Professor Colin Blakemore

Speaker 10:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen ninety six, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:28

Mike Costaway this week is a scientist. A brilliant student, he became an Oxford professor at the age of thirty-five, from which position he's ever since commanded enormous influence through his research and through the way he's tried to communicate the world of science to the public at large. His main work has been concerned with the workings of the human brain. He views mankind as no more than another animal species, but that hasn't endeared him to animal rights activists who frequently attack him for his experiments. A prolific author, recipient of many awards, and the next President of the British Association, he says modestly, I like doing experiments, I have a feel for it, but I know lots of people cleverer than I am. He is Colin Blakemore. You make it sound really rather simple, Colin, as if it's just a kind of knack you have. Is it as simple as that?

Professor Colin Blakemore1:17

Well, actually I think doing science is not something that's easily learnt. I think you either have it or you haven't the ability to go into an experiment and fiddle around and somehow come out with an answer.

Presenter1:27

Is there an element of luck in there, then?

Professor Colin Blakemore1:29

I think there is, but also an element of a particular way of thinking about problems, a knack for knowing how things ought to be somehow.

Presenter1:36

But at the same time you're you're often spoken of as some kind of of genius and I I don't want to diminish your reputation in any way, but do you think that's partly because we allow ourselves to be blinded by science, so that if we find if we come across somebody like you who not only knows about it but can talk about it and make it feel accessible, somehow we feel you must be incredibly clever.

Professor Colin Blakemore1:56

Yes, I don't think you'd find many scientists who'd call me a genius. I'm a very ordinary scientist. But yes, I think the the public does stand in such awe of science, and that must be born out of a terrible ignorance that the public have in general about science. There's this feeling that scientists are a breed apart. And the attitude to science in that respect is very different, for instance, to the attitude to art, where people feel that in a much more natural way it belongs to the public.

Presenter2:14

Yeah.

Presenter2:22

Tell me this. Does your analytical, rather no nonsense approach to the world in any way impede your appreciation of music? Or despite your view of the mind as a machine, is there space for emotional appreciation of things?

Professor Colin Blakemore2:36

Just because one thinks that the mind is a mechanistic thing, that it's created by the the physics and the chemistry of the brain, doesn't mean that you can't think that human beings are the sort of machines that are able to appreciate music, to fall in love, to have passions and desires and so on. That is the kind of machine we are. I mean, we're a wonderful emotional machine. Music's very important to me, and I certainly don't try and analyze it in a scientific sense.

Presenter3:01

So you lean back and thoroughly enjoy it, do you?

Professor Colin Blakemore3:04

Yes, because that's what my brain makes me do. That's part of the machinery.

Presenter3:08

Tell me about your first record.

Professor Colin Blakemore3:10

Well, my first choice is Mozart. I actually didn't discover Mozart until very late really in my appreciation of of music. I started sort of in the middle of music, late in the Romantic period, and have come to to Mozart rather late, and particularly come to opera pretty late. The last ten or fifteen years I've become absolutely besotted with opera.

Professor Colin Blakemore3:28

So this is The Magic Flute. This was written just a few months before Mozart's death. He was quite sick. He'd lost his royal patronage. And yet it has this amazingly uplifting spirit of optimism and enthusiasm for life. It's an opera that I've been to and seen with my family, so I'll remember my daughters and my wife when I hear this.

Speaker 33:50

Let us nature sing of sin. For that

Speaker 33:57

So does it

Presenter4:50

Part of the aria Ozitrenicht from the first act of the Magic Flute by Mozart, sung by Editor Gruberova, with the Bavarian Symphony Orchestra conducted by Bernard Heiting.

Presenter5:00

Your work, Colin Blakemore, your research, has centered around vision and how the brain deals with the images that bombard it. Am I right in believing that you identified the phenomenon of the lazy eye in children?

Professor Colin Blakemore5:13

Well, that's quite wrong, no. I mean, lazy eyes have been known about for 200 years or more. It's a very peculiar condition in which children grow up, their eyes look perfectly normal. The the eye I think in fact functions pretty normally, but they fail to develop normal vision. It's usually a condition in which one eye has a r reduction in its visual capacities.

Presenter5:34

So what did you do about it? You did have something to do with lazy eyes, I know.

Professor Colin Blakemore5:38

I became interested in the late 1960s in the development of the visual parts of the brain. So I studied how the brain developed in young animals, in kittens, and this led to um an interest in the what appeared to be a necessity for visual stimulation during the the development of the brain. The brain didn't seem to develop normally only as uh unless animals had normal vision.

Professor Colin Blakemore5:59

So my interest then focused on this clinical phenomenon of lazy eye. That hadn't been the reason why I started the area of research, but it soon focused on that question.

Presenter6:08

But it was as a result of that work, wasn't it, that you were targeted by animal rights activists because you experimented on kittens?

Professor Colin Blakemore6:15

Exactly. I was picked out for a campaign in nineteen eighty seven. And you know, in a sense, so to detach myself from the emotion of the problems that it's caused, I can see why they chose me. I work on cats and monkeys, on higher mammals.

Professor Colin Blakemore6:29

They knew perfectly well that there's less public sympathy for rats and mice and so on.

Presenter6:33

And you couldn't have

Professor Colin Blakemore6:33

And you couldn't have worked on those? No, exactly. Since I was interested in human vision, it was necessary to use uh an animal which was as close as possible in in it the structure of its eyes and its brain to human beings.

Presenter6:43

What sort of attacks have you suffered over the years?

Professor Colin Blakemore6:47

Everything from threatening phone calls and abusive letters to bombs delivered to my home and razor blades in envelopes and my car being painted with paint stripper and all of these kinds of things.

Presenter6:57

How long has that gone on?

Professor Colin Blakemore6:59

Oh, you know, on and off since the nineteen seventies, but most of all over the last eight years or so.

Presenter7:05

And it's still happening today.

Professor Colin Blakemore7:07

Less so, I hope, and from a smaller group of people, I hope. I mean, one thing that's happened over the last few years is that I've tried to build avenues of communication with the legitimate animal rights and animal welfare groups, who I think have important things to say. And I think it's absolutely essential to establish a dialogue. Some of the problems that we have, the hostility which has led to violence, I'm sure is partly our responsibility. When I say our, I mean the scientists, and the failure to communicate the facts and to respond to the criticism.

Presenter7:38

Tell me about record number two.

Professor Colin Blakemore7:41

Right, this is a memory of my childhood. This is a song that I remember my parents playing when we went on holiday to my mother's family home in Eastbourne. At that stage, we didn't have a record player at home, so I suppose when I was 9, 10, 11, that sort of age. But my great-aunt, who had brought up my mother, had a marvellous wind-up grammar flone in a few 78s. And this is a record that I can remember my parents' particularly liking very much.

Professor Colin Blakemore8:09

La Belle Marguerite by Georges Guttari.

Speaker 38:13

In September when the grapes harvested, Mark girl did pick the grapes with

Speaker 38:19

There are silver bells upon her fingers, All the little birds come out to see. Blame up a ditch Margarita picking grapes with me.

Speaker 38:38

Finger-ding-a-ding-a-ling-a-ding-a-ding-a-n-a-ding-a-ling-a-ding-ling.

Presenter8:43

Georges Gattari and Ma Bella Margherita. Um I don't know whether science i is in your genes, Colin, but you said that as a child you didn't even know what a scientist was.

Professor Colin Blakemore8:54

Well well, no, I'm the first person in my family to go to university, so I didn't come from an academic background at all, and I never

Professor Colin Blakemore9:00

Come into contact with scientists. Of course, I studied science at school. You're an only two.

Professor Colin Blakemore9:07

Born in Stratford, actually.

Presenter9:07

Born in Strapped.

Professor Colin Blakemore9:08

I think I was there for about a day and a half, but Coventry member was heavily bombed during the war, so my mother was evacuated to Stratford to a maternity hospital.

Presenter9:16

And what did your father do for a living?

Professor Colin Blakemore9:18

Well, during the war he joined up when he was seventeen, started the war, spent the whole of the war

Professor Colin Blakemore9:22

As a radio operator in the Air Force.

Professor Colin Blakemore9:25

So he came out with really no professional training and went into the television sale trade and did very well, became a a representative and a s area sales manager for a television company.

Presenter9:36

So you were comfortable off? You weren't you weren't poor?

Professor Colin Blakemore9:39

Not at all. We started I mean, my earliest memories are are of a two up, two down house in a very poor working uh class area of of Coventry. But but as I said, my father did well and we we moved and moved to a nice village near near Coventry where we where we lived.

Presenter9:54

And you went to a fee paying school, didn't you?

Professor Colin Blakemore9:57

Well, I did. I started out at uh at a primary school where we first lived, but at about the age of seven or eight or so, my parents, I think, had a chap with the school who who said that they thought it would be a very good idea if my parents could somehow get the means together to send me to the primary school section of a local grammar school.

Professor Colin Blakemore10:14

So my my parents and I

Professor Colin Blakemore10:17

I thanked them endlessly for this. I don't know how they they did it. They changed my life by um scraping the money together to send me to the fee-paying primary section of King Henry VIII School in Coventry for two or three years leading up to the Eleven Plus. They knew they couldn't go on paying the fee, so I had to pass the examination, but I did, and then I got a scholarship and went on.

Presenter10:36

So a lot was invested in you in that sense. Did you feel that pressure? Because I know I think extraordinarily for a child you suffered from ulcers, didn't you?

Professor Colin Blakemore10:45

Yes, I do. It's very odd. I don't think that any has much to do with pressure on me. Certainly not from my parents. I never felt pressure from my parents. Just support, actually.

Professor Colin Blakemore10:53

But yes, I did have a I had an ulcer which I think probably began at about the age of eleven and caused r really great difficulties through my teenage years. I finally had um

Professor Colin Blakemore11:02

Surgery when I was at Cambridge actually. A gastrectomy operation.

Presenter11:06

But how bad was it? Was it life threatening?

Professor Colin Blakemore11:08

At times it was, I didn't realise that, I think I was very naive about the whole thing, but I literally fell off my bicycle I mean I was working on the Post, I remember, delivering the Post at Christmas as a as a student, and got up one morning feeling slightly odd, set off on my bicycle to go off to the Post Office and simply blacked out and fell off my bicycle'cause I'd lost so much blood. But I went to hospital and I was okay.

Presenter11:27

And has that therefore you I mean it's solved now because you had the operation as you say but has that left you with a

Professor Colin Blakemore11:29

Correlation as you say it.

Presenter11:32

sense of your own mortality. Has it any kind of

Professor Colin Blakemore11:35

Very much so. I've never

Professor Colin Blakemore11:37

really expected to live very long. I seem to be doing okay, actually. I think I'm very healthy now, but I've never had the expectation of living for long. I think that's part of the reason why I've always wanted to cram so much into every minute of the day.

Presenter11:49

You're a workaholic, which I want to ask you about, but let let's pause and have some more music before then.

Professor Colin Blakemore11:51

to ask you about but let

Professor Colin Blakemore11:54

So what's next? Oh, Stravinsky.

Professor Colin Blakemore11:56

This is from The Rite of Spring and I can remember listening to this when I was really quite young, maybe 11 or 12, and I'd like to think experiencing something of the shock and the revelation and the excitement of those French people in the audience at the first performance in Paris, the Diagolef Ballet. And also it represents the ballet. My wife is a dancer, is still a dancer, was a wonderful dancer, so this will be a chance to remember.

Presenter13:19

Part of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, played by the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Leonard Bernstein. So you went to Cambridge, Colin, again on a scholarship. You studied medicine, but you graduated with a first class degree in natural sciences. Who or what influenced the change? What happened?

Professor Colin Blakemore13:36

Well, you have to understand that at both Oxford and Cambridge, s medicine is taught preclinical medicine is taught as a science subject. So everyone's exposed to science and gets a science honours degree. What that experience does, of course, is tempt the student with any scientific inclination to be seduced off into research rather than medical practice, and that's what's happened happened to me.

Presenter13:57

But what was it? What did you realize was there to be had? What ex

Professor Colin Blakemore14:01

The particular choice of the study of the brain and of vision was just a matter of timing. I was in Cambridge in the in the sixties, sixty two to sixty five, and that was um a time when when knowledge about the brain, and particularly about the visual parts of the brain, was simply exploding.

Presenter14:17

So you were very much the right man in the right place at the right time, as it turned out.

Professor Colin Blakemore14:20

And surrounded by many, many experts in that area. So the enthusiasm for vision was tremendous, and I caught the bug.

Presenter14:27

And you went off with that bug to the to UCLA, didn't you? And stayed there for a few years.

Professor Colin Blakemore14:32

to Berkeley between school and university and went off and bummed my way around the States and visited Berkeley on the way and met

Professor Colin Blakemore14:39

people who were still good friends were there. So when I had this opportunity to go to the United States, I got a a Harkness Fellowship to go and work there. What I really wanted to do was to go back to Berkeley because I'd loved it so much. What I really wanted to do was to study a vision and what I really wanted to do was to do it with someone who understood the English educational system.

Professor Colin Blakemore14:55

And when I asked people about that they came up with one name

Professor Colin Blakemore14:58

Very eminent visual physiologist Horace Barlow, he took me on as a graduate student and I didn't look back.

Presenter15:04

Hm. So how long did you stay there?

Professor Colin Blakemore15:06

Two and a half years.

Presenter15:07

And then you went back to Cambridge, where you worked for eleven years, and now you've been at Oxford as Wainfleet Professor of Physiology for seventeen years. But you're a workaholic, we said. Now, what does that mean exactly for you? Do you not take holidays? Do you not or d do you mean your work is always with you in your brain?

Professor Colin Blakemore15:25

I think that's a better description. It is, yes. I mean, I do take holidays. Um, but I usually take my work with me. I'm usually r writing or or thinking or or tapping on my computer.

Presenter15:34

But you list in Who's Who as your recreation wasting time. Is this a joke? Because obviously it's something you just don't do.

Professor Colin Blakemore15:40

Well now and then, you know, I mean, I

Professor Colin Blakemore15:42

Sit down on the sofa and become a couch potato for a few minutes at a time and it's great fun.

Presenter15:47

Is it?

Professor Colin Blakemore15:47

Yes, actually.

Presenter15:48

Yes, actually it is. Don't you have an awful conscience that you're actually not thinking about something important?

Professor Colin Blakemore15:51

It depends how the rest of the day has gone.

Presenter15:54

Isn't it also, though, to do with maybe your origins? Isn't the sort of work ethic perhaps rather strong in you from the sort of background you come from?

Professor Colin Blakemore16:01

I think there was this mood, you know, uh in the

Professor Colin Blakemore16:04

In the late fifties, I mean after the Attlee government and all the changes in education and so on, the feeling that there was opportunity for anyone from any background, if you seized it. I felt that very much, yes.

Presenter16:14

And still do.

Presenter16:16

Yeah, yeah.

Professor Colin Blakemore16:16

Yes, I mean I'd yes, I'd like to feel that the world was a bit more like that, that those kind of opportunities still existed for people from any background and that uh young people felt challenged in the same way that I did and I know that many of my friends did when when I was young.

Presenter16:30

Record number four.

Professor Colin Blakemore16:33

Okay, this is Thelonius Monk. I had a long flirtation with classical music between about the age of uh maybe eleven and fifteen and immerse myself in classical music. I remember carrying enormous loads of cardboard cases back from the record library in Coventry stuffed with records and would listen to these while I was doing my homework.

Professor Colin Blakemore16:52

Then there's a kind of change of mood and I discovered jazz fifteen, sixteen and went to a lot of jazz performances, listened to lots of jazz.

Professor Colin Blakemore17:00

When I was on that trip to America when I was 17 before going to university, I was working around the States and I had the most wonderful opportunity. I worked at a jazz festival in Washington for two weeks where every famous name was playing. All of these people I'd idolised were there. And I had the job of going to the dressing room, calling them out on stage, making sure they had everything they wanted for the performance, the kind of perfect job. They paid me to do it. I remember going to the dressing room of Thelonius Monk, cutting through the fog of dope smoke to discover him in the corner room and guiding him out to the stage. I think he's just wonderful.

Presenter18:34

Thelonious Monk and Honeysuckle Rose. Can you play music while you're working, Colin? You mentioned that you did just then. Some people just can't concentrate.

Professor Colin Blakemore18:39

People just call it.

Professor Colin Blakemore18:41

I'm not very good at that nowadays and I and I yell at my kids for doing it. But I remember playing music all the time.

Presenter18:47

But can you explain it in terms of the brain? I mean, how come some people can

Professor Colin Blakemore18:47

Explaining

Presenter18:51

stand music and concentrate on something else as a level.

Professor Colin Blakemore18:52

Well, I don't ad hoc instant explanation, do you? Yes, well different parts of the brain do different things and maybe some people get clever at uh letting them run in parallel.

Presenter18:55

Yes.

Presenter19:01

So tell me about the brain. It's quite simply a machine, is it? Albeit a highly complex one and one that we don't yet entirely understand, but it is understandable ultimately.

Professor Colin Blakemore19:12

I think the starting point for any discussion has to be to believe that there's n nothing in it which is beyond, as it were, the kinds of explanations that scientists give about the natural world. That doesn't mean that we understand everything about how the brain works, it's certainly true, but there's no reason to believe that there's anything in it that is magical in the sense that it couldn't be explained by the scientific approach.

Presenter19:33

And there is a point within the grey matter, as it were, is there, that controls if you could identify all of those points, that controls every function that we have, our speech or our vision or

Professor Colin Blakemore19:44

Well, that's the way it feels, isn't it? That there's a kind of operator in the br the brain, which is the the I, the self, which is really really running the show. I don't think that. I think that's a kind of self deception, a little bit of illusion, a trick, as it were, that our brains play on us.

Professor Colin Blakemore19:57

Most of what the brain does, we never really know about at that level. It never enters consciousness.

Presenter20:02

But people whose brains have been quite severely damaged can still function quite often quite well, can't they? I met a man quite recently who was said to have only, I think, eleven percent of his brain working, but you could have a a totally normal conversation with him.

Professor Colin Blakemore20:08

But I met a man quite recently who who was

Professor Colin Blakemore20:16

Yes. And this tells us something about the kind of machine the brain is. Very, very different from a conventional computer, for instance, where if you were to take one chip out of it, the whole thing would collapse and nothing would work.

Professor Colin Blakemore20:28

So you have to think of the brain really as many computers operating in parallel with the capacity to compensate and recover to some extent.

Presenter20:36

But how distant is the day when we shall know exactly which part of the brain to operate on, to prevent, as it were, epilepsy, for example?

Professor Colin Blakemore20:45

Oh, that's very straightforward. I mean, you've chosen an easy one there, because the site of an epileptic seizure can be localized. There are various electrical and other diagnostic techniques that enable you to pinpoint where the problem is and then, if necessary, operate on it to remove the episode.

Presenter20:59

So it can be done.

Professor Colin Blakemore21:00

Yes. I mean we know an enormous amount about where things happen in the brain. What we don't fully understand is how, and that's the big problem for the future. How do these nerve cells millions and billions of them though there are how do they actually do the job of the seeing and the thinking and the speaking and so on? That's that's the challenge, to see the b how the brain computes things.

Presenter21:22

Next piece of music.

Professor Colin Blakemore21:25

Right, this is Erin Copeland um and I chose this to

Professor Colin Blakemore21:28

Remind me of the United States. I love America very much. I think it's a wonderful, wonderful country. And I think this piece of music captures the enthusiasm of America. I heard Darren Copeland give a lecture in Coventry when I suppose about thirteen or fourteen. And he he played the recording of this piece of music. He actually gave a performance of his piano sonata and I was very impressed by this tall, elegant, rather gangly American.

Professor Colin Blakemore21:52

Found Fair for the Common Man, I chose that as well because I'm a socialist and a humanist by inclination, so I thought this would remind me of that sentiment.

Presenter23:01

Part of Aaron Copeland's Fanfare for the Common Man, played by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra conducted by Antole Dorati. So the brain is a machine, Colin Blakemore. The mind is a machine, you say, and this is where

Presenter23:13

The analogy becomes rather faulty for some people, isn't it? Because it's a machine that can feel, that can have doubts and fears and regrets and all of those things. Computers cannot do that. Therefore, surely the brain is something, the mind is something greater than a machine.

Professor Colin Blakemore23:28

I'm not sure that saying that the mind is a machine is quite how I'd put it. I think a nice way of putting it is that the mind is what the what the brain does. So it's as it were the product of the machinery of the brain. And that product is very peculiar in the sense that it expresses itself through our awareness of the world. It creates this amazing property of being conscious and being aware.

Professor Colin Blakemore23:51

And that's a a very private product of the brain.

Presenter23:55

But what we have.

Presenter23:56

That is different from a computer, surely, is a sense of purpose, isn't it? We you know, not only do we know how to do something, and computers can be told we can tell them how to do an awful lot of things, but they can't have that sense of purpose and know that they ought to be doing that because they are not as clever as us. Our consciousness gives us something more, a sense of purpose.

Professor Colin Blakemore24:15

I agree that that question of free will, the sense of choice, is a problem that a mechanistic approach to the brain has to confront.

Professor Colin Blakemore24:25

My present view is that it may not quite really be like that, that our feeling that we really are in charge and are making these choices about our futures and where we go in life, or even the day-to-day choices about how to open a door or wh whether to turn left or right on the street, are being made by us. I think to some extent that's illusory. It's a kind of rationalization.

Professor Colin Blakemore24:47

Of decisions that are being made in a much more basic and causally deterministic way in the machinery.

Presenter24:52

We are pre-programmed, are we?

Professor Colin Blakemore24:54

Well if you like to put Yes, but pre-programmed in an immensely rich way. Pre-programmed by our genes, of course, by the s by the inbuilt structure of our brain, but by all of our education, by our background, by our childhood, by everything that we know about how the world uh works, by all our memories. We are so rich in the influences that act on our mind.

Presenter25:12

But you only have free will to the extent that

Presenter25:16

that whatever is present within your brain allows you to choose from a certain clutch of things you would never be able to choose to do something completely different that was contrary to your nature.

Professor Colin Blakemore25:25

Well, that's right. And that's why education is so important in setting the boundaries of what is possible later in life, the choices that are possible.

Presenter25:33

But ultimately, are you saying once we understand this highly complex machine, if once once we understand the exact physiology of it, we will be able to control it, will we?

Professor Colin Blakemore25:45

I think we'll be able to design education more rationally and in that sense control it.

Presenter25:50

But we're also told, for example, that geneticists are working on how to breed out a certain gene that we don't want that's perhaps a disease carrying gene, a gene that has a predisposition to cancer within us. So it seems to me if the geneticists get together with you, the physiologists, and you're both coming at it, you could actually

Presenter26:10

Almost manufacture the perfect person, couldn't you?

Professor Colin Blakemore26:13

In principle, we will have the capacity to manipulate everything about the bodies of our children in the future. There's no doubt about that.

Presenter26:22

In the test tube, or once the defective human being exists, you can't get it.

Professor Colin Blakemore26:26

Well, eventually, it's not permitted now and it's not even conceivable now, by modifying the germline, the eggs and the sperm and changing the ge genetic direction of a whole family will in principle be possible.

Presenter26:36

So we could create a a disease-free and beautifully behaved race. It's rather chilling thought.

Professor Colin Blakemore26:41

Yes, and in doing so, lose the diversity and the richness of human nature. I've heard scientists, geneticists say quite seriously, well, we'll be able to eliminate depression, but we'll also be able to eliminate, say, homosexuality.

Presenter26:45

Yeah.

Professor Colin Blakemore26:56

So there would have been none of the homosexual leaders of the artistic community. Do we want a bland kind of uniformity of genetic makeup and of personality or not? This is a question not for scientists to decide. This is why it was one of the reasons why we need a better informed, scientifically informed public.

Presenter27:16

More music.

Professor Colin Blakemore27:18

Well, next the sixties. I mean, I feel myself in many respects to be a child of the sixties, and I'm not amongst those who, you know, disparage the sixties. I think it was a wonderful time, that that feeling of rebirth and of and of optimism. So it has to be the Beatles. I went to the last live concert of the Beatles in Candlestick Park in in San Francisco. And another reason is that I knew very well a marvellous man, Ivan Vaughan, who

Professor Colin Blakemore27:43

who died very young of a couple of years ago from um Parkinson's disease. He got Parkinson's disease at a ridiculously young age. Great friend of mine and he introduced uh John Lennon to Paul McCartney, so he has his place in history.

Speaker 327:56

He were no shoeshiny

Speaker 327:59

To Jan Football Hill

Speaker 328:02

Fucking finger.

Speaker 328:05

Conquer Cola, he said.

Speaker 328:08

No, you

Speaker 328:10

You know me.

Speaker 328:13

One thing I can tell you is you got to

Presenter28:27

Beatles and come together. Do we then, Colin Blakemore, have no soul? Is there no part of us in your view that cannot be explained in scientific terms?

Professor Colin Blakemore28:38

Well, I think that has to be the starting point for any scientist looking at how the brain works. Because, you see, if you were to admit that there was something in there which was magical and that uh we couldn't possibly ever explain

Professor Colin Blakemore28:50

Then, really, how could you ever do science on it at all? Because you've got to assume in doing science that it's orderly, that it's um.

Professor Colin Blakemore28:56

Lawful that you can do an experiment that gives you the same result if you carry out the same procedure.

Presenter29:02

So how do you cope? Now let me ask you a a personal question again. You know, if you feel incredibly miserable, where where do you turn? How do you cope without God to turn to?

Professor Colin Blakemore29:13

I don't see how God would help. I mean, I think turning to God is in a sense an act of desperation. It's an appeal not to the capacity to solve problems here and now.

Professor Colin Blakemore29:23

And I would have I I have to say I've been lucky enough never to confront insoluble difficulties. But um I mean my my answer would be

Professor Colin Blakemore29:32

Try and do it now.

Professor Colin Blakemore29:33

Turn to your friends. Find the solution. Find the answer. And that is human nature.

Presenter29:38

I suppose it it does help you say what is the point of turning to God. I suppose there is simply a a warmth, really. Christianity offers a warmth in the face of.

Presenter29:46

of your really rather icy reason.

Professor Colin Blakemore29:49

But people can be warm too. I mean, we have other people that we can and should rely on. I mean, I would rather cultivate the goodness in human beings than resort to explanations that are beyond us. I mean, we have our future in our own hands, and we have to accept that.

Presenter30:04

So we're all machines of varying kinds and some function better than others and so on and and and all of us will eventually all these machines will eventually deteriorate and die. And that's that you know

Professor Colin Blakemore30:13

But but you know, leave behind them their progeny, their achievements, add to the world as it is. I mean, we all put our brick in the wall.

Presenter30:20

So that's it. That's our purpose, is it?

Professor Colin Blakemore30:23

Uh well we don't have a purpose, yeah. That's the other that's the other problem. The idea of purpose is a sort of invention of the human mind as well, and it's quite wrong to think of us in those terms, as if we have some objective that's been set for us, some reason to be here. We must stop asking the question why about ourselves and the world and ask the question how. I mean simply how do we work? How can we do our bit, rather than why are we here and what's the future about.

Presenter30:48

Record number seven.

Professor Colin Blakemore30:50

Okay, well this is a r real change removed. This is a bit of humour. I mean I couldn't possibly go to this desert island without something funny. This is uh Alzos Prasaro Sustro. Now I could have chosen lots of uh Ricard Strauss and would like to have done, you know, Ariadnef Naxos or Salome or something, but this is double value. I've got a bit of Richards Richard Strauss, but it's performed by the Portsmouth Symphonia, who were sort of rather cult group in the early seventies. Uh they're musicians, but they chose to play instruments that they hadn't actually been trained to play. So this is a serious attempt. It's a difficult piece of music, as you'll see.

Presenter32:31

The Port Smith Symphonia playing an excerpt from Richard Strauss's Alzo Sprach Zarathustra. I must say, until you played that one, I was going to observe how sentimental Ray your your choices were, you know. That's true. But are you are you also one of those people talking about this programme that who's always had eight records in mind? Not necessarily because you were waiting for an invitation to be on the programme, but because you like the game.

Professor Colin Blakemore32:53

I can't believe that anyone who's listened to this programme has not secretly thought of their eight. And I did, and they were totally different from the ones that I now it's happened that I've chosen. When it's actually come down to it, it's all nostalgia. And that's what would matter, I think, if I really was alone. It would be the past I want to remember, and people, emotions, events in my life.

Presenter33:14

But the prospect of a desert island doesn't appall you, does it?

Professor Colin Blakemore33:16

No, it doesn't.

Professor Colin Blakemore33:18

I've been on desert islands actually before and found it rather fun.

Presenter33:21

But the prospect of death does.

Professor Colin Blakemore33:23

Appall me? Not at all. No, no, it doesn't. I mean, I don't I don't want it because I enjoy life so much. But I don't live in fear of it.

Presenter33:30

But you worry about it, you think about it a lot.

Professor Colin Blakemore33:33

No, not at all.

Presenter33:34

I thought earlier on when you said you you contemplated your own mortality and you were rushing around trying to

Professor Colin Blakemore33:39

Well, yes, but that's not because I fear death. It's just because.

Presenter33:39

See that's a good idea.

Professor Colin Blakemore33:44

Life so much better

Professor Colin Blakemore33:46

Last record.

Professor Colin Blakemore33:48

Well, okay, this is this is Wagner. Painful not to be able to choose eight eight Wagners. I mean I'm a Wagner's my favorite composer. Also very difficult not not to choose Valkyrie, which is which is really my favorite opera. What I've chosen instead is Pasiphel, Wagner's last opera.

Professor Colin Blakemore34:03

I mean, I love it, but mainly because it's my wife's favorite piece of music. So, I'll remember her.

Presenter35:05

The Flower Maidens Confronting Parsifal from Wagner's Opera of That Name, played by the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Herbert von Karian. So if you could only take one of those eight records, Colin, which one would it be?

Professor Colin Blakemore35:18

I think probably the Mozart, magic flute, because of the richness and the variety and and a lot of associations, memories.

Presenter35:25

What about your book?

Professor Colin Blakemore35:27

Right. I've chosen um a book called The Discoverers by Daniel Borston, Librarian of Congress. The subtitle is A History of Man's Search to Know His World and Himself. It's really a history of the origins of science.

Presenter35:39

And your luxury.

Professor Colin Blakemore35:41

Yes, I think you're gonna give me

Professor Colin Blakemore35:43

You're gonna give me flack on this. I want to take a computer, but I want a computer which is solar powered and which has a satellite link to the Internet.

Presenter35:51

Oh, you can't have that bit.

Professor Colin Blakemore35:53

I can't have that.

Presenter35:53

No, you can't well

Professor Colin Blakemore35:54

But I won't I won't you know

Presenter35:55

But then you can communicate with other hosts.

Professor Colin Blakemore35:56

No, I don't want to expand it. No, well I don't want to communicate with anyone. I will do without the email. Well it's difficult to do without email, but I'll I will. But I just want to know what's going on in the world and be able to explore the internet and see how it grows, this marvelous repository of knowledge.

Presenter36:09

So you'll re receive but not send.

Professor Colin Blakemore36:11

Yes, yes, I'd be happy to do that.

Presenter36:13

Orange.

Professor Colin Blakemore36:14

Thank you.

Presenter36:15

Colin Blakemore, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs. Uh

Professor Colin Blakemore36:18

Yeah.

Speaker 136:26

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.