Changing your mind.

A programme in 6 sections about American research into various aspects of the brain. 1) How the brain compensates for loss of a function, in this case, sight. At the Deaconess Beth Israel Medical Centre, Boston, a researcher is blindfolded for 100 hours and an electric shock to her visual cortex disables that function. She then sets out to learn braille and does weel in the test; but when her visual function is re-established, while she is still blindfolded, she finds braille much more difficult. The experiment showed that the brain makes up for loss of sight by re-organising itself and that it can do this in a few days. 2) Grow Your Own Brain: sixteen taxi drivers volunteered to have their brains scanned and it was found that all had a larger than usual hipocampus, the memory area of the brain. At the University of Illinois research with rats showed that their brain cells formed more connections when their environment was more mentally stimulating, but mice given physical exercise formed just as many new brain connections. Mice given an exercise wheel formed more brain connections than those whose cage did not have a wheel. 3)True or False? An observer studied a live picnic scene in order to memorise the events - the number of times people got up, what they ate, etc. Then the scene was photographed to include events that did not take place during observation. The observer was tested as to what he did and did not see and was shown photographs to confuse his memory. He was susceptible to the photographic suggestions of events he had not witnessed. The additional information is given that memory may be scattered throughout the brain according to the sensations involved and that it may be possible to scan the brain for true and false recognition. 4)What's In A Dream? At the Harvard Univ. Sleep Laboratory a man has electrodes attached to his head. He carries out a word association test which he has to repeat throughout the night, being woken up to do so. When he was awoken from REM (rapid eye movement) sleep he carried out the test more efficiently than when awoken from non-REM sleep and even more efficiently than when fully awake. This indicates the importance of this phase of sleep and of dreams. In REM sleep normal inputs of stimuli are cut off and the brain apparently recycles its store of impressions etc. - probably the source of dreams. 5)Monastery of the Mind. Prof. Gerald Edelman, Nobel Prizewinner for his discovery concerning antibody molecule structure, founded the Neurosciences Institute, California, in 1996 and there he assembled a very advanced robot called Darwin, to show how the brain and body work together. Darwin is not a conventional robot which has to be programmed with instructions. It is directed by a computer with a 'brain' modelled on a mammal brain and stimulated neurons which continually form new networks. Prof. Edelman is interested in consciousness and how to investigate it scientifically. It cannot be located in any one site in the brain. Brain scans show how everyone responds differently to a single event. 6)The Power of Half. A brain scan of a young woman who suffered a stroke in utero shows that a large part of the left side of her brain is missing. This woman has impaired gait and visual spatial skills but can carry out a normal workload and has an unusual capacity for calculation - demonstrated by her ability to calculate the days of past and future dates.