All language subtitles for 21D965EAC83EC3094B85622B5333548D_eng

Can we know the universe?

Are our brains capable of
comprehending the cosmos in

all of its complexity
and splendor?

We don't yet know the answer
to that question because our

brain remains almost
as much of a mystery

as the universe itself.

We think that the number of
processing units in your brain

is roughly equal to all
the stars in 1,000 galaxies.

At least 100 trillion.

And it's possible that the
real number of processing units

is ten times larger.

We're inside a brain.

It's in the grip of a Category
5 hurricane of chemical and

electrical forces.

The storm came without warning,

spreading chaos and
heartache far beyond its path...

But it also provided the
first clues to the nature of this

little cosmos.

We are traveling 2,500
years back in time to the island

of Kos in the Aegean Sea.

This is the story of
a giant leap in the

history of thought.

It was here that one of
the most powerful spells

ever to cloud the
mind was first broken.

Imagine you are the
loving parents of a

precious only child.

The boy is given to
moments of brilliance,

which charm and
impress your friends.

But there's something wrong...

A storm is brewing
inside his head...

Peleus! Peleus!

Summon a physician!!
Quickly! Now!!

This was medicine 2,500
years ago in Greece.

The idea that the ritual
appeasement of one of the gods

could bring about the cure
for an epileptic seizure was

magical thinking.

When the Greeks and people of
other cultures performed their rituals,

some of the afflicted recovered,

due to the finite
course of the illness,

or to their own immune systems.

But to the patients
and their loved ones,

it meant that the gods
had been appeased.

And when the patient died?

That just meant the
gods were so angry,

nothing could be done.

This way of thinking was a by-product of
that great human strength, and weakness,

called pattern recognition.

In this case, false
pattern recognition.

The belief that epilepsy was
caused by the anger of the

gods was the confusion of
correlation with causation,

and the wishful thinking
that prevails when

people feel powerless.

That's not to say that the
ancient Greeks didn't have

remedies, plants and minerals,
they used as medicines.

But for a disease as
mysterious as epilepsy,

they could only light
their incense and pray.

They didn't even know it had
anything to do with the brain.

And then came Hippocrates.

Hippocrates rejected the
notion that angry gods were

the cause of disease and injury.

He wrote: "The physician must
investigate the entire patient,

his diet and his environment...

The best physician
is the one who is able

to prevent illness.

Nothing happens
without a natural cause."

For this alone, he could be
called the Father of Medicine.

He is credited with
codifying an ethos for doctors.

The oath ascribed to him
in the 3rd century BCE is still

taken today by those who
would practice medicine.

And it was Hippocrates
who was among the first

to declare the brain to be
the seat of consciousness.

It's hard to believe,

but this was once a
revolutionary concept.

The prevailing wisdom
being that we actually

thought with our hearts.

And it may have been
here where he made one of

the great prophecies
in the history of science.

Hippocrates understood
that he and his contemporaries

called epilepsy
“the sacred disease”

because they didn't
understand its physical cause.

He wrote, "When we do, we
will no longer think it divine."

That little boy wasn't cursed.

There was a physical
malfunction inside his brain.

As long as we searched
for it in the whim of the gods,

we had no hope of
helping him, or ourselves.

Yet thousands of years passed,

and the brain
remained a mystery.

Between 420 BCE
and the 19th century,

our understanding of the
cosmos grew by leaps and bounds.

We discovered
the speed of light,

the laws of gravity,

and we learned that our
Sun is part of a greater galaxy

of stars and yet, 2,300
years after Hippocrates,

we still knew virtually
nothing about the part of

ourselves that made it possible
to make these discoveries:

our brains.

It could be said that
we actually knew less.

The study of the brain
had become stuck in a

pseudoscientific dead-end
called “phrenology,”

which held that from the
shape of a person's skull,

you could deduce
their intelligence and

trustworthiness.

A frenzy of
head-measuring ensued.

A gift for languages resided
above the cheekbone,

and marital fidelity
located behind the ears.

And not surprisingly,

European phrenologists
discovered that their

particular heads
represented the universal

standard of cerebral excellence.

The first real insight
regarding the connection

between the mind and the
brain was made in France in 1861.

And here again, epilepsy
played a critical role...

The Bicêtre psychiatric
hospital was state-of-the-art

in Paris back then.

In the previous century,
it had been the first to

introduce humane practices
in the treatment of the insane

and the mentally disabled.

And among the doctors
there, surgeon Paul Broca was

especially admired for
his enlightened treatment

of his patients.

Tan...

The patient's name
was Louis Leborgne.

Tan...

But everyone called
him "Tan" after the

only syllable that he had
uttered since he was 30.

He was now 51.

Tan had been having epileptic
seizures since childhood,

but he was committed to
Bicêtre because he had lost

all powers of speech except
for being able to say “tan.”

Now, poor Tan lay dying.

His right side had
become paralyzed,

and gangrene had set in.

Prior to Tan's medical crisis,

Broca had been speculating
that specific regions

of the brain might
be responsible for

the powers of speech and memory.

Broca wanted to know
everything he possibly could

about the dying patient
in expectation of what a

post-mortem might reveal.

We do not know if Tan's epilepsy
caused the damage to his brain,

or whether an
unreported childhood injury

caused his epilepsy
and later loss of speech.

Tan...

But because of Tan's fate,

Paul Broca was able to connect,

for the very first time, a
part of the human brain,

in this case the region
that was damaged,

and its specialized function:
the ability to use language.

His reward...

that part of our brain has
been known ever since

as "Broca's area."

Paul Broca's own
brain ended up in a jar

like this one in a back
storage room of the

anthropological
museum he directed,

with shelf upon shelf of the
brains of mass murderers and

other master criminals,
as well as congenital

abnormalities that seemed
to fascinate the public of the

19th century.

Broca was a humanist.

He concluded that there
were deep connections in brain

physiology between
non-human primates and us.

He founded a society of
freethinkers in his youth,

and believed passionately
in the importance

of unobstructed inquiry.

He lived his life in
pursuit of that aim.

But he, too, was partly
blinded by the prejudices that

permeated his society.

He thought men mentally
superior to women,

and whites superior
to everyone else.

His falling short of humanist
ideals shows that even someone

as committed to the
free pursuit of knowledge

as Broca could still be
deceived by endemic bigotry.

Society corrupts the best of us.

It's a little unfair,

I think, to criticize a
person for not sharing

the enlightenment
of a later age,

but it is also profoundly
saddening that such prejudices

were so pervasive.

The question raises nagging
uncertainties about which of

the assumptions of our
own age will be considered

unforgivable by the next...

Broca established for the
first time that there were

physical correlations
between anatomy and function,

but what of the crackling
energy of consciousness?

What of the stuff that
dreams are made of?

Can't put them in a jar...

When the ancient
Egyptians looked up at night,

they saw the underbody of Nut,

Goddess of the Milky Way.

When they closed their
eyes and began to dream,

they believed they were
transiting to the afterlife.

And so, dreaming was
ritualized into a form of

worship, a means to
learn what their future held,

or to send a message to
the gods, as they slumbered.

The faithful would
make a pilgrimage to

a temple to dream.

To prepare themselves,
they would withdraw to a

place of isolation,

and fast to cleanse
their mind and body.

A prayer might be
written to a particular god...

and burned.

It was hoped that its smoke
would convey the contents to

the underworld.

If we could only materialize
and decipher the dreaming that

went on at the Temple
of Dendera so long ago.

And what of your
dream just last night?

The ancient Egyptians were
mystified by the boundary that

separates our waking
and sleeping life.

They believed that we
were actually transported to

another physical realm,
and that dreams had

a material reality.

How else to explain
the stunning detail of a

particularly vivid dream?

More than 1,000 years after
the last dreamers awakened at

Dendera, there was a scientist
who believed that conscious

and unconscious thoughts
do have a material reality,

that dreams were actually
physical phenomena

that could be recorded.

And he found a way to do it.

In a place of broken minds
and shattered dreams...

This is the
Manicomio di Collegno,

in Turin, Italy.

Built as a monastery
in the 17th century,

it had become a
psychiatric hospital by 1850.

It was abandoned decades
ago, but it still reverberates with

centuries of human
suffering and loneliness.

It was here that Angelo
Mosso came to perform

experiments on
dreams and thoughts.

Mosso was a child of
the working class who

boot-strapped himself
into becoming a scientist.

His primary research had been in

pharmacology and physiology.

And it was all focused
on making life better

for the working poor.

He viewed science as a means
to improve labor conditions.

In a time when people
were literally worked to death,

without recourse
or legal protection,

Mosso designed and
built an ergograph,

or “fatigue recorder,” so
that he could demonstrate

experimentally what the
relentless stress of hard

labor did to the
human body and mind.

To Mosso, exhaustion was both
a physical and emotional state,

not a sign of human
weakness or a character flaw.

And it was your body's
way of telling you to stop

what you were
doing to avoid injury.

Mosso reasoned that fatigue
had an evolutionary advantage,

much like fear.

To demonstrate this, Mosso
began thinking about designing

an apparatus that could
record the body's blood flow.

The table that Mosso's
assistant floated on was

exquisitely balanced, and
was all attached to a rotating

drum with a stylus that
recorded the blood flow.

It was the beginning
of medical imaging,

a tool that had
never existed before.

But if the actions of the
heart could be recorded,

what about the brain?

How could you transcribe
the brain's delicate murmurings

when they were housed
in a protective skull?

There was no way to do that
without harming a patient...

Or was there?

When he was not
even two years old,

Giovanni Thron fell
from a great height.

His skull had been so badly
shattered it was necessary to

remove some of the pieces.

As a result of the blow,
he began to have frequent

and violent epileptic seizures.

Fearing that they
might be contagious,

his parents abandoned
him at the mental hospital

in Turin by the
time he was five.

And there he
languished for six years.

The catastrophic injury that
had ruined Giovanni's life had

left a doorway to his brain.

Mosso designed and built the
machine so sensitive it could

register the blood
coursing through his brain.

But Giovanni was so agitated
during his waking hours,

Mosso could only
study him while he slept.

Mosso needed Giovanni
to be perfectly still in

order to record the faint
signature of his thoughts.

When I saw Giovanni
in February, 1877,

he had a large opening in
the skull covered with skin.

The terrible fall
had forever arrested

his intellectual development.

It was a saddening circumstance,

that in the midst of the
ruin of his mind, one single,

higher idea had remained,
a remnant of his earlier

intellectual life, a motto
which he constantly repeated:

'I want to go to school.'
It was one of the most

interesting sights to observe
in the stillness of night,

what was going on in his brain,

when there was no
external cause to disturb this

mysterious life of sleep.

The brain-pulse remained for
10 or 20 minutes quite regular

and very weak...

and then began suddenly,
without any apparent cause to

swell and beat more vigorously.

The dreams, perhaps,

come to cheer the repose
of the unhappy boy?

That the face of his mother
and the recollections of his

early childhood glow
bright in his memory?

Lighting up the darkness
of his intelligence,

and make his brain
pulsate with excitement?

Or was it an unconscious
agitation of matter,

like the ebb and flow of an
unknown and solitary sea?

On that snowy night,
Angelo Mosso gave the brain

its first pen to write with.

He had invented neuroimaging,

and showed that even in sleep,

the brain is pulsing, throbbing,

flashing with the
complex business of life...

dreaming, remembering,
figuring things out.

Our thoughts, visions,
fantasies and our dreams,

do have a material reality.

Three months after
the night of dreams,

Giovanni died of anemia.

He was not yet 12.

Angelo Mosso's breakthrough
in pioneering the field of

neuroscience inspired
another man to take Mosso's

work one giant step further.

He wanted to demonstrate
that psychic powers are real.

It all happened because
of a freak accident...

Hans Berger dreamed of
becoming an astronomer,

but it was too hard,
and so in 1892,

he enlisted in the German army.

Berger was shaken
by his brush with death,

but something happened
that night that shocked

him even more...

A telegram had
arrived from his father,

a cold and distant man
who had never sent him

a telegram before.

Berger's older sister had
become panic-stricken with the

certainty that something
terrible had happened

to her little brother.

Was it possible,
Berger wondered,

that in the moment that he
realized he was going to die,

his brain had somehow
telepathically delivered a

message to the person he
was closest to, his sister?

Berger became a
physician and a professor at

the University of Jena.

By day, he worked with
his students and colleagues,

who found him to
be awkwardly formal,

and scientifically
unadventurous.

But by night, he went to a
secret laboratory where he

conducted experiments
on the brain's activity.

Berger believed that this
was his best chance of proving

that psychic energy was real.

He feared that if anyone
were to discover his real

scientific objective, he'd be
laughed out of the profession.

He kept his secret for 20 years.

Berger's
electroencephalograph made it

possible to interpret the
signals that the brain sends,

and to diagnose many
neurological diseases,

including epilepsy.

He never did find any
evidence for psychic energy,

or telepathic communication.

Berger sunk into
a deep depression,

and hanged himself in his
secret laboratory in 1941.

The EEG is still in use today,
although we now have far more

accurate ways of seeing and
recording what the brain does,

and we even have the ability
to decrypt the electrochemical

language of thought.

Exactly 100 years after
Angelo Mosso first recorded

the electrical whispers
of Giovanni's dreams,

the brain waves of a
woman newly fallen in love,

were included in the
Voyager Interstellar Message,

destined to sail the Milky Way

for a billion years or more.

From horse-drawn
carriage to interstellar craft,

in just a 100 years.

From telegrams to sending our
thoughts hand-delivered to one

another at the speed of light,

and our deepest feelings
to a billion years from now.

How did we make that leap?

And why us?

Of all the billions of species
that have ever lived on Earth,

why us and no other?

Primates who descended
from the African savannah have

sent their robot emissaries
to explore the red deserts of

Mars, and ring that
world with satellites.

We've only been at this
since the mid-20th century,

not even a lifetime, yet
look at how far beyond

our little world our
robots have ventured.

One of our craft, Voyager 1,

has broken free of the Sun,

and now sails the deep
ocean of interstellar space.

And every one of
those odysseys of

discovery began here.

It's easy to see why the
seat of all these mythic

achievements would
itself seem beyond our

ability to understand.

It's hard to believe that
our minds are made of

the same matter as our
stomachs and our feet.

Consciousness
seems supernatural.

Identity, awe...

Skepticism, imagination, love.

How do you assemble
transcendence from the

periodic table of the elements?

We are at the bottom of the sea,

off the coast of Chile and Peru.

This is perhaps the largest
living organism on Earth.

It's a community of microbes
that is the size of a country...

Greece.

But there's something even more
amazing about it than its immensity.

The ancient ancestors of these
colonies represent an early step in

the development of brains.

When the microbes living at the
center of this vast mat get hungry,

they dispatch
electrochemical messages to

their fellow citizens
at the outer-edge.

These communiqués travel
through passages called ion channels.

A message goes out on
amber waves of potassium from

“Sparta to Athens” saying,

“Hey, guys, stop
hogging all the food!”

And the residents of the
mat's outer edge respond

by reducing their
intake of nutrients.

It's possible that their
ancient ancestors evolved

cells called neurons
that specialized in

this kind of messaging.

Neurons are the basic unit
of nervous systems in almost

every life form in the
animal kingdom, including us.

And they vary very
little in nature, if at all,

from species to species,

but vary dramatically in number.

In fact, we now
think that epilepsy,

that so-called “sacred disease,”

is a misfiring in the brain
of our own ion channels.

Think of it: A microbial
mat and Isaac Newton,

separated by hundreds of
millions of years of evolution,

but sharing the same
basic currency of thought.

The messaging system
pioneered by the microbes

some four billion years ago,

is still inside us.

No one looking at a microbial
mat three billion years ago

could have predicted that
the one-celled organisms

of life on Earth
would evolve into you.

That's what happens when
living things and environments

interact over the eons.

New forms and ways
of being alive and aware

come into existence.

When the whole becomes
greater than the sum of its parts,

it's called emergence.

See the thing that looks
like a shred of a ruffle

from a gaudy dress?

You might think
it's kind of silly.

But, you would be so wrong.

Long, long ago, some
600 million years ago,

life first evolved something
new to planet Earth,

a command center that
could perceive and react

to its environment...

a brain.

Now, life inched
closer to the stars.

We think it first happened
inside a flatworm...

this little guy's ancestor,
the first animal hunter.

A brain was just what
a hunter would need to

seek out and plan
a strategy for attack.

Binocular vision allowed
the flatworm to perceive the

dimension of depth more sharply
and objects with greater clarity,

all the better to
triangulate on prey.

The flatworm brain had a pair of
dense nerve clusters called "ganglia."

Cords extended from them,

carrying instructions and
sensations to the rest of its

body via some 8,000 neurons.

Not many compared with the
life forms that would come later,

but a momentous beginning.

Flatworms have something
called auricles on the sides

of their heads where
their ears should be,

but they're actually noses.

We may not look much alike,
but we have a lot in common.

We share the same chemicals
that control our nervous systems,

called “neurotransmitters.”

We get addicted
to the same drugs.

Flatworms can learn.

They process information
about their environment

and act accordingly.

We think they're nature's
first animals to have a front,

a back and a head,

a blueprint that
remains state of the art,

600 million years later.

And they were the true
pioneers in the deepest sense

of that word.

Unlike any life
form before them,

they developed the habit of
venturing into the unknown

territory in search
of what they craved.

Okay, flatworms are cool,
but there's a big difference

between a flatworm
brain and ours.

How did we get
from there to here?

We don't yet know.

That's mainly because
brains tend to be squishy.

They don't leave distinct
imprints in the fossil record.

But the brain preserves
its evolutionary past...

Why?

Because our brains are a
little like New York City...

Most of the world's great
cities have grown haphazardly,

little by little,

in response to the
needs of the moment;

very rarely is a
city planned for

the remote future.

In New York City,

many of the streets
date all the way back

to the 17th century...

the stock exchange
to the 18th...

the waterworks and the
electrical power system

to the 19th century.

And the communications
bandwidth to the 20th.

A city is like a brain: it
develops from a small center

and slowly grows and changes,

leaving many old
parts still functioning.

New York can't afford to
suspend its water supply,

or its transportation system,

while they're being replaced
by something more efficient.

Changes have to
happen piecemeal.

And that's how
it is for the brain.

There is no way for
evolution to rip out the ancient

interior of the brain because
of its imperfections and

replace it with something of
more modern manufacture.

The brain and the city both
must function continuously

during the renovation.

That's why our limbic
system is surrounded by

the cerebral cortex.

The old part is in charge of
too many vital mechanisms for

it to be replaced altogether.

So, it's sometimes
counterproductive.

But that's a necessary
consequence of evolution.

The city is a gift of
the cerebral cortex.

But the brain's language is
not encoded in the DNA of

genes because the
vocabulary of life is too small.

Our brains need a
language with 10,000 times

as many words.

The information content of
the human brain expressed

in bits is probably comparable
to the total number of connections

among the neurons...

about a thousand trillion bits.

If all the contents of your
brain were transcribed into

written language, it would
amount to vastly more books

than are contained in the
largest libraries on earth.

The equivalent of more
than four billion books

are inside your head.

The brain is a very big
place in a very small space.

It's written in those
neurons pioneered by

the undersea microbial mats.

These are tiny electrochemical
switching elements,

typically a few hundredths
of a millimeter across.

Each of us has
86 billion neurons,

comparable to the number of
stars in the Milky Way galaxy.

The neurons and their
parts, axons, dendrites,

synapses and the cell
bodies themselves make up

a network in the brain.

Many neurons have
thousands of connections

with their neighbors.

Dendrites, those pathways sent out by
neurons to connect with other neurons,

extend these nerve
cells to synapses until

they create a full-blown
network of consciousness.

The neurochemistry of the
brain is astonishingly busy,

the circuitry of a machine
more wonderful than any

devised by humans.

Your brain functions are
due to those 100 trillion

neural connections
that make you, you.

Your deepest feelings
of love and awe...

those moments when we
glimpse the grandeur of nature,

and all the elegant
architecture of consciousness...

are made possible
by those connections.

This is the essence
of emergence:

tiny units of matter
operating collectively

to become something much more

than themselves,

to enable the
cosmos to know itself.

But there's a vision of emergence
that takes it even higher.

Can we know the universe?

And will it ever
come to know us?

Can we know the universe?

All those galaxies, solar
systems, numberless worlds,

moons, comets, beings,
and their dreams...

everything that ever
was, is, or will be?

Can we know the universe?

I'm not sure we can
even know a grain of salt.

Consider one
microgram of table salt,

a speck just barely large
enough for someone with keen

eyesight to see
without a microscope.

In that grain of salt there
are about 10 to the power 16

sodium and chlorine atoms.

What does that mean?

It means that there are 10
million billion atoms in this

and every other
single grain of salt.

To know the grain
of salt deeply,

requires us to know at
least the three-dimensional

positions of each
of these atoms.

In fact, there's much
more to be known...

for example, the nature of
the forces between the atoms.

But okay, let's try
to keep it simple,

we'll leave that aside.

Is the number of all the
positions more or less than

the number of things
which the brain can know?

How much can the brain know?

If you do the calculation,
with all the neurons and their

dendrites, axons, synapses...

we can know 100 trillion things.

But this is only 1% of
the number of atoms in

our grain of salt.

So in this sense, the
universe is unmanageable,

astonishingly immune
to any human attempt

at full knowledge.

We cannot, at this level,
fully know a grain of salt,

much less the universe.

But let's look a little
more deeply at our

microgram of salt.

Salt happens to be
a crystal in which,

except for defects in
the structure of its lattice,

the position of every
sodium and chlorine

atom is predetermined.

If we shrink ourselves
into this crystalline world,

we would see rank upon rank
of atoms in an ordered array,

a regularly
alternating structure...

sodium, chlorine,
sodium, chlorine...

specifying the sheet of
atoms we are flying through,

and all the sheets
above us and below us.

An absolutely pure grain of
salt could have the position

of every atom specified
by something like

ten bits of information.

This wouldn't strain our
brain's carrying capacity.

We'd still have plenty
of room for other stuff.

Now, imagine a universe
with natural laws that govern its

behavior to the same
degree of regularity that's true

for a grain of salt.

That universe would be knowable.

Even if it had many
complicated laws,

we'd still have a shot
at knowing that cosmos.

It wouldn't matter if the
reality of that universe

exceeded the
information-carrying capacity

of one of our brains.

We'd just go outside our
bodies and build a computer to

store the surplus information.

And we'd still, in some sense,

know the universe.

Now, imagine a universe
with no such laws,

one that behaves in a
completely unpredictable fashion.

That universe would contain
something like 10 to the 80th

elementary particles.

The inhabitants would find
everyday experience a muddled

jumble of events with no
predictability, no regularity.

And if they ever came to exist,

they would be in grave peril.

Lucky for us, we live in a
universe with important parts

that are knowable.

The universe
belongs to those who,

at least to some degree,
have figured it out.

It's an astonishing fact
that there are laws of nature,

rules that summarize...

not just qualitatively
but quantitatively,

how the cosmos works.

But what about the
cosmos inside each of us...

That unknown and solitary sea?

There are something
like 100 trillion...

that is, one-hundred
thousand billion connections

in your cerebral cortex.

That's 100 times as many
connections inside you as all

the galaxies of
the visible universe.

We're just at the
beginning of a great

journey of exploration.

Just as biologists succeeded
in mapping the human genome,

neuroscientists are
attempting to map something

far more complex and unique
to each and every one of us.

It's called our connectome.

If we could truly know
another person's connectome,

the singular wiring diagram
of all their memories,

thoughts, fears, dreams...

How would we treat each other?

Could we heal the brain
of its countless torments,

and free all the
Giovanni's of the world?

Could we send one of our
connectomes on a future interstellar probe,

or ever hope to
receive one from the

being of another world?

Would that be the ultimate
realization of emergence...

a cosmos interconnected
by thoughts and dreams?