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Documentary, The Brain: A Secret History - Episode 02 Emotions
The Brain: A Secret History
The Brain: A Secret History is a three-part series presented by Michael Mosley that explores the history of experimental psychology and the attempts to understand and manipulate the human brain. The series covers various topics, including the study of abnormal brains to reveal the workings of the normal brain.
In part 3, titled "Broken brains," the series focuses on experiments on abnormal brains, such as the case of Angela, a 45-year-old suffering from severe epileptic seizures, who undergoes surgery to remove the damaged part of her temporal lobe.
The series also discusses Paul Broca's discovery of a damaged language centre in a patient's brain in the mid-19th century, which is considered the start of modern neuroscience.
The series also includes discussions on the work of Henry Molaison, who suffered brain damage leading to severe epilepsy, and the surgical removal of his hippocampus.
The Brain: A Secret History was released on January 6, 2011, and has an IMDb rating of 7.2.
The series has been described as informative but biased, with some controversial portrayals of historical figures and events.
The series includes episodes on mind control, where Mosley explores the history of attempts to control the human mind, including the use of hallucinogenic drugs and the work of B.F. Skinner and William Sargant.
The series also touches on the controversial Project MKULTRA, which involved experiments on the human brain
The Brain: A Secret History
The Brain: A Secret History is a three-part series presented by Michael Mosley that explores the history of experimental psychology and the attempts to understand and manipulate the human brain. The series covers various topics, including the study of abnormal brains to reveal the workings of the normal brain.
In part 3, titled "Broken brains," the series focuses on experiments on abnormal brains, such as the case of Angela, a 45-year-old suffering from severe epileptic seizures, who undergoes surgery to remove the damaged part of her temporal lobe.
The series also discusses Paul Broca's discovery of a damaged language centre in a patient's brain in the mid-19th century, which is considered the start of modern neuroscience.
The series also includes discussions on the work of Henry Molaison, who suffered brain damage leading to severe epilepsy, and the surgical removal of his hippocampus.
The Brain: A Secret History was released on January 6, 2011, and has an IMDb rating of 7.2.
The series has been described as informative but biased, with some controversial portrayals of historical figures and events.
The series includes episodes on mind control, where Mosley explores the history of attempts to control the human mind, including the use of hallucinogenic drugs and the work of B.F. Skinner and William Sargant.
The series also touches on the controversial Project MKULTRA, which involved experiments on the human brain
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LearningTranscript
00:00Why do we do the things we do?
00:05What really makes us tick?
00:08How do our minds work?
00:11For centuries, these questions were largely left to philosophers and theologians.
00:21Around 100 years ago, a new science began to shine a bright light on the inner workings of the mind.
00:28It was called experimental psychology.
00:34But doing scientific experiments posed some terrible ethical and moral dilemmas.
00:41Do you think the research was justified? Would you have stopped him if you could?
00:45In this series, I will explore how psychologists have probed inside our minds,
00:50by way of experiments which sometimes were frankly barbaric.
00:55The experiment requires that we continue.
00:57But he might be dead in there.
00:59Ever since I was a medical student, I have been fascinated by psychology,
01:03by its brutal history and by how far some researchers have been prepared to go in the search for answers.
01:10This time, I'm exploring how scientists have struggled to understand that seemingly irrational and yet deeply complex part of our minds are emotions.
01:24I'm playing my own small part in this quest.
01:30You're going to be experiencing some moderate pain.
01:34How are you going to create the pain?
01:36Emotions are a huge part of our lives.
01:41But where do they come from?
01:43Can they be controlled?
01:45What are they there for?
01:49What are they there for?
01:50The answers they came up with were rich, complex and also profoundly uncomfortable.
01:58They have made me re-evaluate the role of emotions in my own life.
02:04It's a load-bearing belt.
02:18It's got to be done up securely because your life may depend on it.
02:22Safety helmet.
02:24A problem faced by anyone who wants to study emotions is how to reproduce them.
02:30Some emotions are harder to generate than others.
02:34The one we're hoping to generate today is fear.
02:39A pair of gloves.
02:40If you do get stuck, it will stop you ripping your fingernails off.
02:45Do you ever get people who freak out when they're down there?
02:47Frequently.
02:48Right.
02:49I have never done this because I have always been aware that when I go into small dark spaces,
02:56and I even think about doing so, I become really, really uncomfortable.
03:01I think I probably have a mild degree of claustrophobia, but I've never challenged it.
03:05And that's kind of why I want to do it now, and to see what it's going to actually be like.
03:10There's your kite.
03:11Wow, that's small, isn't it?
03:13I was imagining something large.
03:16Ah, okay.
03:19First of all, it's nasty.
03:23Now, one of the questions that scientists have grappled with down the years is the relationship between reason and emotion.
03:30I see myself as a rational creature, and yet I can be overwhelmed by my feelings.
03:37As I think I'm about to find out.
03:42There's a part of me which is absolutely convinced that I'm a rational creature.
03:46Whatever emotion is engendered by the cave, I can control it.
03:50But I don't know until I do it.
03:55Oh, God, blimey.
03:57It's one way down.
03:58Going down.
04:01Yeah, I'm fine.
04:04Lay right down.
04:05Yeah.
04:06Get your legs in first.
04:07Sturt your legs.
04:08Oh, jeez.
04:09Twist your hips.
04:11Oh, God, that's horrible.
04:12Yeah, just relax.
04:13I realise that, actually, it's not the dark and the small.
04:19It's the fear of getting stuck.
04:25Right.
04:27Do people panic at this point?
04:29Well, the secret is your mind and your body both have to be relaxed.
04:33Ah, Jesus.
04:34Ah, I can feel a panic.
04:38Calm down.
04:40Objectify it.
04:41I have a score of ten.
04:42How bad is it?
04:43Probably about nine at the moment.
04:46Can I...?
04:47No, that's really, really horrible.
04:48You just...
04:50Stop.
04:51Relax.
04:54You come to what they call the grip self moment.
04:57Right.
04:58When you've got a grip self.
04:59Yeah.
05:00But you absolutely have to take control.
05:02All right?
05:05Just don't think about it.
05:06Just breathe.
05:08Jesus.
05:09Christ.
05:13My arm has got stuck.
05:16I have one...
05:17My left arm underneath me.
05:19Don't panic.
05:21Do I put my hands in front of me or what?
05:24Yeah, with whatever's most comfortable.
05:26I'm not going to get stuck.
05:30Oh, trees are horrible.
05:32Oh, God.
05:34Oh.
05:36Oh.
05:37Oh.
05:38That moment, man.
05:39My arm was trapped underneath me.
05:41I really thought...
05:44I'd get me stuck.
05:46And that was just...
05:48absolutely bloody awful.
05:50Oh, God.
05:51God.
05:56It is clearly possible to produce a powerful emotion.
06:00But to really understand them is a very different challenge.
06:13In the early days, psychology largely relied on speculative, unproven theories.
06:19Then, at the start of the 20th century, psychologists finally began to apply the scientific method to their discipline.
06:30One of the first to do so was young, ambitious J.B. Watson.
06:34The place, John Hopkins University, Baltimore.
06:38The question he was asking was deceptively simple.
06:44Where do emotions come from?
06:47Are we born with them?
06:49Do we learn them?
06:52He already had a pet theory.
06:55Now, Watson believed that we're all born with three basic emotions.
06:59Love, fear and rage.
07:01And that by mixing those together, you get all the emotional range that we enjoy as adults.
07:07But where he broke with other people was he believed that every experience you had,
07:13all the emotions you felt later in life, were the product of some childhood experience.
07:18That what you experienced as a child would determine who you fell in love with,
07:23what you hated and what you got angry with.
07:25Watson's own childhood was not happy.
07:30His father was drunk and often absent.
07:33Perhaps because of this, Watson was immensely driven.
07:37And in 1920, began planning something that would make him famous.
07:41Now, Watson is about to do what will turn out to be one of the most controversial and also important experiments of the early 20th century.
07:51He must have been nervous, and so must the people taking part in this experiment.
08:02Watson wanted to study fear.
08:05And to do that, he's going to have to find someone and utterly terrify them.
08:11These are his props.
08:13A clown mask.
08:14Some newspaper and matches.
08:18A steel bar and a hammer.
08:21So, who was he going to terrify?
08:26Watson chose as his subject a nine-month-old infant he called Albert.
08:33Albert's mother was a wet nurse at the local hospital,
08:37who probably needed the dollar a day usually paid to experimental subjects.
08:41A corridor conveniently linked Albert's hospital home to Watson's lab.
08:48Now, Watson must have hoped this was going to be something memorable because he filmed it,
08:55which was something extremely unusual for the time.
08:57Watson wanted to prove that though babies are born with an instinctive capacity for fear,
09:02initially there is not much they're actually frightened of.
09:07They learn what to fear.
09:10Watson started by testing Albert's reaction to a series of potentially dangerous things.
09:16This is a burning pile of paper.
09:18Will little Albert be frightened of it?
09:20And the answer is no.
09:21Little Albert's trying to reach out and grab the flames.
09:26He's obviously not frightened.
09:28He doesn't know that fire burns.
09:31He hasn't had that experience.
09:33Then animals were pushed in front of him.
09:36Albert was curious but showed no signs of actually being frightened.
09:40But Watson knew he could terrify Albert with loud, unexpected noises.
09:46So far what he'd done was pretty innocuous.
09:49The next bit wasn't.
09:51Imagine this doll is little Albert.
09:54And this bit of cotton wool is a mouse.
09:57Well the mouse comes to play with little Albert and they have some fun together.
10:01And then on one occasion the experimenter comes up behind little Albert and completely unexpectedly
10:07terrifies the kid by banging a loud noise.
10:11They do this again and again.
10:15What they wanted to see was had they induced fear in little Albert towards the rat that he had previously really liked.
10:30Watson was deliberately trying to condition Albert to associate all these objects with fear.
10:35The test would be would Albert be scared of them without needing to startle him with a bang.
10:44So Watson and his colleagues push the objects in front of Albert once more.
10:49Ooh.
11:07Albert is obviously very uncomfortable.
11:09He's trying to run away.
11:11And they're almost torturing him.
11:13Oh, you can see it. He's crying.
11:15He's screaming.
11:17He doesn't want anything to do with it.
11:18He's trying to run away.
11:19And they'll just bring it back to him.
11:20It really is quite disturbing.
11:25Watson noted that when the rat alone was presented, little Albert puckered his face and withdrew his body sharply to the left.
11:33Oh, and this is nasty.
11:37They've got a mask out there.
11:40Oh, this is horrid.
11:41The experimenter's got a mask on and he's deliberately setting out to try and terrify the child.
11:47Watson had proved that you can learn fear of almost anything.
11:52Extreme fear.
11:54You can make a person phobic.
11:56So I've read about the case of little Albert before, but I've never seen the footage and it's really quite upsetting.
12:04Particularly when you think of him as an innocent young child of eight months, having these horrible things done to you by adults.
12:13There's a sort of coldness about this experiment, which is really, really uncomfortable.
12:19Watson's work was a landmark.
12:26By frightening little Albert, he had shown that whilst our capacity for emotions is innate, how they develop depends on what we experience.
12:39The experiment ended after five months, when his mother got a new job and moved away.
12:44She took with her a child filled with fears.
12:50For nearly a century, one of psychology's most iconic figures vanished.
13:00Recently, however, a relentless researcher did manage to track him down.
13:08But there was to be no happy ending.
13:10Little Albert died from an infectious disease when he was a child.
13:19Even the name Watson gave him isn't really his.
13:24His mother called him Douglas.
13:29He is this sort of big event in the history of psychology and yet he's also utterly anonymous.
13:34Which is quite sort of sad in its own way.
13:39And also because his mother took his secrets with her to the grave.
13:45We have no idea what happened to this little Albert after he left.
13:49We have no idea whether the fear that was conditioned into him by Watson persisted.
13:54All we know is he lies here, he died at age six, probably of encephalitis.
14:02And that his mother loved him.
14:06Fast forward to the 21st century and it's clear that the influence of the little Albert experiment has been profound.
14:25Watson had shown that we learn fear by association.
14:28It wasn't long before others began using the same technique to reverse the effect.
14:35To use the power of association to unlearn fear.
14:38His legacy is behavioural therapy.
14:46One of the most effective treatments today for helping people with phobias.
14:53Ten years ago I made a TV series about phobias.
14:57I particularly remember Daniel.
14:59He was so frightened of dogs he could barely walk down the road.
15:02Oh my God.
15:05It's all right. It's okay.
15:07It's okay. It's okay.
15:09It's all right.
15:11It's all right. It's all right.
15:14Okay. Just keep walking. It's all right.
15:17No, I don't.
15:19Okay.
15:21Daniel had a few sessions with a behavioural psychologist which seemed to help.
15:27But has it lasted?
15:28Daniel is now 20 and I've come to meet him with my own dog, Guy.
15:37Hello there.
15:39Hiya.
15:40Hi there.
15:41Michael.
15:42Hiya, Daniel.
15:43Hello, nice to see you.
15:44Hiya, nice to meet you.
15:45You've changed a lot. It's so nice to see you.
15:47Are you okay with Guy?
15:48Um, yeah, fine. Yeah, it's no problem.
15:50Very good. Very good. I'm impressed.
15:53Do you mind? I'm just going to bring Guy next to you.
15:55I just want to see. Are you happy petting Guy?
15:57I don't mind.
16:00There you go.
16:01See, that's fine now.
16:02Yeah.
16:03But years ago that would never have happened.
16:04Yeah.
16:05It's a lot easier to rationalise and weigh up now before it would have just been anything to get away from the situation.
16:11Behavioural therapy does not claim to cure, but to make fear manageable.
16:15I wanted to see if Daniel would be able to handle a bigger challenge than Guy.
16:21So what do you think about the one over there?
16:23Um, this phimalist over there.
16:25Would you be happy going over there and having a chat or me bringing her back over here?
16:29I'd rather you didn't, to be honest, but I could probably walk past.
16:33Shall we go and see how close we can get before you feel uncomfortable?
16:37Yeah, I think I can walk past.
16:38Let's go and see. Come on, go.
16:42Behavioural therapy involves gradually increasing exposure to whatever it is you fear.
16:48So, out of ten at the moment.
16:53How anxious?
16:54Please.
16:56Six or seven?
16:57So it's going up?
16:58It is, yeah.
17:00Okay, tell me kind of when you want to stop then.
17:04If Daniel runs away now, his fear of dogs will be reinforced.
17:11See, this is okay. I want to get much closer to where else.
17:14Okay.
17:16But staying while his brain shrieks run is hard to do.
17:24You all right?
17:25I am.
17:28Is your pulse running?
17:30Yeah, probably a bit faster.
17:33Mind if I just have good pulse?
17:40About 125, 130.
17:42Which is about, I imagine, twice what it normally is.
17:45Really?
17:46Yes.
17:47So I think you're feeling a trifle anxious.
17:53If Daniel can tough it out, his anxiety will fade and he will start to break the association between dogs and fear.
18:01You're now running at about 90.
18:02Which is, I know a bit above.
18:03It's a little bit, but it's come down, in the last minute or so, it's come down from about 120 to 90.
18:20Yeah.
18:21I don't think Daniel will ever love dogs, but nor will he allow fear of them to rule his life.
18:31Well done.
18:32Really, really impressive.
18:33By the 1950s, psychologists felt they had a grasp of how fears develop and how they can be controlled.
18:51But what about a more positive emotion?
18:56What about love?
18:57I don't actually bring out these photographs very often and they are incredibly evocative.
19:18This is me and Claire on our honeymoon, looking at each other.
19:24And it brings a very sort of warm go and these are pictures of me and the kids growing up.
19:30That must be Jack, probably about two years old.
19:34Very sweet.
19:37So what is love?
19:39And what is it for?
19:43In the 1950s, the answers were unclear.
19:46There were just a series of assumptions going back half a century.
19:52They knew babies are born with basic instincts and the most basic is to eat.
20:00The dominant idea was that affection and love develop towards whoever is feeding us.
20:06Love is just there to reinforce this bond with the feeder.
20:13But no one had put this idea to the test.
20:16People didn't understand how you could study it, let alone be willing to study it.
20:26It was something which was seen as almost unstudiable, certainly in the laboratory.
20:34And that anyone who attempted to do so was probably a fool.
20:37One man who thought that as far as love was concerned, psychology had been a complete failure, was Harry Harlow.
20:45In 1958, Harlow set about challenging this by doing a strange and compelling experiment.
20:56What Harlow wanted to do was explore love.
21:02Now, how do you actually do something like that?
21:05Well, he had an idea.
21:07It's rather extraordinary and certainly bizarre.
21:08What Harlow needed for his experiments were baby monkeys and very basic building materials.
21:20What Harlow wanted to investigate was the nature of love between a mother and a child.
21:32What is it a child really wants?
21:33This was going to help him answer that.
21:42There were lots of theories about love and the relationship between a mother and child, but virtually no experimental data.
21:49Right. So what Harlow was attempting to do was build something which was a sort of surrogate mummy monkey.
22:06The baby monkeys were to be separated from their mothers and then offered DIY alternatives, built out of bits of scrap.
22:15Now, the interesting thing is that Harlow was doing this face here, not really for the benefit of the baby monkeys, but because he wanted parents to identify with this funny little creature he was creating.
22:34Harlow wanted this to be about people, not just monkeys.
22:38And finally what I need is, yes, one of these, basically a sort of food.
22:46A mother paired down to absolutely bare essentials.
22:51Basically one breast, if you like, one nipple to feed, one face to smile and a frame to sort of cuddle onto.
22:59Right. So that was monkey number one.
23:02Now he needed to build monkey number two.
23:11The purpose of the experiment was to offer baby monkeys two types of surrogate mother and see which they preferred.
23:19One would offer food, the other something less obvious.
23:23At this point, these two monkeys look really quite similar, but I'm just going to add Harlow's final touch.
23:33To the second surrogate mother, Harlow added just one thing.
23:40A soft cover.
23:41The question was, if you took a baby monkey and he introduced the baby monkey to these two parents, who would it prefer to go to?
23:51Conventional theory said that you get love or love is generated by fulfilling something of your basic wants.
23:58So in theory, and that's certainly what everyone believed at the time, the baby monkeys would become attached and bonded to this monkey, because this monkey is providing milk.
24:08It is satisfying a need, satisfying hunger.
24:11So what happened?
24:17Harry Harlow is no longer alive, but I'm going to meet someone who worked very closely with him.
24:23Hello.
24:33Hi. Come on in. Come on in.
24:35Hello, thank you.
24:37Woo!
24:39Hello.
24:40What happened?
24:42As I heard somebody once say, I put my foot down and it broke itself.
24:46Oh, wow.
24:48Len Rosenbaum is an eminent psychologist.
24:49Going, I think, into this front room.
24:52Fabulous.
24:54Did people really think it was enough just to feed and to clothe?
24:58I think at that time people thought those primary drives, the survival needs, were enough to carry infants, monkeys or others, from immaturity to maturity.
25:12No one at that point thought that something like what Harlow called the affectional drives, these bonding tendencies, were in a sense as primary as the need for food, the need for water and so on.
25:29That's the experiment.
25:31Okay.
25:32Let's see.
25:33Let's see.
25:34Let's see.
25:36The baby monkeys were offered their choice.
25:41Harlow recorded exactly what happened.
25:47Watch.
25:48He's going to the wire mother.
25:52The baby readily fed from the wire object but rather rapidly left the wire mother and then spent its time clinging 15, 16, 18 hours a day.
26:05Each of these had a clock attached so you could time how much time was the baby spending clinging to one or the other.
26:12The attachment was developed towards the cloth surrogate regardless of the source of the food.
26:22So it was not food in the end, it was touch which was important to the baby monkey.
26:25That was what these experiments purported to show, yes.
26:29Having shown that the babies preferred the cloth mother, they wanted to investigate what this really meant.
26:36What was the baby feeling for the cloth mother?
26:39The whole idea was to ask the question, well fine, the kid prefers the cloth even though the wire feeds.
26:49But what, how far does that preference go?
26:52What's its ultimate meaning?
26:56They used fear to test the strength of the baby's bond.
27:00Faced with a scary object, which mother would they run to?
27:04And now Dr. Harlow is moving to the front of the cage, one of these very scary objects.
27:13He raises a door, scares it and the baby rushes.
27:19Where does it rush? Not to the feeder, but to the cloth surrogate.
27:25So mummy really is providing everything I need, protection?
27:30Exactly.
27:32So this is love?
27:33This is what Harlow would call love?
27:35This is what Harlow would call love.
27:37Right.
27:38And I'm inclined to agree.
27:40Next, Len and Harlow tested the strength of a baby's love for its mother.
27:45Just how unpleasant would the cloth mother have to be before the baby monkey ceased to want it?
27:53What I did was to try and provide a mother, a cloth mother, that the infant would become attached to,
28:01but which would provide a kind of rejection, which meant that what I did was used compressed air to blow a blast of air at the kid at some periodic interval.
28:15The baby then steps off, gets away, and then what happens?
28:19That's the question.
28:21Does the kid say, well, I don't want any more of this?
28:24This is not for me.
28:25No, just the opposite.
28:27The theory is this.
28:29What if every time you're emotionally upset, you do the thing that you always do when you're emotionally upset, you rush to your mother.
28:37But now when you're on your mother, I make you even more emotionally upset.
28:42What do you do?
28:44Well, you want to be on your mother even more.
28:46There's a linkage between the infant's emotional state and its desire to be on the mother.
28:52Even if the mother is the source of that emotional distress.
28:57I mean, it kind of makes sense, but when I was working with delinquent children, it always, I was young, I was sort of 20,
29:04but I was surprised by the extent to which these children who frankly had abusive mothers didn't matter how badly their mothers had behaved to them.
29:14They would get really, really angry if you ever, ever accused their mothers of being in any way inadequate.
29:18Absolutely the case, and it was exactly those kinds of observations at the human level that was a natural bridge for us to study.
29:29These experiments threw a powerful light on a baby's need for its parents' touch.
29:37But Harlow was about to go further.
29:40He now asked what would happen if we had no love, no contact, nobody at all.
29:48Would this lead to depression and despair?
29:51And if so, would this help our understanding of this terrible affliction?
29:57Harlow himself had suffered from depression.
30:01He put baby monkeys in total isolation for up to a year.
30:06Some were not only isolated, but confined in a restricted space known as the Well of Despair.
30:12All the monkeys came out severely disturbed.
30:17Those placed in the well were particularly damaged.
30:23Len did not work with Harlow on these experiments.
30:28Do you think the research was justified?
30:30Would you have stopped him if you could?
30:32If you'd had the choice then...
30:33The isolation experiments I probably would not have.
30:36You wouldn't have stopped them?
30:37The Well of Despair studies I probably would have.
30:40But what was the goal?
30:42If we could create a meaningful, valid monkey model of depression, would that be worthwhile?
30:52Without question in my mind, I would say it would be absolutely worthwhile.
30:58Whatever you had to do to the monkeys to achieve that.
31:00Well, that's your phrase.
31:03I don't know. I can't answer the whatever I had to do.
31:06But would I have said if I were on a grant committee reviewing research that said our goal is to create a monkey model of depression that would allow us to understand ultimately brain mechanisms?
31:23I would say, having worked in a psychiatry department for 47 years, you're damn right I would have been supportive of it.
31:28To be able to solve that problem, to be able to knock a piece of that problem out of the way, is overwhelmingly worth it.
31:37Harlow's work is deeply controversial. But what he gave the world is something that I think is of profound importance.
31:46I haven't stopped reading it yet.
31:47I haven't stopped reading it yet.
31:48He proved just how much we all need affection and close physical contact.
31:52Okay.
31:53Okay.
31:54Okay.
31:55When we were walking home from school, Betty told me she had this idea.
31:58Tells.
31:59Tells, yeah.
32:00Tells.
32:02After Harlow, hospital-born babies were no longer separated from their mothers, but placed physically close to them.
32:07What had seemed natural to so many mothers was now confirmed by science.
32:14This particular experiment utterly altered the way that people dealt with the subject of love and indeed the way they brought up children.
32:24From then on you begin to see the important thing is that children should feel touched, cuddled, held, and for that I am profoundly, profoundly grateful to Harlow.
32:34Watson had shown that emotions are learnt and Harlow that we are intensely social creeps.
32:53So it was natural to put these two ideas together and ask how much of what we do and feel is learnt from other people.
33:13In 1961, American psychologist Albert Bandura set out to see how far just watching other people influences our behaviour.
33:27Bandura chose to study aggression.
33:32At the time, the widespread view was that watching violence reduces aggression.
33:38It purges us.
33:40But was this true?
33:48To find out, Bandura experimented on small children, aged three to five.
33:58So what Bandura did is he put an adult in a room with a child and a bunch of toys,
34:03including something he called the Bobo Doll, which is a giant inflatable doll.
34:08Then, what happened after about a minute, the adult unexpectedly started beating up the doll in really quite a vicious manner,
34:15shouting, screaming, kicking, hitting with a hammer, and went on like this for about ten minutes.
34:24What would the child do if, after watching the adult, they were left in a room on their own with the same toys?
34:30Ooh, she really is going for it.
34:40She's doing exactly the same as she saw the adult do.
34:45She's lifted the doll up and now she's really hammering it.
34:49She's got a little hammer out and she's having to go at its toes now.
34:52It shows innovation, if nothing else.
34:55Every child who watched the adult being violent copied much of what they'd seen.
35:01The closest imitation was when a child observed an adult of the same sex.
35:06Now he's got a gun out and he's using that combination of the gun and the hammer to just whack the doll.
35:14He's got a very aggressive expression on his face.
35:19Importantly, another group who had watched an adult play gently, played calmly, showing no signs of aggression.
35:27Basically, what the children saw, the children did.
35:32This was an utterly unexpected finding.
35:38Before Bandera did this experiment, psychologists thought that seeing somebody else acting out a violent scene would be cathartic.
35:46It would sort of purge you.
35:47But what this clearly demonstrated, and really shocked people at the time,
35:51is that actually what happens when you see something doing violent, actions, you tend to imitate them.
36:02Bandera's findings were given added impact by his timing.
36:06His experiment took place just as television was moving into the home.
36:14Two years later, Bandera re-ran his experiment with one important difference.
36:21This time, he wanted to compare how children react to watching an aggressive adult, not in real life, but on film.
36:32Children watched two versions.
36:35One was a straightforward recording of the adult beating up the Bobo doll.
36:40The second, a fantasy version, with the attacking adult dressed as a cat.
36:45In almost every case, Bandera got the same results.
36:49Children imitated what they'd seen.
36:52The results were dynamite.
36:55This was one of the first experiments to look at the impact of television violence.
37:02The complicated relationship between TV and behaviour is still being debated.
37:07But it was Bandera who opened the floodgates and launched an entirely new area of research.
37:25Right.
37:27Bandera had shown that we can be strongly influenced by other people's behaviour.
37:31This is the basis of so-called social learning theory.
37:36We didn't have a bowl.
37:38How much?
37:40About four ounces, I think.
37:42Which one's ounces?
37:44Four for one.
37:46But it's also clear that how we learn changes as we mature.
37:50As we grow up, something else happens to temper our behaviour.
37:54We develop a capacity to reflect on what we see.
37:59We spray it by the edge.
38:01We identify with other people.
38:03We develop empathy.
38:05Mmm, tastes good.
38:07It's good, doesn't it?
38:09So how exactly do we do this?
38:12Well, for decades, nobody really knew.
38:15And then researchers developed new ways of looking inside the brain for answers.
38:20I'm on my way to Holland to experience experimentation 21st century style.
38:35We've left the world of abuse and exploitation behind.
38:40Though what I'm about to do will involve pain.
38:43Christian Kiesers is researching empathy by trying to watch it at work in our brains.
38:58So I think the big question is a bit how we understand other people.
39:03And I think you've all experienced that sometimes you'd see a partner, for instance, accidentally hurting herself.
39:09And when you see that, the funny thing is you don't just realise that the other person is in pain,
39:15but you almost have to hold your own finger because you kind of embody, to a certain extent, the pain of the other.
39:21And so what our lab is all about is trying to understand, at the level of the brain,
39:27what happens while we get these very strong insights into what somebody else is feeling.
39:32Christian is investigating the extent to which our own feelings of pain are important in understanding the pain of others.
39:45So basically there's going to be two phases to the experiment.
39:49There's the first phase in which you're going to be watching movies.
39:52And then there's going to be a part where you're going to be actually experiencing some moderate pain.
40:00How are you going to create the pain?
40:02Well, I think you're going to find out a little bit later on in the experiment.
40:11Christian is going to collect two sets of data.
40:14First, he records what happens in my brain when I see someone else in pain.
40:18OK, ready to go?
40:20Yep.
40:21OK, here we go.
40:35OK, Michael, how was that?
40:37Then he measures what happens in my brain when I am repeatedly and enthusiastically whacked by one of his colleagues.
40:45One, go.
40:48Three, two, one, stop.
40:52The two brain scans can then be compared.
40:57What they're finding suggests that empathy is actually measurable.
41:02Many of the same brain areas light up whether we are experiencing pain or watching someone else in pain.
41:09What's really special about this area we're in is that by seeing that the same brain area is active in two cases, you don't just see where in the brain it's being done, but you see that it's done by this recall of your own experience.
41:27When tested this way, people show very different responses.
41:38I'm a bit nervous.
41:41Will the machine reveal that I am warm and empathic, or perhaps a secret psychopath?
41:46I often have tender, concerned things with people as fortunate as me.
41:53Yeah, I...
41:55Yeah.
41:57This questionnaire will help them compare how empathetic I think I am with how empathetic the machine thinks I am.
42:04When I see someone getting hurt, I tend to remain calm. No, that probably doesn't describe me very well.
42:14First, Christian shows me what happened when I was slapped.
42:18This created a very reasonable result.
42:22So you did activate your S1, your S2, your insula, and your ACC, just like your average Joe.
42:29OK.
42:30So far, I was normal. I'd activated areas involved in sensation and emotion, like most people do.
42:37Now, this is the part where you probably want to distract your wife.
42:41Yeah.
42:43While we were showing you the movies, the first thing we saw was this, basically.
42:48None of the red areas get reactivated when you observed it.
42:52And now you can call her again, because what we then did was we lowered the threshold a bit, kind of looking for weaker activity.
42:59And when we did that, we actually saw that you do have activity that is typical, but it was lower than what we find on average.
43:09OK. So I'm not a psychopath, but I'm not wholly in touch with the feelings of others.
43:15Exactly. You're not the most soft-hearted person, maybe.
43:19OK.
43:20What made it more embarrassing was the brain images did not match the answers I had given on the questionnaire.
43:27OK, maybe I lack insight then.
43:30They could actually be, because that's one of the things, the funny things is when we scanned psychopaths, is the brain images really suggested that they weren't all that empathic.
43:40Yeah.
43:41But the question is, I mean, they looked like they were model citizens.
43:45Of course. So I'm a psychopath. There you go.
43:48Well, maybe that's pushing it a little bit.
43:51I think what tends to happen is we tend to exaggerate our best characters, don't we? We have vain brains.
43:57Yes.
43:58Right. So what brain scans are doing, in a funny way, is they are answering one of the more fundamental questions, which is, who are we, as opposed to who we think we are?
44:07Yes.
44:15Our understanding of empathy is developing, because today's technology allows us to see inside the brain.
44:24It's revealing that empathy seems to be deeply embedded in the networks of our minds.
44:30While I'm witnessing you go through some experiences, my brain does exactly that.
44:36It doesn't just make me see what is going on in you.
44:39It makes me share all the different senses.
44:43I will feel the pain you go through.
44:45I will empathize with the actions you do to get away from it.
44:48It really reminds us of the fact that we are kind of incredibly social by nature, that kind of everybody around us is not just around us, but kind of in us.
45:02Cutting edge technology, and sometimes brutal experiments, have each opened a window onto human emotions.
45:19But there is another way we have come to learn about the role of emotions in our lives, and that's an accidental by-product of terrible personal misfortune.
45:29In the 1990s, a neuroscientist called Antonio Damasio started researching patients who had damaged a part of the brain key for normal emotions.
45:45He was struck by the differences in the way they were making decisions.
45:54His research would reveal the surprisingly pervasive role emotions have in every corner of our lives.
46:02Dave is a patient like those in Damasio's original study.
46:09Until eight years ago, life was good.
46:17We had a really good relationship, I think.
46:20Very affectionate, yeah.
46:22Very, very loving.
46:24He could put himself in my shoes and think about what could he do to make me feel more at ease, and so he would do those kinds of nice things.
46:37In 2002, Dave was diagnosed with a brain tumour and had surgery to remove it.
46:44What neither he nor his wife realised was that the operation would involve removing a part of his brain, crucial for processing emotion.
46:55When he woke up, he just was really cold.
47:02He told me he didn't want me to touch him or talk to him.
47:07The doctor came, the surgeon, and I said, you know, that's not Dave. What happened?
47:13Dave's IQ was unaffected, and he has returned to his job as an animal psychologist.
47:21But he is very conscious of being changed.
47:25A lot has gone from that aspect, emotionally flat.
47:32That's the toughest thing, is you don't realise how important emotions are until you don't feel them, and you can only remember them.
47:44Hi.
47:45Hi.
47:47Dave had not fallen out of love with Lisa, but he was no longer capable of feeling it.
47:53They divorced, but she remains devoted to him and takes him to all his medical appointments.
47:59Do you want any more coffee before we go?
48:04No, I've just filled up.
48:07Well, shall we?
48:08All right.
48:09Dave's case is so rare, he is being studied by a doctor who trained under Antonio DiMaggio.
48:22At Wisconsin University, Dr Kanig is continuing the investigation started by his teacher into the impact of emotions on our capacity to reason.
48:32So is it fair to say that you're maybe not operating with the same intuition in terms of emotion, but you're relying more of a sort of cognitive or rule-based strategy to try to put together what this person might be thinking than what is my responsibility in this situation?
48:51Right.
48:52It's, I have to think about what it would feel like rather than feel it.
48:57I was thinking the other day, and I don't want this to sound strange, but I imagine, well, maybe serial killers don't have emotions.
49:13Not that I would ever be a serial killer, but I think I have that sense of, it doesn't bother me. You know what I mean?
49:25But the thing that prevents me from being a serial killer is that I can remember that I'm not.
49:31What Dave is experiencing is intensely personal, but it is also scientifically revealing.
49:47I wanted to meet Dave's doctor to find out what had happened to his brain to produce these profound changes.
49:54So what are we looking at?
49:58So here we're looking at Dave's brain in a number of different views.
50:03As we move forward in his brain, you can see here are his eyes.
50:07Oh dear.
50:09Yeah, so right above his eyes you can see.
50:11Oh dear.
50:12That's tragic, isn't it?
50:13Yeah, very obviously a loss of tissue there on the right.
50:16Can he still read emotion, say, in Lisa?
50:19He saw someone crying and he would know that, you know, tears mean this person is sad.
50:24Now, if that would mean anything to him, if that would impact him emotionally is a different question.
50:30Right.
50:31So he can probably recognize these, you know, social and emotional cues that are emitted by other people,
50:38but, you know, can he use those to influence his decision making is a different process.
50:43Patients like Dave are making it increasingly clear that our power to reason is not independent of our emotions.
50:53They are supporting the evidence first gathered by Antonio DiMaggio.
50:59Through most of the 20th century there was this really predominant view that our decision making is dominated by some cold logical processing, some reasoning.
51:12So I think Antonio DiMaggio's work was seminal from the standpoint of highlighting the importance of emotion for decision making.
51:21And patients like Dave were really the key piece of evidence like that.
51:29DiMaggio undermined the widely held belief that most of our decisions are logical ones by devising an ingenious test.
51:37He took his inspiration from gambling.
51:43He devised a gambling test that would try to mimic the uncertain mix of risk and benefits that we juggle with in everyday life.
51:54DiMaggio was convinced that even when we think we are making a decision based on reasoning, we are actually following an emotional hunch.
52:03DiMaggio tested this by a carefully designed gambling task.
52:10OK, so I've got $2000 and I will pick this one here.
52:16Reward penalty. Good. I'm $2100. Let's keep going at that one.
52:19I'm playing a computer version of the game.
52:23The player is offered four rows of cards.
52:26They sample each one and find out that two of them will give them small but consistent rewards.
52:32I like this one.
52:34The other two give them big rewards but also big losses.
52:38Argh!
52:39Normal people respond before they are even aware of this.
52:44They just instinctively feel wary of the risky cards.
52:49Ooh, that's a bad one. That is a bad one.
52:52They are not necessarily conscious of this.
52:55They have an emotional cue.
52:58What we often call a gut instinct.
53:01You earned a total of $2900.
53:08Whoa! You may now leave.
53:10Please alert the experiment that you are done.
53:12Press the X to exit.
53:14So, yes.
53:16OK, that was fun.
53:18What struck me was I had no idea I was getting an emotional cue.
53:23That feels like a sort of simple logical decision.
53:27It doesn't feel like an emotional decision.
53:28Right. Well, in the end, I mean, after enough experience, you do sort of process it at this sort of explicit level where you say,
53:37well, this is just a logical choice.
53:39But as you're going through the task, what we found is that neurologically healthy individuals will start to move towards the safer decks before they can explicitly, you know, articulate that these decks are safer than the other ones.
53:51So they seem to be operating more on an emotional hunch.
53:53So, actually, what I think of as a logical decision is actually a rationalization after the event.
54:00And my gut has already decided which is the safe bit, and then my intelligence catches up with it.
54:05Yeah, that's one way to put it.
54:06So your emotional system is really the instrument of learning here, which precedes your sort of conscious awareness.
54:11Dave has never done the gambling test before. With his damaged emotions, how will he do?
54:24How did I lose money there? Penalties.
54:37You owe us some money, Dave. I do. You owe us some money.
54:49$1,500. I'm $1,450. All right, get your checkbook out. Get your checkbook out.
54:53I'd rather owe it to you. Yeah, I didn't learn anything on that, did I?
54:56Yeah, well, you wouldn't send me loose, though. That's what gambling's all about, right?
54:59Yeah.
55:01So as you were doing it, did you have any feeling that this is sort of a risky decision or, you know, this is a safe play or...?
55:08Um, no.
55:10We go through life thinking decisions we make, big or small, are the result of our uniquely human ability to think rationally.
55:31But as Dave and other unfortunate individuals show us, reason without emotion is nothing.
55:40On a more personal level, Dave also shows us how vital emotion is to feeling alive.
55:51And how crucial empathy is to even knowing who you are.
55:57I'm going through life missing some of these important pieces that we don't have to think about. It just happens.
56:07The longer I go basing what I should feel on memory, I'm kind of nervous that eventually the memory will fade and then trying to remember what the actual emotion felt like will be more mysterious.
56:25At least now I have the memory so I can at least go through life with that understanding. If I didn't have that memory, I guess it would be a lonely, lonely existence.
56:43Yee, I can't! Yee!
56:58Yeah!
57:01Whoa!
57:02Look for that clip.
57:04Nearly a century since Watson set out to terrify little Albert and in the
57:11process triggered an extraordinary and sometimes disturbing quest to try and
57:16understand human emotions. We now realize that far from being something you have to
57:23curb, suppress, restrain, emotions are actually central to becoming a rational,
57:30complex fully functioning human being. But the price of applying the scientific
57:42method to the study of the mind has been high. Terribly high in some cases. And
57:48this leaves me with conflicting feelings.
57:54Some of the experiments, particularly the later work with monkeys carried out by
57:59Harlow and experiments done on little Albert, you just couldn't justify, you
58:04couldn't get away with in the modern age. I certainly would obviously never allow
58:08any of my children to be terrified as part of an experiment. But do I think it was
58:14worthwhile in the end? Yes, I do. I'm glad it was done. I do believe that the
58:20knowledge that was gained was worth the price that was paid.
58:24The Brain, A Secret History continues here on BBC Four next Thursday evening at the same time.
58:41Coming up next tonight though, stay with us as drama continues with Five Daughters.
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