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