Hannah Critchlow on the connected brain

The Life Scientific

BBC

Technology, Personal Journals, Society & Culture, Science

4.6 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 16 April 2024

⏱️ 29 minutes

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Summary

With 86 billion nerve cells joined together in a network of 100 trillion connections, the human brain is the most complex system in the known universe.

Dr. Hannah Critchlow is an internationally acclaimed neuroscientist who has spent her career demystifying and explaining the brain to audiences around the world. Through her writing, broadcasting and lectures to audiences – whether in schools, festivals or online – she has become one of the public faces of neuroscience.

She tells Professor Jim Al-Khalili that her desire to understand the brain began when she spent a year after school as a nursing assistant in a psychiatric hospital. The experience of working with young patients - many the same age as her - made her ask what it is within each individual brain which determines people’s very different life trajectories.

In her books she’s explored the idea that much of our character and behaviour is hard-wired into us before we’re even born. And most recently she’s considered collective intelligence, asking how we can bring all our individual brains together and harness their power in one ‘super brain’.

And we get to hear Jim’s own mind at work as Hannah attaches electrodes to his head and turns his brain waves into sound.

Producer: Jeremy Grange

Transcript

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0:00.0	My name is Mikita Oliver and I'm Lily Allen. In our new podcast we talk about the big issues and the little ones and everything in between in the way that only best friends do with brutal brutal honesty.
0:14.0	We'll be talking about things like early crushes, techno and ambition.
0:20.0	I've had a few celebrity crushes and for the most part they've come true.
0:24.8	Miss me with Lily Allen and McKeeter Oliver listen on BBC Sounds.
0:31.8	BBC Sounds music music, radio podcasts.
0:35.0	Hello and welcome to the podcast edition of The Life Scientific.
0:39.0	I'm Jimal Kulele and this is the show where I get to talk to some of the world's leading scientists
0:44.0	and you get to find out what drives them.
0:46.4	So sit back, get comfortable and enjoy the episode.
0:50.0	Hello, imagine if you can, a machine made up of 86 billion components, joined together in a
0:57.1	network of a hundred trillion connections.
1:01.0	In computing terms such a machine could perform the equivalent of a million trillion
1:05.7	mathematical operations per second and yet its network of connections is flexible
1:10.6	enough for them to break, regenerate and renew. Such a device, if it existed, will be
1:15.8	the most complex system in the known universe. Well, such machines do exist. In fact, there are
1:21.6	over 8 billion of them on our planet right now.
1:24.3	Don't worry if all this is making your brain turn some of sorts because if you haven't
1:28.1	already guessed, the machine I'm talking about is the human brain.
1:31.6	Today's guest on the life scientific has spent her
1:34.3	career demystifying and explaining the brain to audiences around the world. Dr
1:39.8	Hannah Kritschlow is an internationally acclaimed neuroscientist and through her writing,
1:44.8	broadcasting and lectures to audiences whether in schools, festivals or online,
	...

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