time are seen by a few people. Now, he's obviously fascinated by it. What did he find? Yeah. Well, the crucial thing here is, again, it's about the visualization. of the body. And so visualising it not only in order to describe the wonders of the mechanisms of the body,

because don't forget that when we're talking about anatomies, we're talking about anatomies in order to demonstrate something that is divine rather than something that is to be cured medically, but also to be able to be at the service of the artist, of the painter, so that Leonardo da Vinci says very clearly that one needs to understand the proper deep functioning of the structure, of the painter. of the human body in order to be able to depict the histori, the stories, the paintings, the pictures, the gestures that go into the paintings. Now, he famously depicted the measurement, the ideal measurement of, and the proportions of the human body, the external body with the Vitruvian man.

But he also looked, and that was the first time that it was done, looked at the proportions and the measurement of the inside of the body. So measuring the inside of the skull and looking at the brain, oxus brains in this case anatomized, as a way of looking at the spaces between us, the ventricles. It's interesting that Leonardo's theories are based around the idea of ventricular analysis of the brain and that the spaces in between the brain and in the skull are of great. interest in history, not only the mass itself, so that within the ventricles he was looking at the location of the census communes.

That is true. He's taking over a medieval view, which is interested not in the brain as something that you can see, but in the brain as something that, if you like, you can represent. And the medieval drawings of the brain emphasize the ventricles, emphasize the spaces. in which you put memory, imagination, sense, and so on. And in fact, what differs, I mean, Dante had that, so it does come from the Middle Ages. And the sense of the census commune is placed right in the middle,

the common sense, yeah. The common sense, yeah. Actually, it comes by being a place in the brain where there is the common senses come together, and that is the common sense. Exactly, and also looking for fantasy and for fantasy and intelligence. These kind of models or maps, are kind of in themselves fantasies.

Their fantasies mapped onto the brain and there's a sort of feeling that, well, there should be this sense, there should be a place where memory has to use a Renaissance, has its seat in some way. But actually in terms of what the brain's doing, it's still kind of an area of absolute ignorance. Vesalius, with his aggressive and advanced dissection,

seemed to move the thing forward. Can you tell us brief to what he did, Vivian? Well, Veselius is perhaps overrated in this because we now know that there are people in the previous 20 years who begin to look, dissect bits of the body, including the brain, on the model of, in fact, Galen, because they rediscovered some of the big texts of Galen in which Galen says, you must dissect, you must look, you must do this.

And the rediscovery in the West of material that have been lost for centuries stimulates people in Paris, in Germany, and particularly in Italy, to start looking inside the brain. Well, John and Sode, so if Faisalus didn't... Did William Harvey discover about the circulation of the blood in the 17th century? Did this take it forward? Are we still circling around Galen with Aristotle hovering above?

We're starting to move a little bit away from that, I think. What Harvey does is, of course, he discovers, and demonstrates the theory of circulation. And in doing so, he, and it's a completely kind of unconscious act on his part, he dethrones the heart. He turns the heart into a kind of pumping engine. And at that point, when it's being seen, the heart is being seen more as a sort of a muscular structure

rather than some sort of place where the passions, where the kind of, you know, sensations reside. At that point, people begin to ask or people begin to wonder, well, if the heart is just a muscle, if it's just a kind of part of an overall mechanism. And maybe the brain is a bit more important in that kind of thing that makes as human than we'd thought.

The other thing is, I suppose, about Harvey and about sort of theories of the brain up until the 17th century, it tends to be seen, the brain tends to be seen as the distributor rather than the receiver and processor. I'm using kind of a modern analogy, which isn't entirely appropriate

for the material we're talking about. But now we tend to think of the brain as a processing mechanism of some sort. But in the 16th century, in the Renaissance, the brain is thought of more as a thing that sort of reaches through the body distributing rather than receiving ideas. I take the point that Marina's work may make earlier about the eyes, about taking in kind of light and so on.

But it's still, I think, the case that the brain is sending out messages rather than receiving messages. And in fact, in addition to that, it's also not only through the eyes goes in the information, but through the face comes out the expression and the information from the brain so that to take on, to carry on, and still we are in the Renaissance,

to carry on with Leonardo and artists, the expression, which is something which is picked up much later with physiognomy and physiognomical studies. Can I ask you while you're talking about that? How did people depict new discoveries, this newness that came out with Harvey and so on? Is it influencing painters? Is it influencing the subject?

they're doing and the way they're painting traditional subjects. Take Rembrandt for instance, then we know what we're talking about. Yes, well, we're talking now about representations of anatomical lessons. I suppose that's the one you are referring to in Rembrandt. But also self-portraits, but anyway, you've played some by the anatomical lessons first.

There are two things because the representation, interestingly, is, as I said, has two functions. One is that of representing the scientific discoveries, and the other one is for the scientific discoveries to be reflected back into the art in order to change it. So from representing the scientific discoveries, the anatomical lessons were rather than an accurate record. There were more a celebration of the guild of the surgeons or a particular surgeon performing a particular

dissection. And they were not accurate from a scientific point of view, but all the same they referred to, as in the case of the anatomy lesson of Dr. Damon, where Rembrandt represented in the middle of the 17th century a dissection of a brain, which is in fact now because the painting was destroyed in a fire, it's now represented by a headless figure performing the section of a brain. He's looking again at a metaphor. He's showing Dr. Damon holding a falx, which is the structure, which is in between the two hemispheres of the brain, which is in the shape of a sickle, of a scythe. And by that, rather than a particular representation,

accurate medical representation, he's using the metaphor of death. As I understand it, Vivian Nutton, in the 17th century, the anatomical understanding of the brain became more sophisticated to the work of the English physician, Thomas Willis. What did he contribute? Well, Thomas Willis was, if you like, a pupil of Harvey, and he and other people in Oxford at the time

continue Harvey's method of experiment and in particular Harvey's work on blood and because they now just know that blood circulates Willis and people like him could devise new methods of showing what was in the body

and Willis first of all injected colours into the bloodstream so you could have a new map of the brain and so he could use blood as a way of depicting within the

brain structures that you couldn't see and easily with the naked eye. Is he bringing... It's a microscope being brought to a moment. Not at this point. It's just a little before this. He's using techniques

to show with coloring. He uses wax. And so he gives in his book on the anatomy of the brain, he shows structures that had never been shown before. And he inspires a whole series of anatomists, particularly in Holland, to come up with new ways of depicting, visualising the brain, in beautiful artistic form, just as much as in, if you like, scientifically, anatomically correct methods. And there is a joining in, in fact, in Holland with Frederick Rauch of this representation, anatomical representation, turned into works of art, as you say.

Now, Frederick Rausch injected wax and discovered through that, through the injection in the brain, and was amazed and in fact wrote no one had ever heard of or read of, and the red is still referring to the textbooks, that there could be so many little veins or so many little passages inside a shape, a form, which is so inconsistent and so undifferentiated as the brain. What was the literary reaction to this about that time, Jonathan Sorday? I said in, I think I can't remember with the trailer, introduction to us, that Shakespeare's references to the brain were rather few. His references to the heart were numerous. Yeah, I mean, that's right. You look in a concordance to Shakespeare's work,

sort of mapping the language. And, I mean, I was surprised, actually. I was doing this in preparation for this discussion. You find that the heart is sort of omnipresent. you're going to ask me for a quotation. I'm not going to able to come up with one. But the heart is actually omnipresent in Shakespeare's writing. The brain is really a kind of term of abuse. When you come across the word brain or brains or brainy and those kind of connotations,

it's usually a comment about stupidity or irrationality. He's not really interested in the way that he's interested, Shakespeare's interested in the heart. And I suppose it kind of makes sense because you're thinking of a dramatist who is concerned with, as it were, mapping or mirroring or expressing human passion. And the brain is this kind of cool calculating engine is not really where it's where the interest lies. His drama, this is a huge generalisation, his drama is more to do with the heart in the head, I think.

I want just one other kind of literary reference. To me, the great kind of account of human thought in the 16th century outside of the medical world is in Edmund Spencer, in the Fairy Queen. Spencer has a wonderful kind of allegory of the body, the house of alma, as he calls it, the house of the soul, in which he describes mental functions in terms of kind of a sort of a num skull theory of the brain operating.

He imagines that in our mind, in the brain, quite literally, there are tiny homunculi who are kind of operating to deliver information around. He thinks that the brain is an enormous library, which I think is a very intriguing metaphor, in which messages are essentially. off to go and gather parchments, gather old volumes, bring them back process. And this is how memory

and recording, sort of, he imagines it's working. And of course, it has no basis in reality, it appears to have no basis in reality, and yet it's quite a powerful metaphor. And I think it's a metaphor that we sort of still use in some ways. Can I just come to about the 18th century, Vivian, and Galvani

and the, how that revolutionised? Well, in fact, we continue we continue with what the effect of Harvey was, because Harvey believed very, very strongly that the heart was the central point and that in some way blood was life. And Descartes and others after him

in a sense separated life from the brain. So what you have in the 17th century, in the 18th century, are people who are looking at the brain to see how the brain works, but are also then puzzling about what is life. And in the middle of the 18th century, many people begin to think that life-living beings

are something to do with your response to stimuli. You react to something, and that is what means, what life is, and it's something which the brain doesn't really have a place. A brain is a place for thinking. Life is something different. By the end of the 18th century, this interest in, if you like, stimuli

becomes expressed in chemical terms and then with Galvani's experiments, it's expressed in electrical terms. Because Galvani, by applying, if you like, electricity, made frogs, legs twitch. And suddenly we have something which is apparently dead, brought to life.

And suddenly we have an interest in the brain as possibly something electrical. And one step to Frankenstein. Marina Wallace, phrenology is growing up at about this time too. The work of Joseph Gould, it's discredited now,

but there was a strong theory behind it, wasn't there? Yes, and it's interesting going on from what Vivian says about the fact that the stimuli could cause a reaction. Now, with phrenology, which is, interestingly, it's the study of the mind, the knowledge of the mind, we're going back to the sense of how the brain or the head, rather, can be isolated in different parts.

Again, this problem about not only visualizing, but about what to do with something which is inside, inert and doesn't give us signs. Phrenology was developed by Joseph Goll and was in association with Spurzheim and popularized particularly by Spurzheim. And a number of studies were made on different kinds of crania, of skulls, and the bumps on the skulls were the ones that indicated certain tendencies in human behavior and in human thinking. fear being that as your brain grew inside it affected the skull at the outside and you could buy Dickens did a lot of this didn't he thought he was a great phrenologist and he would feel people's skulls

and say are you this, that and the other were very very influenced by it by chronology. It's also about categorisation isn't it? It's categorisation of people and you can see the beginnings of sort of other ways in which when a mental function is going to be categorised. I'm thinking about IQ tests in the end. I mean there is a sort

of line isn't it that takes us through that There is a sense, I mean, brought to extremes with phrenology, which was described as a pseudoscience, it was put forward as a science on a popular level. It filled museums in New York as well, in Edinburgh, famously, and museums of skulls of different types of heads so that you could go and check what faculties were particularly developed in yourself.

And the faculties were extraordinary, you know, There was love for friendship, there was courage, there was perseverance, as well as intelligence. So they're not just the big categories, but also the small ones. And hence this love of individual brains. I mean, the idea of hunting after Mozart's brain or hunting after Beethoven's brain to find the particular bumps, the particular individuality on the surface of that. And of course you could go down to the shop and buy your lovely model of the head, which is carefully divided into segments showing where love, anger.

And it's beautifully medieval because it almost reproduces some of these images that come from the 14th century. But there you have your three-dimensional brain and you can look at it and you can put it on the wall. You say, ah, that's where my thought is being processed at the moment. In the 19th century, this man, the French anatom is Paul Brocker, looks at the brain's relationship to language And that again takes it forward.

It's beginning to speed up the study of the brain and the interest and the knowledge of the brain then. Can you introduce us to that development, Maria? Well, that's a huge leap because it's actually looking with Paul Broca who founded the Societette d' Anthropology, the Anthropological Society in Paris. It's, again, looking at the types,

so not only the types within one race, the types across races, Petros Kampa had already done a hundred years earlier, but also measuring, obsessionally measuring, and identifying one particular area in the brain that was responsible for language. That's what Broca is particularly what is noted for,

and indeed one of the areas which is responsible for language is still called the Broca area. So there is a sense that not only are we, we're moving away from phrenology, not only are we looking at the shape about which you can do nothing, if you think about it. You can go and buy your head,

but then after that, the head you have is the head you have, so in a way you're determined. But maybe you can develop the brain in different ways. Maybe what is contained within the brain can be developed. And there begins the sense of the malfunctioning of certain parts, how something can. And that, I have to say, that's still very strongly going on.

Brain gymnastics, brain exercises. Yeah. What else is being brought to bear, John Osadi, around this time in the mid-19th century? What else is being brought to bear on this study of the brain? It's moving quite quickly. It's moving very, very fast. I think what's really kind of important in the whole thing is electricity. And I think the idea now of, you mentioned Dickens earlier.

One of Dickens's kind of, you know, fascinations is with modes of communication, methods of communication, the telegraph, the railway. And I think those, the example of that kind of high. Victorian technology begins or starts to help people think through ways in which, in the microcosm, if you like, in the small world of the human frame, you could use analogies of transmission of telegraphy, of electrical circuits and so on, to start thinking about how the mind is functioning. And I'm kind of rather intrigued by the way in which there's a sort of two-way flow in this. People start looking at the brain, they discover it's a kind of cellular mechanism with responding

to and using electricity and then they kind of map that across to the world and say well can we imitate that in some way in the world we're moving we ourselves are now moving very fast in this discussion because we're also up to the 1930s and 199040s in the way I'm not we're still in the middle of we're going to do a program

we're going to come back to the 20th century development which you're massive but in about a year or two which is but there's a sense in if you like in that the question changes because once you think of the heart simply as a pulse, as a pulsing organ, sending blood around the body, you've identified the function of the heart. You go and look at the brain and the 17th, 18th century

maps of the brain are really not surpassed until the end of the 19th century. What then comes the end of the 18th century is a question of how the brain operates. What does it use? And some of the, the notion of electricity fits well because people are now understanding electricity. Galen, in fact, at one point, says maybe the reason why the brain can communicate so quickly around the body is that it operates in the same way as we see a fisherman who sticks his metal trident into an electric ray, suddenly losing all power in the arm. And what has been sent from the top of Pido Ray goes right up his arm. Does the brain work in the same way?

Which is a wonderful metaphor. But he never develops it. I would say one other crucial thing. I mean, this is all very true and it fits in with the sort of scientific developments and methods of communication. The other fundamental concept that happens that goes on at this time is the sense of society

and what contribution individuals make bring to society. So there is a sense of responsibility and where our attitudes may come from. So not only a well-behaved person, an intelligent person, or the sort of phrenological concepts, but also where does criminality come from? So there is a sense of being able to detect and preempt and define perhaps

what makes us what we are in order to society. It's to do with a defined sense of individuality, which is now being located in this polarity. mass, which for a thousand years has just been a pulpy mass that nobody understands, and suddenly it becomes the place where we reside. And in fact, the palpi mass at this point is also being identified as slightly distinguished because that's where the cerebellum is identified, for instance, earlier on by Malacartna in Turin as being the seat of cretanism and the associations with malformations and behavior that is not acceptable.

with Galton and Lombroso, much later on in the 19th century contemporaries of Darwin, looks at the behaviour which is dictated by this forms. Finally, Vivian, can you say that at the end of the 19th century, the basis was laid for this great developments in the 20th century? We had neurology was being developed, electricity and chemistry, and the language developments of Broca. We know we suddenly at the end of the 19th century have gone as far as we, can do in, if you like, doing the basic anatomy of the brain,

suddenly all sorts of things become possible. And the new technologies in the 20th century take us far beyond anything that was gone before. And as I say, we'll come back to that in a year or so. Thank you very much to Vivian Nutton, Jonathan Sordi and Marina Wallace. Next week we'll be discussing the Library of Nineveh, the intellectual heart of the Assyrian Empire. It's a bit of a link there, I think.

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