Madness and Morality
The Reith Lectures
BBC
4.2 • 770 Ratings
🗓️ 15 December 1976
⏱️ 30 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Neurobiologist and lecturer of Physiology at the University of Cambridge Colin Blakemore considers mental illness and morality in his sixth and final Reith lecture from his series 'Mechanics of the Mind'. He questions why society attempts to regulate the behaviour of its members and tries to order them into normal and abnormal.
In this lecture entitled 'Madness and Morality', Professor Colin Blakemore expands on the many ways cerebral irregularities have been treated throughout history; invasive psychosurgery and electro-therapy were the precursors to modern day medicines and psychiatry.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Reith Lectures. |
| 0:04.3 | This lecture in the series Mechanics of the Mind, given by Colin Blakemore, was originally |
| 0:09.4 | broadcast in 1976. |
| 0:12.3 | Gustav Fechner was the founder of a new and objective approach to the measurement of mental events. |
| 0:19.9 | He hoped that the kind of strict experiments that had beaten the forces of nature into the laws of physics |
| 0:25.6 | could work for the mind of man as well. |
| 0:28.6 | Yet despite the orderly reductionist nature of his ideas, Fechner, in 1860, |
| 0:34.6 | permitted himself an extraordinary speculation about personal consciousness. |
| 0:40.0 | The brain is bilaterally symmetrical. It has two sides which are virtually mirror images of each other. |
| 0:47.3 | Nowhere is this clearer than in the cerebral hemispheres. There's a deep cleft between the two halves, |
| 0:53.0 | which are linked by an enormous strap containing millions of nerve fibres, the corpus colossum. |
| 1:00.2 | If consciousness is a property of the brain, which Fechner certainly believed, what would happen if the cerebral hemispheres were literally split apart completely? |
| 1:09.8 | As the psychologist William McDougal reported in 1911, |
| 1:14.0 | Fechner asserted that if a man's brain could be mechanically divided into two parts |
| 1:19.3 | without arresting the life of the parts, |
| 1:22.2 | the nervous activities of each part would be accompanied by its own stream of consciousness. |
| 1:29.4 | But McDougal was convinced that no mere split in the brain could divide the mind. |
| 1:36.1 | This hypothetical, inconceivable experiment of Fechner and McDougal has actually been performed, |
| 1:41.8 | and its results are quite simply some of the most fascinating produced |
| 1:45.8 | during research on the brain. The rationale behind this unlikely story is that an epileptic seizure, |
| 1:52.9 | originating at a focus of damage on one side of the brain, can spread to the other hemisphere |
| 1:57.8 | through the nerve fibers of the corpus colosum. The attack then takes |
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