Speaker 1: Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: And welcome back to Coast to Coast George Nori with you.
Speaker 2: Matthew Cobb with us. A professor in the School of
Speaker 2: Biological Sciences at the University of Manchester in England. He
Speaker 2: is an expert on insect behavior and the history of science.
Speaker 2: He earned his PhD in psychology and genetics from the
Speaker 2: University of Sheffield and is the author of a number
Speaker 2: of books, five plus and Lives in England. Matthew, Welcome
Speaker 2: to the program, looking forward to talking to you.
Speaker 3: Good to be here, George, thank you very much for
Speaker 3: inviting me.
Speaker 2: Howard things in the United Kingdom these.
Speaker 3: Days, Well you may have heard we've left the European
Speaker 3: Union and we're about to have a new king crown,
Speaker 3: So I guess that kind of sums it up.
Speaker 2: They're all excited about King Charles, aren't they.
Speaker 3: Some people may be. I'm afraid I don't share it.
Speaker 3: I think I think the American settler's had it right.
Speaker 2: Well, you may have been right all about that, but
Speaker 2: it's amazing how most folks out there still embrace the
Speaker 2: you know, the royalty.
Speaker 3: Well, yes, and no I mean there's some people are
Speaker 3: ardent supporters, but opinion polls generally show that somebody liked
Speaker 3: the queen. I mean, she was a nice old lady.
Speaker 3: I think opinions of Charles are somewhat different because of
Speaker 3: all his past and his he tended to, even when
Speaker 3: he was Prince of Wales, to get much more involved
Speaker 3: in politics and so on, and people many people don't
Speaker 3: appreciate that. We'll see what he does when he's crown king.
Speaker 3: But they are incredibly wealthy people and they still take
Speaker 3: a lot of money from the taxpayer, so people get
Speaker 3: cross absolutely.
Speaker 2: Matthew, your idea of the brain book that you wrote
Speaker 2: back in twenty twenty, we'll talk about that in a second,
Speaker 2: but tell me a little bit about insect behavior that's
Speaker 2: that kind of study. How did you get into.
Speaker 3: That, Well, it's connected actually with the book. So, as
Speaker 3: you said rightly, I began my career training in psychology,
Speaker 3: and in those days, psychology was pretty much like neuroscience,
Speaker 3: which the word benly existed at the time, neuroscience with
Speaker 3: a bit of freuds thrown in. And one of the
Speaker 3: things that I was interested in behavior in general, in
Speaker 3: how organisms are able to do what they do. And
Speaker 3: I was a first year student and I read a
Speaker 3: little article in nineteen seventy six in a magazine called
Speaker 3: New Scientist, which is a weekly popular science magazine in
Speaker 3: the UK, and it summarized a paper from an American
Speaker 3: group in which they had taken drosofla dressofs, the tiny
Speaker 3: fly that geneticis you.
Speaker 2: We can't fruitiflies, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they're not actually fruit flies. And that caused a
Speaker 3: lot of trouble in the US because you do have
Speaker 3: real fruitflies, which are a real problem so in most
Speaker 3: places in the world, and they're called vinegar flies because
Speaker 3: they're attracted to vinegar. But yeah, they're commonly known as
Speaker 3: the fruit fly. And this article showed that these researchers
Speaker 3: had made a fly that was a big mutated a
Speaker 3: single gene. In fact, they mutated one letter of its
Speaker 3: DNA code, and the fly could now no longer learn.
Speaker 3: It was stupid. They called this mutation dunce. And I
Speaker 3: read that and I remember it was like an electric shock.
Speaker 3: I thought, Wow, so you can actually get something as
Speaker 3: complicated as learning using one and insect and two you
Speaker 3: can actually get to the genetic factors involved in that.
Speaker 3: And I instantly decided that's what I want to do.
Speaker 3: What I didn't know that, quite by chance, I was
Speaker 3: at the only place in the UK at the time
Speaker 3: that was studying what's called drosop behavior genetics, using genetics
Speaker 3: to get at behavior. So I was incredibly lucky, which
Speaker 3: is generally the truth of all scientific careers, so that
Speaker 3: it was trying to find a way of getting at
Speaker 3: the heart of complicated factors like behavior, to understand the
Speaker 3: underpinning components of them. And I decided that I was
Speaker 3: going to study the genetics of behavior. And flies, whilst
Speaker 3: they aren't as interesting as mice or rats or whatever,
Speaker 3: clearly or humans have worked on humans as well. They're
Speaker 3: much simpler and much more easy to manipulate, and they're
Speaker 3: you know, it's just much it's much more straightforward to
Speaker 3: get at these fundamental aspects. So that's why I decided
Speaker 3: to do what I've spent the last forty odd years doing.
Speaker 2: I remember in my biology class in high school, Matthew
Speaker 2: that we would use the drosophala as our genetics test
Speaker 2: because they've bred so darn fast.
Speaker 3: That's right. You get a generation apps in ten twelve days,
Speaker 3: so that's pretty good going and if you can create
Speaker 3: a mutation you I mean, in the old days, you'd
Speaker 3: either bombard and X rays or you'd give them so
Speaker 3: horrible chemical that would change their DNA. That's how they've
Speaker 3: made this dunce mutation. And then you've got lots and
Speaker 3: lots of individuals, and then you have to look to
Speaker 3: see which ones are the odd ones that show that
Speaker 3: the thing you're interested in, that can't learn, or can't
Speaker 3: smell or whatever it is, you're interesting. So in those
Speaker 3: days back then, it was a very very cumbersome, slow affair.
Speaker 3: Nowadays because we know everything about there, probably know more
Speaker 3: about drosoft Loo than we do about any other organism
Speaker 3: on the planet except what it does in the wild.
Speaker 3: So we've actually turned this thing into a piece of
Speaker 3: laboratory equipment. And that's been the focus for the last
Speaker 3: kind of forty or fifty years, is basically trying to
Speaker 3: understand this one thing and not actually thinking about, well,
Speaker 3: actually it's alive and it has a life out there.
Speaker 3: It was evolved to have a life out in the wild.
Speaker 3: So people are kind of beginning to move on from
Speaker 3: this very mechanistic view and trying to think of it
Speaker 3: in a bit more rich way. But the first thing
Speaker 3: we had to do was to nail those mechanisms and
Speaker 3: understands something very very simple, which is what I've been
Speaker 3: involved in.
Speaker 2: I was fascinated as a youth with ants. I thought
Speaker 2: that they were just so smart, and the way they
Speaker 2: colonized and built their houses and built their little ant
Speaker 2: the piles. I mean, it was an amazing, amazing the
Speaker 2: way they think.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, you're not the only one has been amazed
Speaker 3: by it. I mean I spent I spent a few
Speaker 3: years working on ants as well. But Charles Darwin he
Speaker 3: wrote that the brain of the ant was the most
Speaker 3: marvelous atom of nature because it precisely what you've just said.
Speaker 3: They do all this amazing stuff, and yet do you
Speaker 3: think about the size of their heads? Quite how small
Speaker 3: it is. And all of that stuff that they do
Speaker 3: is in two places. It's in their brain, it's in
Speaker 3: their neurons, but ultimately, of course it's in their DNA.
Speaker 3: How does that work? Right, our spoiler, we have no idea.
Speaker 2: Fantastic Now, how did you get interested in the brain?
Speaker 3: Well, it flowed from being interested in behavior. So I've
Speaker 3: studying psychology and so it kind of that's the you know,
Speaker 3: that's what you do. That's the main thing. It's not
Speaker 3: the only thing. That it's involved in producing our and
Speaker 3: explaining our behavior and the behavior of all animals. So
Speaker 3: I mean, in general, I haven't actually worked on the
Speaker 3: brain directly. So most of my work has been on
Speaker 3: studying the sense of smell using not even Drosophla of flies,
Speaker 3: but drosophl maggots. So the baby, the laugh and a
Speaker 3: little rigly thing. I've studied that because I'll just to
Speaker 3: give you an idea of scale. You've got about four
Speaker 3: million smell cells in your nose, okay, and the fly,
Speaker 3: or the maggot, rather the tiny little maggot has got
Speaker 3: just twenty one. Because we can manipulate all sorts of
Speaker 3: things about the Drosofla genes, I can make a maggot
Speaker 3: with just one smell cell in its notes, just one
Speaker 3: working smell cell, and you can then record from that
Speaker 3: cell and see how the maggot responds to smells, how
Speaker 3: that particular cell responds to smells, see how it behaves,
Speaker 3: and try and understand something about the organization of its
Speaker 3: nervous system and of its behavior. And what's very striking
Speaker 3: is that the maggot. The way the maggot knows and
Speaker 3: its brain are wired up to detect smells is basically
Speaker 3: the same way as yours is, and indeed every other animal.
Speaker 3: So by looking at something simple we can with luck,
Speaker 3: get principles about how more complex things work. And to
Speaker 3: give you another example, the genes that are involved in
Speaker 3: the fly in that learning experiment that make the gene
Speaker 3: that dunts had its poor older or old dunce had
Speaker 3: its genes altered. That gene is active in your cells
Speaker 3: right now. It's the same gene. So it doesn't, you know,
Speaker 3: involved in learning. It's involved lots of things. But though
Speaker 3: there's a what's called a conservation of characters, there are
Speaker 3: some characters, some genes that are present in all organismship.
Speaker 3: You know, your your your biological clock, which you may
Speaker 3: or may not be suffering from from that you used
Speaker 3: to do it working at night, it's probably okay. Again,
Speaker 3: the mechanisms of the biological clock were discovered in the fly,
Speaker 3: and to everybody's amazement, it's the same genes involved in
Speaker 3: the fly as in humans. A bit more complicated than us,
Speaker 3: but ultimately it's the same thing.
Speaker 2: How much do we understand about the brain.
Speaker 3: Matthew, not much at all. So when I was writing
Speaker 3: the book. When I was writing the book, my editor said,
Speaker 3: so how does the brain work? And I said, we
Speaker 3: have no idea. They said, oh, you can't say that.
Speaker 3: Every book about the brain, and goodness mean, there's an
Speaker 3: awful lot of them. Every book about the brain has
Speaker 3: got to say how it works, whether it's quantums for
Speaker 3: you know, whatever, computation, or you've got to have an explanation.
Speaker 3: I said, well, there isn't one, right, and scientists, there
Speaker 3: are various approaches that people have, but they're not they're
Speaker 3: not agreed. There's no consensus on what's going on. And
Speaker 3: in terms of the actual detail, we have absolutely no idea.
Speaker 3: And scientists know this, and this kind of thing we
Speaker 3: admit in late night bar conversations at conferences. And I said,
Speaker 3: you know, we don't know. And that's so it's ended
Speaker 3: up being that that's the that's the usp of the
Speaker 3: book is that I'm honest and I try to I mean,
Speaker 3: I try to set out the problems there are and
Speaker 3: show the weaknesses there are with each approaches. And very gratifyingly,
Speaker 3: the reviews in by euroscientists have all been really positive.
Speaker 3: And I guess that's for two reasons. One is that
Speaker 3: I'm you know, fairly and decently critical of everybody, so
Speaker 3: no disfavored, and they can agree with some of my
Speaker 3: critiques of their rivals. But secondly, as I said at
Speaker 3: the beginning, I don't you know, I work on the
Speaker 3: what's called the periphery, so the smell cells, rather than
Speaker 3: the brain. So I'm not a player in this world,
Speaker 3: so I'm not it kind of invested in any of
Speaker 3: these theories. I can look at it quite dispassionately.
Speaker 2: It is an amazing mechanism. I kind of think of
Speaker 2: the brain as the computer of whatever we are. What
Speaker 2: do you think of that?
Speaker 3: Well, I mean that's one of the themes of the book,
Speaker 3: which maybe we'll discuss later. I mean, it isn't. It isn't,
Speaker 3: so it's fine to think about. Yeah, okay, so the
Speaker 3: brain's doing this stuff, this complicated. I mean, you know,
Speaker 3: you've got your computer, you've got a screen. You can
Speaker 3: see it's doing stuff that you don't actually know what's
Speaker 3: going on behind it. There is an architecture to it,
Speaker 3: but it to the extent beyond that, I'm not sure
Speaker 3: it's terribly helpful as a scientist. It's useful for the
Speaker 3: general public and as a general idea of the kind
Speaker 3: of things that are happening in you in your brain.
Speaker 3: But I don't think it helps and it can be
Speaker 3: misleading because you know, you've got your computer is very
Speaker 3: carefully designed. It's got different bits that do different things.
Speaker 3: It's got very clear what's called localization of function, different
Speaker 3: bits of you of your computer, whatever it is. The
Speaker 3: stuff that's controlling the internet, the stuff that's controlling the screen,
Speaker 3: that's all a particular chip, a particular thing that has
Speaker 3: been designed to do one thing, and is you know,
Speaker 3: that's all it does. Whereas in your brain, although there
Speaker 3: is some localization of function, there are bits of your
Speaker 3: brain that you're involved in vision or controlling movement. It's
Speaker 3: increasingly obvious that there's also a distributed aspect that is
Speaker 3: that there is there are parts of this that there
Speaker 3: are connections which alter even the most primitive of functions
Speaker 3: depending on context. And furthermore, the brain's it's called plastic
Speaker 3: it's got plasticity. So one of the things we're really
Speaker 3: sure about, and have been sure about since the eighteen sixties,
Speaker 3: is that what I'm doing now is controlled by a
Speaker 3: very particular part of the brain, and that's speech. So
Speaker 3: the front left hand side of your brain is involved
Speaker 3: in the production of speech, and this is why somebody's
Speaker 3: speech suddenly starts slurring, especially if they're quite old like me.
Speaker 3: You've got to pay great attention and get them to
Speaker 3: a hospital quickly because they may be having a stroke here.
Speaker 3: This is how this area was identified because patients who'd
Speaker 3: had strokes and lost their power of speech when they
Speaker 3: died and their brains were looked at, they all have
Speaker 3: lesions in this front left hand side of the brain.
Speaker 3: So everybody's confident that speech is controlled there and if
Speaker 3: you damage it, you're done for or you lose your
Speaker 3: power of speech for a while. And then occasional who
Speaker 3: we find most bizarre cases. There's a just released about
Speaker 3: a year ago, a paper from about a woman in
Speaker 3: America who has a college degree. She's absolutely normal, and
Speaker 3: she heard that the group were doing some of these
Speaker 3: scans on brains and she said, well, I think you
Speaker 3: might want to look at my brain because I've been
Speaker 3: told it's very interesting. So they put her in the
Speaker 3: scan and then they said, oh, because the front left
Speaker 3: side of her brain, there is nothing there there's a
Speaker 3: big hole literally, and what they think happened is that
Speaker 3: when she was in the womb, she had a there
Speaker 3: was a stroke and the area was damaged. So there's
Speaker 3: none of the language production centers the brain, and yet
Speaker 3: some other part of her brain taken over that function.
Speaker 2: That's amazing.
Speaker 3: Your computer can't do that, right If I break the
Speaker 3: chip that controls the screen, the part of it's going
Speaker 3: to go, Okay, I'll do that instead.
Speaker 2: Exactly exactly, Well, I was going to say, you know,
Speaker 2: in some areas of the brain, if you have a tumor,
Speaker 2: it starts to affect certain things, but sometimes people offset
Speaker 2: that and you're so, you're right, yeah, I.
Speaker 3: Mean the plasticity. I mean, you know, there are cases
Speaker 3: of people who had terrible, terrible strokes that the medics say, look,
Speaker 3: this is going to be incapacitating, blah blah blah, and
Speaker 3: then they have made an amazing recovery. So is there
Speaker 3: is plasticity. But I think it's more that we don't
Speaker 3: understand enough about the detail of the brain to be
Speaker 3: able to Our scans are so low resolution in fact,
Speaker 3: that we don't understand enough about what's happened when such
Speaker 3: damage occurs, so we don't understand the plasticity. I think
Speaker 3: that's the real point. If it's early damage happens early,
Speaker 3: as in the case of this woman, then you can,
Speaker 3: if you're lucky, you will carry on perfectly normally. But again,
Speaker 3: we really don't understand why that might take place, why
Speaker 3: that can occur. But as a principle, there is this
Speaker 3: plasticity that there is not in a machine.
Speaker 2: Do you think, Matthew, emotion stems from the brain or
Speaker 2: some other area, maybe the heart for example.
Speaker 3: Well, I mean this is one of the interesting questions
Speaker 3: of why we're interested in the brain at all. And
Speaker 3: I start the book with this that you know, most cultures,
Speaker 3: as far as we know, for most of our history,
Speaker 3: people haven't been interested in the brain at all. They
Speaker 3: have thought that emotion, feeling, spirit, whatever you want to
Speaker 3: might call it, is based in some part of the body,
Speaker 3: often in the heart. And if you think about it,
Speaker 3: that's what it feels like. If you get excited, you
Speaker 3: don't get excited in your brain. Generally you might do,
Speaker 3: but in general it's some part of your body. You'll
Speaker 3: heartile start pounding, you know, if you're frightened, then your
Speaker 3: bowels might start churning, so that suggests that there's there's
Speaker 3: something else going on here. And there was a very
Speaker 3: famous neuroscience paper published about twenty five years ago which
Speaker 3: might the title of which was very striking but might
Speaker 3: sound a bit odd to listeners, and it was the
Speaker 3: brain has a body. And what they were trying to
Speaker 3: do was say, look, you know, we're not just this
Speaker 3: computer sitting in our heads. Our brains are connected to
Speaker 3: our bodies, to the various hormones that are coursing around them,
Speaker 3: and now we know probably also being affected by things
Speaker 3: like our microbiome in our guts and so and therefore
Speaker 3: we need to have a much more whole body view
Speaker 3: about not only us, but animals as well, what we
Speaker 3: do and how we do it and why we do it.
Speaker 3: So our perception of emotion, our perception of emotion is
Speaker 3: very much bodily. We feel things in our body. That
Speaker 3: have been loads of studies of this showing that for
Speaker 3: the vast majority of emotions and feelings and concepts that
Speaker 3: they are detected or perceived as being in various parts
Speaker 3: of your body, not in your head. And when people say, well,
Speaker 3: put things in their head, it's because they've been told
Speaker 3: sit being told that it's in yet.
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