Interesting Horizon last night. The Secret You:- BBC Two, 09:00pm Tuesday 20th October 2009.
Professor Marcus du Sautoy goes in search of answers to one of science's greatest mysteries: how do we know who we are?Smart boy wanted and Sir Marcus de Saveloy of Hackney is one of the smarter sausages being a mathematician of some not inconsiderable talent and the ability to explain it all.
Well the answer seems to be that we normally (including chimps and orang-utans) become aware that we are individuals before the age of 2. We can recognise ourselves in the mirror and remove a sticker that has been placed on our face taking it directly from our face. Our brains appear to respond very specifically to a picture of a person in the same way that they respond to the name of that person in text!
Our brains light up with electrical activity when we are awake. They can be stimulated by magnetic fields producing electrical activity at a particular point and the whole brain starts behaving like a communications network, which of course it is, with billions of nodes able to get in on the act. When we are asleep The message is delivered but there is usually no one home! However, it appears to be possible to stimulate the brains of individuals in a vegetative state by suggesting they think about, say, playing tennis. The pattern produced appears to be the same as that in conscious volunteers asked to think about the same activity.
The experiment which seem to knock de Saveloy's very pretty little socks off was quite a simple one for this day and age. Your man was wired up and put in the brain scanning machine with the wherewithal to choose between right and left by pressing buttons. His brain was scanned before the choice and then the choice was made. The investigator claimed to be able to predict the choice, left or right, up to 6 seconds before de Saveloy consciously made it!
We may know who we are in one sense but am I the union between my, not insubstantial, corporeal self and the billions of networking neurons producing electro-chemical activity in my brain?
