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Oct. 17, 2018 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:04:21
Edition 366 - Sergio Della Sala & Nick Pope

Top Neuroscientist Sergio Della Sala on mind mysteries and Nick Pope on his newdocumentary...

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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is the Return of the Unexplained.
Very nice autumnal sunshine as I record this round about 20 degrees, maybe just north of there.
We've had some very strange weather in mid-October.
We've had cold spells, heavy, heavy rain and wind in some areas.
And we've had beautiful, almost summer days, golden days.
So I think the weather's deciding what to do.
But we know we're heading towards winter, and you know what I think about that.
So enough said about that.
That's my weather report, which I have kept short for those who don't like them.
Many people seem to, which is good.
I haven't done any shout-outs for a long time.
I do promise you that I will.
I do see all of your emails, and if they require an urgent reply, then they get one.
But please know, unlike a lot of the mainstream media, I see personally all of your email, and I take on board your guest suggestions and everything that you have to say.
And like I say, if your email requires an urgent response, then as you will know, it gets one.
And thank you very much.
If you want to send me an email, go to the website theunexplained.tv, created and owned by Adam from Creative Hotspot, and you can send me an email through there.
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And if you have recently, thank you very, very much.
Okay, now, something I want to address this time around is something that I've talked about before.
Some of you have been asking to hear again some of the interviews from the radio show that I do.
And as I explained, when I did put a very, very few pieces of material from the radio show on here, then some people said, oh, I don't want to hear that.
We've heard that before.
So again, it's a case of you can't win.
So I haven't been including material from the radio show, and I have said that I will include selected items here.
But the fact with the radio show is, like a lot of radio shows, the material that is broadcast is hearable for a couple of weeks, and then it's gone.
You won't ever hear it again, and it's lost.
And that's a shame in the case of some of the interviews.
So I realize that, you know, especially with people emailing me about people like Mary Ann Winkowski and others, you know, those interviews have been broadcast.
They were around for a few weeks and they are gone unless I preserve them here.
So that's the way that it works.
So two to run this time that I think you might want to hear.
One is the great neuroscientist from Edinburgh, UK, Sergio DeLa Salo, talking about the mysteries of the human mind and the human brain and how those two terms are often used interchangeably.
So we're going to be doing that here.
Also, a little bit from my recent conversation on the radio recorded at the radio station with Nick Pope about his new documentary, UFOs at the Pentagon, which is fascinating stuff.
He'll just explain what that is all about and what new we can hear in this documentary and certainly the new way that he's approached the documentary and the subject.
So former Ministry of Defense UFO researcher now living in America, Nick Pope, about his documentary will be second.
And first, Sergio de la Sala, neuroscientist here to talk about the mysteries of the human brain.
That interview recorded here and intended originally for the podcast, but broadcast on the radio.
It's all very complicated.
If you'd like to get in touch, please do.
But right now, the first item on this edition of The Unexplained, Sergio De La Sala.
And Sergio, you are, according to your biography, professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Edinburgh.
You've been at other places before that, but this is the place where you spent the thick end of the last decade.
So, you know, that sounds very important.
Can you tell me what that work entails, what you do?
Yeah, I'm an academic and my job research-wise is to study the relationship between the brain and behavior.
So how we behave according to lesions in the brain.
We study patients with different kinds of diseases or lesions in the brain and figure out what is missing and how the behavior changes according to the different lesions.
And from that, we try to figure out how the normal, healthy brain works.
Now, that's difficult, isn't it?
Because it is very hard and has been traditionally for scientists and medical people to be able to connect the associations between that lump of meat that sits in your head.
I forget what it weighs on average, but you know, that chunk of grey matter in your head and the things that you actually think and do.
And sometimes injuring one part of the brain or changing one part of the brain may actually not affect behavior in the ways that you think that it might.
That's correct.
This is one of the tenets of science, really, is looking at counterintuitive situational phenomena, things that are not common sense, things that go against common sense and try to figure out why and how this came about and build theories of the mind.
Of course, there are people who suggest, and some of those people are very much on the fringes, we have to say, but they've been suggesting for decades, that actually what goes on in that lump of meat and the way that we think and behave and our consciousness are maybe not all entirely resident within the lump of meat, if you know what I'm saying.
Maybe comes from somewhere else.
You know, previous civilizations and back in history, they believed that the heart was terribly important.
So what do you make of all of that?
Is everything that we are and that we think and that we believe centered in that, I hate calling it that, but that lump of grey matter?
Well, first of all, history is interesting and remains in some of the words that we used.
For instance, I'm Italian by birth, and to remember in Italian is ricordare, that is re-putting into the heart.
It comes from the old Aristotelian view that the center of the body and the mind was the heart.
We now know a bit better, and we know That the center of the mind is the brain.
The brain does the mind.
The mind is the product of the brain.
So I do not really believe in a dualism, mind and matter.
The mind is the product of the brain.
There are, of course, other inputs to the brain.
Emotions make our heart accelerate.
That's where this came about.
If we feel the heart going faster, then we believe that that's because we feel an emotion in the heart.
But we feel an emotion in the brain which influences the heart.
So my view is very reductionist.
The mind is the product of the brain.
So just like a modern motor car, you may have a big powerful Ferrari engine in the front, but somewhere in the middle of the car around the control area is a box full of chips and electronics that are controlling what that engine does.
So we're saying the same with the brain.
The mind is the thing that controls, in some cases, fight or flight, the heart beating fast, and all of those things that may be emotional reactions to situations, whether they be love or hate.
Yes, provided that we do not embrace the idea of a little homunculus, a little man sitting inside our head.
It's a very complex, orchestrated set of phenomena, which makes us humans and makes us think and use the language and remember.
It's not one little robot that governs it all.
I promise we'll talk about the current book, which is a collection of essays by accomplished people on these subjects and various things that are much of interest to us.
And you edited this.
But you yourself, I believe, are responsible for a book about forgetting a while back, which is a fascinating topic in itself.
How do we forget?
Can we make ourselves forget?
And how do some people seem to forget more easily than others?
Right.
The reason for concocting that book and making it one topic of research, this is what mainly I'm doing now, and this try to figure out theories of forgetting, is because forgetting has a bad publicity.
We conceive forgetting as the opposite of remembering.
So remembering is good, forgetting is bad.
But if you think about it, without forgetting, we wouldn't remember anything.
If you would remember every time in a place where you parked your car, you wouldn't be able to find your car today.
So you need to forget all the previous instances of where you parked your car in order to find where you parked the car today.
So forgetting is not only a negative aspect of not remembering, it's also an active way that allows us to remember.
In fact, if you think back, you mentioned the heart and the old Greek signs.
In the ancient Greece, forgetting and memorizing, Memozine and Lithi, were the two twins together, allowing us to become humans and remember where we are and what we are.
So the hypothesis is that forgetting is an active principle, an active phenomenon, which deserves studying and researching in its own right, rather than being the poor brother of remembering.
Because it's a kind of aid to the filing system in the brain.
As you say, if we remembered everything all the time, we'd be so crowded out with recollections and thoughts and details and information that we'd never be able to get anything done.
That's a good thing.
But why do we sometimes forget things that we need to remember?
And sometimes, I mean, look, I have occasions these days where, and maybe it's just because I'm getting older, I guess we all are, but I have occasions these days where I will forget a password for an account that I've been using for years, an email account or whatever, and I will momentarily forget that.
That's an instance where forgetting is not helpful.
No, but our mind, the system of our cognition is not built up in good and bad.
We have a lot of glitches to allow our brain to respond very fast.
In order for our brain to respond fast, we make errors.
We make errors all the time.
The issue is when these errors become pathological.
So you forget the occasional password for an email address, that's okay.
But if you forget the name of your partner or if you forget your home address constantly, that becomes pathological.
So there is a boundary between normal forgetting, which hits us all all the time, and pathological forgetting for diseases like Alzheimer's disease or following a stroke.
I was going to ask you about Alzheimer's and indeed the effect of a stroke.
Those people who have those situations and it renders them unable to remember, perhaps they can't remember short-term things.
I mean, my dear late father, before he died, his mind was sharp.
He was able to read the newspaper, understand it, have political discussions with me, but he found it hard to remember something we talked about half an hour ago.
He found it easy to remember something that happened 40 years ago, and I just guess that was part of the situation of him aging and the fact that he had had a mild stroke and all the rest of it.
I suppose the question that flows from that is that the memories that are lost in those situations, and I'm fascinated by this, and these things are affecting more and more people, the memories that are lost, are they still there to be accessed?
Is it just that we've lost the key?
Right.
You have to think that there is no memory store, a memory storage as such.
We all reconstruct memory every time we remember something, not just people with a disease or people with a pathology.
Memory is a reconstructive process.
We reconstruct our memories every time.
The brain, the mind, does not work like a video camera.
There is not such a thing as, okay, I have this, I file it away, I'll retrieve it when I need it, and it's exactly the same.
It would be always different from the previous instance.
The fact that people remember stuff from very far away, first of all, this episode may be very telling in their life, very conspicuous, or they may have recited that, they may have told the stories over and over again.
So in more scientific terms, they have consolidated These memories, and they are easier to be retrieved than reading a newspaper with new stuff, which has not had the time to consolidate.
The brain, the little different cells, didn't grasp it.
And there are not enough in people who have a stroke or Alzheimer's disease to consolidate new memories.
That's why we tend to remember in old age old stuff rather than new things.
Right, because the old stuff we've encoded, and it's there in a form that can be retrieved, and the new stuff we've lost the capacity to encode in that way.
Yeah, encode and consolidate.
You have to think, like, to use another metaphor, you have to think about like a wardrobe full of hangers, and you hang your memories there.
And while you age or you have a disease, these hangers drop.
You have less and less, so you don't know where to hang them.
What a wonderful way of putting it.
So those who say that they are working on cures for this, is that possible then if you lose the capacity to compact your memories and store them away more efficiently?
Does that mean actually that those who say I'm working on a drug or a therapy that will help people to remember stuff, they're never actually going to be able to help with short-term memory?
Right.
There is a big market there for the economical market, money-wise, ready to be grasped.
And in science, as you know, you never say never.
It's possible that in years to come, there might be a drug possibly preventing rather than treating diseases like Alzheimer's disease.
At the moment, though, we are very far from having a weapon, a drug which treats this diseases of old age.
And the little remedies that are there are only very much placebo, not very effective.
So we have to be very careful and alert the people and the patients, the carers and ourselves that all the markets about improving memory most of the time is a market for making money.
They are not really going to help us being programmed to improve memories or being drugs out there or remedies that you buy off the counter through following advertisement.
Most of the time, that's just money grabbing.
Okay.
Now, how is it then that some people are gifted with a fabulous memory when they're old?
I mean, my dear grandmother, Edna, in Liverpool, had the most razor-sharp mind.
She was able to calculate.
She was completely across the news agenda.
But crucially, she was able to, if you said something to her five hours ago, making a promise to do something and you forgot, she'd be the one to remind you, how come some people are able to retain that level of function, which I don't even think I've got, until they're 90 or 100?
They choose their parents wisely.
Right, so it's genetic, you think?
Well, partly surely genetics, and then partly is lacking life.
You have your brain is hit by an awful lot of environmental causes throughout the life.
So while you age, not only you lose cells sometimes, but also you have little insults to your brain.
If you have fewer of those, then your mind becomes or remains sharper than if you have, say, a hundred little strokes here and there, even if you don't realize that you have them.
So it's luck, it's genetic, is probably the way you conducted your life.
But we are far from understanding where there is one cause to preserve your memory.
Surely genetics and style of life are two very big factors.
We seem to be getting closer and closer to a situation where what resides within the mind, what makes us us, our memories, the person that we are, may be preservable perhaps by computer or perhaps by some kind of genetic engineering technique.
Do you realistically think that we are in fact as close as some scientists in the popular papers keep telling us we might be?
I'm not in the business of prediction because whenever I predict anything, it goes wrong.
And also science runs so fast that it's almost impossible to predict what is going to happen next.
But certainly what people like Professor Andy Clark here in my university call extended mind does exist.
We use computer and appliances and telephones and other things to improve our cognition.
And certainly this will increase with time.
The issue is not how much we can find facts through this gizmos.
The issue is how we learn and keep the capacity to look for the right facts, to search for the right sources.
Because it can also be overwhelming to be exposed to too many facts, like the access to internet is proving.
Having access to an awful lot of information doesn't make us any wiser.
And this is another situation that we're facing at the moment, isn't it?
The technology that we have available to us, and this is artificial intelligence, it is robotics, it's many other things.
It is in danger, and may already in some cases have done this, it's in danger of outpacing the ability of that lump of meat within our heads to keep pace with it.
As you said, we are, you know, I constantly am looking at my phone.
I'm always checking news and emails.
I have a million things in my head at any one time.
Do you think we're getting to the stage now where that which we are able to do will not be able to cope with that which we have created?
No, I believe that every generation is better than the previous one.
And just remember that when people started to write five, six centuries before Christ, writing became diffused and distributed, there were an awful lot of philosophers and politicians who were against writing.
Plato in Phaedrus describes the situation, Says, oh, now that everybody is writing, we will lose our mind.
Because they were thinking that through writing, we couldn't remember things by heart as they used to.
So every period of time has new technology.
Then it was writing, now it's a gizmus whereby we have our facts, which we are afraid of.
They are afraid that we will lose our mind.
The issue is to learn to use them properly rather than being snowed under facts and believe that if we have facts available, then we become experts.
Right.
But that's something that's fascinating to me, the fact that we are evolving and we will evolve to be able to cope with what's around us.
And I guess you're right.
We always have, Sergio.
I want to move on to a few things, if you don't mind, that are in the news this week.
Not all of them I expect you to have a pat answer to, but it's just interesting to talk about.
But, you know, not all of them I expect you to have an answer to.
But I think they're interesting to consider, and I think some of them you may have seen in the newspapers this week.
And then I promise you, we will get on to your current book, because that's what we're here to talk about.
One of the things was discussed in the Daily Mail newspaper this week that does an awful lot of stories like this.
And I'll quote what the paper said, criminals could have reduced sentences if they agreed to electrical brain stimulation that makes them feel guilty.
According to a neuroscientist this week, this person is Dr. Nick Davis from Manchester Metropolitan University.
He says the science isn't quite ready yet, but might be in the near future.
Apparently, according to the newspaper, convicted criminals could have years taken off their custodial sentences if they agree to have electrical stimulation therapy that made them feel guilty.
And I presume, although I don't think it says this, that would also make them feel remorseful.
If you saw this, what did you make of this?
Because this is right within your ballpark, isn't it?
Well, what do I make it is embedded in the sentence that you read, and it is, science is not ready yet.
So my point is very simple.
We scientists have a social responsibility.
We should be more responsible in uttering predictions or facts.
If we are not ready, then we should keep our gob very shut.
And we should talk when and if we are ready.
By inviting debates on something which might be possible, might not be possible, we create an environment whereby it's a matter of opinions rather than a matter of evidence.
And science is evidence-based, it's not opinion-based.
Okay, but I guess, you know, we have the freedom to be able to talk about things that might possibly happen.
I see further down this article, it says the brain stimulation might change the morality of criminals, so they're forced to feel remorseful about the crimes, according to this cognitive neuroscientist, which is an interesting thing, but I just wonder if that is possible.
I suspect if you mess with one part of the brain, surely you're affecting another.
Okay.
Let me take you back a few decades when the same kind of debate appeared and ended in the acceptance of lobectomy or lobotomy, whereby to change the criminal intent or to change people who were diagnosed with any sort of madness, some part of the brain was chipped off or severed.
Indeed, or indeed some depressed people, I think, I may be wrong about that, were subjected to this.
Right.
So the issue was that there it seemed such a good idea.
You enter in somebody's brain with an ice peak and you change the behavior.
And then slowly we realize that it was not at all such a good idea.
And now it looks like an abhorrent idea, really a gruesome idea.
So the issue is not only whether science can or cannot do something.
The issue is whether it is ethical and it has moral standards enough to intervene on somebody's brain, whether the person is a criminal or not.
And I don't think that we have ethical agreement at all on such interventions.
Personally, I'm utterly against.
So even if we get the science right to be able to do that, and that's a big question and that's some way off, the ethical issue of whether you should be doing that kind of thing would probably outweigh the whole debate.
You would say this is something that we really shouldn't be playing with.
That would be my position, but of course, it depends very much on the evidence that we will have available at the time of decision making.
Now it's like a bit of science fiction.
But yes, ethics is more important than science, if this decision.
Science cannot be prescriptive.
Science describes reality.
And then politics, individual choices, policymakers, the law prescribes over the society, prescribes understanding science.
But science can't be prescriptive.
If something is available, if something is possible, does it not mean that we have to do it?
Right.
Understood.
And that's one of the biggest debates in science and always has been.
One of the other things, on a lighter note, really, in the papers, lots of the papers carrying photographs of this thing.
And, you know, periodically we get stories like this, Sergio.
A bottle supposedly has been spotted on the surface of Mars.
It appears to be, if you look at it in a certain way, and if you read the text underneath it, you start thinking that's what you are seeing.
It looks like a beer bottle.
It looks like a beer bottle that has a faded label on it.
Now, I've wondered about this because the more I've read about it and the more newspaper websites I've seen the photograph on and in, the more it looks like a bottle.
But is my head telling me it's a bottle?
Is there really a bottle there?
Is a huge question.
Huge.
And I don't expect you to be able to tell me, yes, Howard, there is a bottle there or there isn't.
But what is going on with me increasingly seeing a bottle the more I read that there might be one?
Okay, we see, we, We see things All around us.
We see faces in stains in walls.
People who believe in some religion may see saints or may see holy figures in the sky.
We see faces in appliances.
And of course, there are the people in South America and Europe and various other places who regularly claim to see the face of Jesus Christ on a piece of toast.
That's very right.
So why this is called patternicity.
We see patterns.
Our brain is a machine which makes us see patterns, particularly patterns that we recognize and patterns that are very familiar, like faces.
Our brain is built up to see faces, allowing us to see faces of our mom when we are newborn.
So we see, we reduce everything to patterns and to patterns that we know.
And once you have been told this is beer bottle, you cannot but see the beer bottle.
Even if you know it's not a beer bottle, you see a beer bottle on Mars.
You see the green and the red and you even see the white label if you look at the pictures of this.
But there are several of these other discoveries on Mars.
There are spoons on Mars.
There are faces on Mars.
There are giants on Mars.
There is enough photo stuff on Mars, except aliens, I guess.
Well, as far as we know, unless, of course, they're somehow under the surface or they exist on a plane that we can't see, which I guess is a whole other debate for a whole other place, Sergio.
Is what you described, is it the same as it's a wonderful word.
Is it pareidolia?
The pareidolia is the, yes, I didn't say the word because I did not know whether I was allowed to use difficult words.
Well, I'm not even sure whether I can pronounce it, sir.
Paredolia is the phenomenon whereby we see faces, we see patterns where they are not.
And this is what our brain is geared at, particularly for faces, but for a lot of other patterns.
Think about we see the zodiac, we see constellations in the sky, and we make them into objects.
Now, those stars are not in that shape simply because most of them are not there any longer, they're dead, and also because we see them on a black, like in a blackboard, but then we lose the three dimension.
Those shapes do not exist.
Yet we see them, not only we see them, but we eagerly read newspapers and magazine every day to find out how these shapes, which do not exist, influence our behavior, which is fascinating.
It's all right.
How can something that doesn't exist influence anything?
I wonder what this would mean for the search for extraterrestrial life that everybody's getting so excited about.
Every week we get a new story about it.
But if our minds are used to being able to create solidity and patterns in things that perhaps are random, then we're going to have a lot of false calls on this.
We're going to have an awful lot of false dawns, I guess, in this search, because we are going to think there is something important.
But that's only us thinking.
Well, you know the story of on eBay, you can buy helmets to protect you from aliens.
They are not very expensive.
I must get one of those.
Well, you should, because they really work.
If you wear one of such helmets, aliens never attack you.
So that really, really worth the war.
It's just $200 for each helmet.
But the issue is that if something happened to us, if you believe in aliens, you'll attribute whatever happens to us to the aliens.
If you believe in other things, you will read your reality according to the frame of reference that you have.
Like the philosopher of science, Popper, said, we all used a framework within which we interpret our reality.
And as you say in the forward, I think, or the introduction to your book, which I promise you we are getting on to, our beliefs condition our experiences.
That's very true, I think.
In fact, the best way to protect yourself against aliens is not to buy a helmet, but not to believe in aliens.
If you don't believe in aliens, they will never attack you.
Right.
So if you believe in aliens and you believe that a helmet is going to help you, then the aliens that you believe in will be kept at bay by the helmet that you bought because you believe the helmet will help.
Yeah, of course.
Wow.
And we know that works.
Okay.
$200 well spent.
$200 well spent.
Yes, well, perhaps not.
You could always give it to me.
Oh, Lord.
Okay, let's get on to the book now.
The book is about the myths surrounding the mind and the brain.
I think we just need to restate here, I know we did at the beginning to an extent, just what the difference between those two terms is, because most people on the street use mind and brain interchangeably, and they're not.
No, the brain is the matter that you see, that you touch, that you cut, that you can observe in machine, in your imaging.
The mind is a product of the brain.
It's something that we experience but don't see.
It's our memories, our language, our intelligence, our thinking, our personality, our emotions, our way of relating to others.
So the mind is invisible to us, but we feel it.
The brain, we can feel it, but when we are dead, there's nothing.
Okay, well, let's get into some of these myths and beliefs that you explore in the book.
And we have to say, the book is a series of essays by people who are experts in their field, and you edit the volume.
So you tie it all together.
One of the things, and I always believe this was so, you asked the question, are bigger brains cleverer?
And do we inherit intelligence?
And if we do inherit intelligence, is an IQ Test the best way to measure it?
I guess that's three questions in one.
Let's start with the big brains.
Yeah, this is slightly out with my own field.
This is for people who study individual differences or personalities.
But what we know is: yes, most of the intelligence is genetic.
There is a strong genetic component in intelligence.
However, if a newborn is hammered with a hammer on their head, there is nothing genetic about it.
The problem of the newborn's intelligence will be due to the hammer, not to the genetics.
So it's not just genetics.
The environment also has an enormous influence in our behavior and our intelligence.
Does IQ exist?
Yes, it does.
If you are very good in one thing, it's very likely that you are very good in another thing.
The idea that we have multiple intelligence not correlated to one another is a bit of a myth.
We tend to have an intelligence, a factor, which the scientists call G-factor, which cuts across most of the phenomenon of cognition.
Is the size of the brain important?
Yes, it is.
In a way, if you have a larger, larger brain, it's more likely that you have a very good cognition.
But then an elephant is not more intelligent than a human.
So it's not just the size, it's the size relative to the size of the body.
But yet, we, relative to the size of the body, our ratio is roughly the same as that of mice.
So there is more to it.
There may be an awful lot in how the brain is linked, the different cells of the brain as linked to one another.
Certainly, we cannot use the size as such to determine differences across different genders, women versus men, or this kind of fling-flam has to go from the books.
So, you know, somebody that is very clever, when I was a kid in Liverpool and didn't know any better, we'd sometimes call them a big head.
And that actually is not always true.
No, Einstein's brain was not very big.
Really?
Oh, well, that is something I'm sure Paul Ross, who's on talk radio after me, will know that.
I didn't know that.
Okay, what about left brain, right brain?
When I was a kid, there were lots of programs on the BBC, usually BBC too, that talked about this and scientists being very impressed with themselves because they discovered that the left brain is the rational part and the right is the emotional part and never the twain shall meet.
Yeah, well, this is very important because it's pervasive, for instance, in education or in schools.
It is true that we have a left brain and a right brain and this left and right brain do different things.
But it is not true that the right brain is creative and the left brain is like a bank accountant.
Think about that the language itself is sitting in the left brain.
You can imagine something more creative than creating with language.
So this myth about the creativity sitting on the right and the rationality sitting on the left is completely ill placed.
It's the usual assumption that we divide things in a dichotomy, yin and yang, left and right.
It's too simplistic.
The brain does not work this way.
The brain works like an orchestra whereby all the different areas work together.
But what is more relevant is that independently, it is not true, but what is certainly not true is the fact that you can have programs based on this apparent dichotomy to train your creative size of the brain.
And this is worrying because when you go to the education conferences, you see all these books based on this false dichotomy on which student pupils program are based to allow them to become more creative or more rational, stimulating one side of the brain or another.
Right, and I think back in the 90s, I seem to remember interviewing a few people who claimed that brain training is something that you can do.
You can make yourself cleverer.
You can make yourself more adept by training your brain.
And you say that's not entirely so.
No, I'm not saying that it's not entirely so.
I'm saying that it's not so.
There's no entirely, it's not so at all.
You can't, you can train, I know for auto, you can become a better skier if you train yourself to go downhill with, you can train yourself to learn poems, you can train yourself, you can train the system, but it's not by using programs stimulating the right side of the brain.
You learn what you are learning.
You learn a poem, you learn to ski.
You don't stimulate a right side to become more creative.
That's really flim flam.
And it's dangerous that it's sold in the educational realm.
It's very dangerous that teachers may believe in this fact because they may choose to separate kids into creative and rational according to the right or left brain.
And people like Brain Jim, these are programs that make an off-lot of money based on no evidence whatsoever.
Okay, when I was at school, the big thing, this was a long time ago, but I found exams difficult.
I was not one of nature's natural passers of exams.
I was better at the coursework, but exams are how we are judged, so exams are what I had to do.
I was advised on a number of occasions, a good idea would be to tape record, which of course, wanting to get into radio, I was quite happy to do the facts that I needed to learn, and then play themselves back to myself, play those things back to myself just as I was about to fall asleep.
The theory being that you'd wake up knowing everything that was on the tape.
It never worked for me.
Should it have worked or is that a myth?
No, it doesn't work.
It doesn't work to listen to, say, foreign languages while you sleep.
You don't learn much while you sleep.
What does work, though, is a system called retrieval practice.
What does Work is that whenever you listen to anything or read anything, you have to repeat it to yourself or repeat it to your friend or repeat it to another student in your class.
If you repeat what you understood, that will consolidate, and after a while, you will remember it much better and you fare so much better in the exams.
So, the technique is not to jot down strange visual maps or to tape record yourself and put that under the pillow, but is to understand what you're listening or reading and repeat it to another person or to yourself.
Retrieval practice.
Keep repeating what you understood and you remember it.
And what about mnemonics?
Where I remember one from when I was 18 taking my A levels, and there was one where I had to remember, it was maybe for my O levels, whatever, that dates me.
It was about, it was a geographical thing that I know and where you locate industries.
And I came up with a mnemonic Tasporweg and I can still remember some of it now, transport, the availability and supply of raw materials.
S was something else, P was power supplies, W was water, and so on.
So once you learn and consolidate in that way, it can stay with you forever, can't it?
Yes, mnemonics do work.
They work in the way that you described with primes and prompting or rhyming, or it works with visual imagery.
You can visualize a series of objects, a series of words, a path, a route.
It's called method of loci.
It comes from Chichiro and the old rhetorics in Latin.
It does work.
However, it works only for remembering a series of facts.
I want to remember the 12 nerves in the head.
I remember them by heart by reciting amnemonics.
I want to remember, as you said, some series of events.
I can use amnemonics.
But mnemonics are, the use of mnemonics is simply to remember a series of names.
You can remember the seven dwarfs.
And that it works pretty well for that limited purpose.
Okay, please don't ask me to recall the seven dwarfs right now because I think I probably only get three of them.
You talk also, or the book talks about, things we talk about on this show a lot.
Things like out-of-the-body experiences and near-death experiences.
And the particular section of the book that talks about these says the popular appeal of OBE and NDE stories is easy to understand.
They're amongst the strongest support for mind-body dualism, which offers a lot of comfort to those who want to believe that humans have an immaterial soul that survives death.
Are we saying here that there's a mechanism at work and it's not a bad thing?
Are we saying that these things are bunk?
Quite often, believing in things that makes us more serene is not bad as such.
Even if it's not substantiated, if it's not evidence-based, if I believe in something that makes me feel better, why not?
The problem becomes when my belief pushes me to buy products or to spend enough auto money or a policymaker uses public money on things that are not evidence-based.
So beliefs as such are not bad.
They are bad if they influence the society in spending money on bogus.
So if you want to believe that there is an afterlife, then that's entirely up to you.
But if you spend an awful lot of money to go to a place where they tell you that you can talk to your dead husband, then that's bad, because that's absolutely not possible.
Okay, well, there would be an awful lot of people who've been on my show who would disagree with that, but then that comes back to the matter of belief, I guess.
You also look at psychics, which ties into all of this, of course.
People who claim to be able to perhaps perceive the future, people who perceive that they can talk to your dead relatives, that they have an intuition about them, which is another linked element of this.
Do these things exist?
Is there such a thing as an intuitive part of our mind?
Or again, is that just something that we construct?
Okay.
Some of these people are very skilled, but ask them, go there with some rice in your fist and ask them to tell you how many grain of rice are there.
They will never be able to guess.
The issue is that they guess generic sentiments, they don't guess facts.
So there is no evidence whatsoever except our own sentiment and our own belief and our own wish to believe that there is any capacity like reading minds or telepathy or flying back and forth from time and speaking to the dead.
These would be wonderful.
If one day somebody discovers that this is true, then I'll be the first to use them.
And yet recently I interviewed a doctor.
It's going to be one of my podcasts that I'll be doing in America who worked in Vietnam and worked on trauma victims and says that in a, I think, a hypnotic state or certainly an induced state, some of those people were able to communicate with what they believed was a relative, perhaps a father or a mother, giving them comfort from beyond the grave.
Of course, as I said, this is a very difficult territory.
Who am I or who is anybody to claim that comforting thoughts or dreams or comforting beliefs are to be banned?
When I fall asleep, I tend to talk to my dad who died years ago.
I feel that I can relate to him or to what I remember.
He's still alive because I remember him.
My remembering makes him real.
But he's dead.
And I'm talking to the memory of him.
I'm talking through my Love for him.
I'm talking through my emotion when I remember him.
I feel very emotional remembering my dad, but he's dead.
He's nowhere.
Right.
So you're talking to the part of him that is within you that you will always, we all will take forward from those people who brought us here.
There is an essay in the book by somebody called Ken Giluli, Ken Gilhouli, I believe it is, about creativity and how can we explain creativity.
I mean, for example, if I think about my own sister, my own sister has a tremendous ability and talent for painting and drawing.
She is a great artist and, you know, should have got more recognition for her art than I think that she has got.
She's very, very good.
I cannot, you know, I can barely do a stick figure.
I cannot do that.
I can compose photographs.
People say I have a great eye for photographs.
But she is creative in a way that I'm not.
How do we think creativity works?
This I really don't know.
And I can venture speculation, but I don't think that it's not just my ignorance, which is vast, but I think that nobody can really address this question thoroughly.
We do not really understand the concept is too vast.
We can understand bits and bolts.
So for instance, if I ask you now, think about the letter J in capital and then think about the letter D in capital.
Now turn around 90 degree the letter D and place it onto the letter J and you see a little umbrella.
Right.
Right?
Is that creative?
The umbrella was not there and you created one.
There are people who are more able to visualize this kind of task than others.
We, with colleagues, Michaela Dewar and Adam Zeman, we described a syndrome that we called aphantasia, whereby people are not able to use visual imagery to, for instance, perform these tasks.
They are not able to do those, even if they're completely normal.
It's not pathology.
Some people are better at some tasks than others.
And these people realize that they cannot do it only when we ask them to do it.
So creativity can be multifarious.
You can be more creative in writing a poem.
Another person may be more creative in performing a visual art.
Somebody is very good at drawing.
Creativity, a scientist can be creative in the way they devise experiments.
I don't think that there is one concept that encompasses creativity as such.
And the chapter tells stories about people who discover things, like Poincaré or other famous scientists, who discover things abruptly.
But they discover things abruptly, not because they drank coffee in the evening or drank whiskey before going to bed and then discover.
They knew a novel stuff.
And then at a certain point, this stuff gets together in their mind and they discover it.
It's not an act of discovery if you don't know anything.
Right.
So it's synthesis, antithesis, thesis.
That's right.
Your brain is doing that.
Your mind is doing that.
That's very true.
That's very true.
There is a lot of recruitment consultancies, I think, still use graphology, handwriting tests.
Maybe I'm wrong about that.
Perhaps my knowledge is out of date.
There is a whole section in the book about graphology and the fact that we maybe place too much reliance on graphology and the reliability of being able to look at somebody's handwriting and discern things about them.
Well, it depends what we mean by graphology.
The science of recognizing the different style of writing, recognizing that my signature is my own, the science which is embedded in criminology, for instance, understanding if that's my own handwriting, that's really solid and really worth its while.
But the branch of pseudoscience, trying to guess the personality of somebody by the way they write, or the construction of tests to detect the kind of person you'd be in an industry, that's based on very, very thin ice.
And there is no evidence whatsoever that's the case.
So it depends what you're talking about.
If you're talking about the capacity of science to detect a style of writing, allocate to a given individual the signature, that's very solid, very, very worthwhile.
But the other aspect, the aspect that tells us that you can figure out the kind of person you are on how you write or how you draw a tree with a bit of fling flam.
So you can tell generalities, like I've got a terrible signature.
You know, it just looks like something's crawled across the page and I do it very quickly.
And it never quite looks the same twice, although the basic characteristics of it are the same.
And that just indicates that I am somebody who's always time poor, has always got his mind on something else, or maybe three other things.
And that's about all you can tell you think from that kind of graphology.
Okay, one final thing to get into.
We are getting into new and extended forms of reality.
In fact, extended reality is the new virtual reality.
It's a reality so good that it is almost indistinguishable from the real thing.
Now, as we said, we do evolve and we do encapsulate and take on board changes in the world around us, and that would include changes in technology.
But are we ever going to be overwhelmed by virtual reality and extended reality so that we are confused and disturbed and maybe get mental issues because it then becomes impossible to be able to tell what is real from what is not?
Well, first of all, it's already pretty difficult to tell what's real and what is not.
Even sometimes distinguishing your recollection, your memories, maybe you remember something that never happened.
We all have an incredible number of false memories all the time.
That's why we keep fighting with our partners or where are the car skis?
Because we both remember that the car skis are in a different place.
We live with false memories all the time.
So distinguishing reality from something that has never happened is already pretty difficult independently of the machineries or virtual reality.
Because our brain, as I said, is constructed as a reconstruction machine.
The brain represents reality every time.
It doesn't fish from a storage, a bucket, like a video camera or an audio system.
So in this context, yes, it will be even more difficult when we are exposed to reality which are virtual to remember whether they really happened or whether it was the figment of our imagination or whether it was presented to us via some media or a mechanical gizmo.
It's like remembering a scene from a movie as if it happened to us, which is not rare.
Sometimes we see things, we hear stories, and then we embed these stories into our own memories.
So yes, the more we'll be exposed to virtual stuff out there, the more difficult it will be for us to distinguish reality from what really happened.
And what can we do about that?
If anything?
Enjoy it.
Just go along for the ride, the experience.
Absolutely.
And I guess over time, we will, because we're human beings and we are the most adaptable creatures, will come up with coping mechanisms.
Sergio Darasada, thank you very much for speaking with me.
What is the title of your book?
If you're talking, this book, there's one that's called...
There is one called Mind Myths and another one called Toll Tales About the Mind and the Brain.
Okay, and they're published, I think, by Oxford University Press.
The second one, yes.
Told Tales is published by Oxford University and Mind Myths is published by Wiley.
Right.
Do you personally have a website?
I have the university website, not one for books or blogs because I don't have much time.
I work.
Right.
And that's going to be taxing your mind, I guess.
Sergio, thank you very much, and happy birthday.
Thank you.
Thank you for having me.
The remarkable Sergio de la Salo, who is based at the University of Edinburgh, and talks about some of the mysteries that are not out in space.
They're not deep below the oceans.
They're not in parallel universes, but they're right within our skull.
The mysteries of the human mind.
Maybe they're some of the deepest mysteries that we will ever have to tangle with here.
What do you say?
Nick Pope was on my radio show quite recently.
This is an edited version of that conversation that I thought you might want to hear.
Nick is out at the moment with a new documentary, professionally produced and making a big stir around the world.
It's called Aliens at the Pentagon.
It's all about information and data and telling the story in an informative way, weaving together a very, very complicated story that, frankly, covers 70 years of material, but obviously starts with Roswell and Project Blue Book, but very much focuses on the more recent revelations about the Pentagon's program.
But I didn't want to do this scattergun approach, you know, 20 seconds say on by it here, then move on, have a glossy, wide-angle shot of Roswell, because I knew that there were people back at home watching saying, yes, but what happened next?
Or how does this tie in with X?
Or, but what did Y say about all this?
And so I did, I kind of took a lot on myself for this, to be honest.
I scripted the entire documentary.
And then I went into a studio and into the soundproof booth, headphones on, microphone out.
I narrated it.
And then I sat down in front of the camera and recorded lots of other two-camera pieces.
So in that way, the viewer is introduced to me, telling them the story.
And instead of cutting away before I've had a chance to even develop half a point, people actually get the information.
They get the data.
There's nothing better than having some control over things.
I've certainly found this point doing this show.
The fact is that when you're calling the shots with it, you're going to swim or you're going to sink, depending on what you do, and you're not dependent on somebody else.
So totally understand that.
Aliens at the Pentagon is an intriguing title because the title itself assumes, as many of us have for many years, that they know something we don't.
Well, I think they always know things we don't.
And yes, it's an attention-getting title, and quite deliberately so.
But I think we then go on to do this deep dive into what, frankly, I often describe as being a believer versus skeptic dogfight that has raged for decades at the heart of the US government and the UK government too about this issue.
And yes, if the word alien conjures up that, then absolutely, because there are people who have done this officially for the government who believe it is or certainly might be extraterrestrial.
And they come to that through almost a process of elimination.
Well, it's not X, it's not Y, it's not Z, so that only leaves.
And yes, we are deliberately provocative with all of this.
And I'm not asking people to agree or disagree, but simply to listen to the information and then make up their own minds.
The history of modern ufology, as you say, goes back seven decades.
It goes back to Roswell.
Everybody talks about Roswell.
I mean, God, the place has become a tourist attraction now.
There is an alien cafe there.
And, you know, there's a great, always a great traffic of tourists wanting to see where the events of that year allegedly happened.
The problem with talking about Roswell now, and I want to talk through the history as you outlined it in the documentary, the problem with talking about Roswell now is a lot of the people are dead.
I suppose what I'm saying is that when it comes to that, is there anything new that we can uncover or is there a new way that we can look at it?
I think there's always going to be something new.
You're right.
The fact that the primary witnesses are all pretty much dead now is problematic in evidential terms.
But, you know, just being brutal about it, if we took that attitude, we'd never look back, say, at something like World War I again.
And we'd say, well, none of the witnesses are there, so we can't take it any further.
And of course, that's not true.
There will always be things to be discovered, for example, in archives.
And there will always be family members who come forward.
And this is something, this isn't in the documentary, but it's something that I'm working on in parallel, is the idea that somewhere in a dusty old box kept in an attic, somewhere in Roswell, there might be a sort of granddaughter of somebody who served who's going to come out and say that she's found this old box and was rummaging through and look what I found.
And there is going to be some crucial piece of the puzzle.
And I use the word puzzle deliberately.
It is a puzzle.
And this is something we do in Aliens at the Pentagon.
We kind of try and put the disparate pieces of this puzzle together.
And sometimes the pieces of the puzzle are bits of information, but more often than not, they're people.
And it's following the threads and the linkages between the different people that have been involved in this that's particularly interesting, especially with the more modern part of the story.
And that's when we get into all these characters like Senator Harry Reid, the pop-punk musician Tom DeLong, the intelligence officer Lou Elizondo, and this kind of unlikely cast of characters who all come together.
I mean, some of the big movers and shakers in this field are getting up in years now, as they say in the U.S. And people like Stanton Friedman, who's recently stepped away because he's well into his 80s now.
He's stepped away from the presentations that he used to give.
He doesn't appear that often.
He's not going to be doing the circuit of conferences and stuff like that that you do.
A lot of these people now are getting older.
Who's coming up to replace them?
One of the aims of Aliens at the Pentagon is to reignite interest in this and to get the next generation of Stanton Friedmans and Linda Moulton Howes and Richard Dolans and whoever it may be to get the people in.
It's not as if people in their teens, for example, aren't interested in this, but it's just when they see a whole bunch of, shall we say, you know, predominantly male, predominantly white, predominantly kind of 60-plus people up there talking about this, it doesn't exactly say, well, this is for me.
So that's why Aliens at the Pentagon is aimed at young people particularly, to bring them into the subject.
And I don't know the answer to your question.
I don't know where the next Fantas Friedman or Linda Moulton Howe or whoever it might be is coming from.
But they're out there.
And the problem is, isn't it, that we are in the era of fake news.
We're in the era where anybody's word counts just as much as anybody else's.
So if anything, even though we have access to even more information than ever we had, and we think we have a free and open society, things may be getting foggier.
Yes, and that's where it's important that people develop and hone their critical thinking skills and that they do know how to differentiate between real news and fake news, that they do know the importance of proper sources and they do understand the concept, the journalistic concept of fact-checking.
And again, everything in Aliens at the Pentagon can be traced back to material that comes from government archives or comes from reliable sources.
So again, it's a problem, but it's not an insurmountable problem.
Investigator Nick Pope talking about his new documentary, Aliens at the Pentagon.
And I wish Nick all the best with that.
Check it out online if you want to.
I think you will be interested.
And of course, Nick will be appearing on this show again, as you know.
More great guests in the pipeline here.
Please register a hit on my website, theunexplained.tv.
As you're passing by, you might want to send me a message or a guest suggestion.
The contact link is there.
Or if you want to leave a donation for the show, then you can do that there as well.
And if you have recently, thank you very much indeed.
So until next, we meet here on The Unexplained online.
My name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained.
I am in London, and please stay safe.
Please stay calm.
And above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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