Dr Susan Greenfield

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 seven, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:30

My castaway this week is a scientist. Science, in a sense, is her adopted subject. She studied classics at A-level and psychology at Oxford, and only moved into science because of her interest in the working of the brain. It was a happy choice. Since the early seventies, she's carried out pioneering work on the structure of the brain, becoming Professor of Pharmacology at Oxford and the first woman to give the Royal Institution Christmas lectures. She's a fervent ambassador for all things scientific, and for women and their work too. The problem is not with women in science, she says, it is with women at my level. And the more senior I get, the more convinced I am that there's a problem. She is Professor Susan Greenfield. What do you mean by that, Susan, that women are only taken seriously in science at a certain level?

Presenter1:16

Yeah.

Dr Susan Greenfield1:16

No, I think that when you're Foley Junior

Dr Susan Greenfield1:18

You're not a threat to anyone, and so therefore you fit into the order of things quite well.

Dr Susan Greenfield1:24

It's only when you get older and you start challenging people and being rivals that um that's when the difficulty starts, I think. But the men don't like it, is what you're suggesting. I certain well they're not used to it. I think people feel uncomfortable with women who um tend to be assertive. They use words like strident.

Dr Susan Greenfield1:38

When for a man it'd be tough. Or bossy. Or bossy. You only have to look at the adjectives that are used. And is this just in in the world of academic science? Is that what you're saying? I think it's particularly marked in academic science. That's of course the world I know most.

Dr Susan Greenfield1:50

Although I have seen it in the corporate world as well. I told a story once when I was in the States and I was in

Presenter1:53

Mm.

Speaker 11:53

At the end.

Dr Susan Greenfield1:55

At Limo, there was a great train of limos furrying a party of dignitaries back from some meal, and I just happened to be in the limo with two other women who were fairly senior as well, American corporate women, and suddenly it all came out. And whereas before these women in all their power suits and so on had, to my mind, seemed very self confident and no problem at all, suddenly behind the glass panel

Dr Susan Greenfield2:15

There was a whole expression of frustration, a feeling that they weren't heard well enough, that they weren't listened to, that they couldn't initiate topics and conversations, that they were restricted in their progress. And that was really a turning point for me because I thought it was just me perhaps that was getting delusions of grandeur as I was getting older and using that as an excuse if I wasn't feeling I was moving as fast as I could.

Presenter2:37

Yeah.

Dr Susan Greenfield2:37

The very Important

Presenter2:38

Questioners

Dr Susan Greenfield2:38

Let's get straight to it. The male brain Bigger than the female.

Presenter2:41

What

Dr Susan Greenfield2:42

Um If you took two individual brains and placed them on the table, you couldn't tell if one was male or female. But on a population basis, that's to say if you took a hundred brains from a men and one hundred brains from women, then the most remarkable difference is the kind of motorway

Dr Susan Greenfield2:57

The connection of fibers that joins the two hemispheres, the two parts of the brain on each side. And that's actually stronger in women, it's more marked in women. And what does that mean if our motorway is better between the parts of the brain? No one really knows, to be honest. There are certain things that women do better than men, like language, for example. Little girls tend to speak more easily and more quickly than boys do and be better at reading at an early age, although of course the boys catch up. Boys are supposed to be better at so-called visual motor skills. That's coordinating their hands and their eyes in doing things. But there's a huge variation. When I was doing the Royal Institution lectures, and I tried to demonstrate this with three little boys, well, three boys, they weren't so little, three boys and three girls, they actually baffled me because the girls did the things that the boys were supposed to do best and vice versa. So that was marvellous because it showed that the individual triumphs over gender, which is one of the themes of my life.

Presenter3:42

Tell me

Dr Susan Greenfield3:42

Uh

Presenter3:42

About your first drink.

Dr Susan Greenfield3:43

Um it's the Rolling Stones.

Dr Susan Greenfield3:46

I think in in my day people divided into people that like the Beatles, people that like the stones.

Dr Susan Greenfield3:51

And I was very much a Stones person. I like that defiance. I think Mick Jagger was one of the most exciting and charismatic performers.

Dr Susan Greenfield3:57

This one, Brown Sugar, is the one that I most easily recollect and the one that certainly would have me dancing on a desert island as soon as I heard the first pass.

Speaker 44:10

Sold in the market down in New York. Scott Old Slave I know it's doing all right here and with the whammy just around

Presenter4:30

The Rolling Stones and Brown Sugar to get Susan Greenfield bopping on the beach. The most amazing thing is that you've ended up where you are, being a top research scientist when you have no O levels.

Speaker 14:35

Uh

Dr Susan Greenfield4:38

Research

Presenter4:42

Or indeed a degree in the subject.

Dr Susan Greenfield4:44

No, no.

Presenter4:47

But no biology can be used.

Dr Susan Greenfield4:48

No biology, no chemistry level now.

Presenter4:51

Were you not amazed when that

Dr Susan Greenfield4:51

Yeah.

Dr Susan Greenfield4:52

Uh

Presenter4:52

Happened to you.

Dr Susan Greenfield4:52

For me, there's been a continuing theme that therefore hasn't made this surprising. What do you mean by that? Well, I've always been interested in consciousness and the mind and the human mind. And when I did Greek, perhaps more than Latin, and you read the Greek philosophers and so on, that was something that worried them and that features in both the plays and in the histories and the literature and so on. So I was always very interested in what makes an individual an individual.

Presenter5:14

Mm.

Dr Susan Greenfield5:14

The

Presenter5:14

Why the brain specifically? I mean, this sort of lemmange-like organ, you can hold it in one hand. That's right. It's awfully watery.

Dr Susan Greenfield5:17

To Le Mot.

Dr Susan Greenfield5:19

That's right. It's awfully watery. Yeah. Well, I think it's that fascination of the mechanical and the mental and how the one relates to the other, as clearly it does, because I don't believe that consciousness is beamed in from the planet Zorg or anything like that. So

Dr Susan Greenfield5:32

Is absolutely the fact that the brain generates consciousness, absolutely without question.

Dr Susan Greenfield5:38

So how does it do it? And what baffles me is, unlike black holes or interplanetary investigations, the whole thing is there in front of you. You can put it on a table. And there it is. All the secrets are there.

Dr Susan Greenfield5:48

If only we could get at that. Do you think we ever will?

Speaker 45:48

Then

Speaker 45:49

Uh

Presenter5:49

Do you think we have

Dr Susan Greenfield5:51

That's hard to say, not being a kind of Nostradamus type. I would never say we'll never not do something because that'd be wrong, obviously. With the constraints that we have at the moment, with the assumptions we make at the moment,

Speaker 45:57

No.

Speaker 15:57

Um

Dr Susan Greenfield6:02

It's hard to see how we're going to make much progress. People go round and round in circles. I think soon we're going to get correlations. That's to say, we're going to be able to match up physical events in the brain.

Dr Susan Greenfield6:11

Increasingly precisely with certain types of consciousness. And I think the royal road there is drugs. For example, LSD or Prozac, as we know, changes your subjective states. And I could tell you at the physical level what that's doing to chemicals in the brain. So the more precise we get in matching up what some people would say is the subjective,

Speaker 46:28

Hmm.

Dr Susan Greenfield6:28

Being happy or not, having hallucination, with physical states in the brain. I think that is a way of getting forward how one causes the other.

Dr Susan Greenfield6:37

We're going to have to make a sea change of thought.

Presenter6:40

So there are people like you across the Western world working on these tiny, tiny little areas which you hope to piece together. But I think you've said yourself, just just to put this in context, that it's like trees in the Amazon rainforest, the l there's many leaves as there are on trees. There are little

Dr Susan Greenfield6:42

Okay, I'll be

Dr Susan Greenfield6:44

Yeah.

Dr Susan Greenfield6:47

Alright.

Speaker 16:49

But

Presenter6:56

And that way

Dr Susan Greenfield6:56

If you were to count the connections in the outer layer alone.

Presenter6:57

If you was a

Dr Susan Greenfield7:00

It would take you thirty two million years if you were counting up one one connection a second. That's quite a a literally mind-boggling statistic.

Presenter7:04

Um I literally

Presenter7:06

So just tell me a bit more then about consciousness, because I know again you've you've compared it to because the analogies are what make it work here, aren't they? You've compared it to rain falling on a puddle.

Dr Susan Greenfield7:09

Discuss.

Dr Susan Greenfield7:13

Yeah.

Dr Susan Greenfield7:16

Okay, my own personal theory um in an attempt to establish this correlation between subjective states and mental ones is to have the following idea.

Dr Susan Greenfield7:26

But what happens is there's no brain centre, there's no brain within a brain that is the boss or anything like that. But rather, different groups of brain cells can corral up or be made to work together very, very quickly and then they disband again. Imagine a stone being thrown into a puddle and the ripples that are they're very transient and then they're gone. And then another stone comes in. Or while the ripples are spreading out another stone or a big boulder or a little pebble.

Presenter7:44

I'm gonna

Presenter7:49

So in that moment the brains come on the surface.

Dr Susan Greenfield7:50

And that's why you say

Presenter8:01

And that's why you say that it that it's really the the analogy with a the comparison with a computer is not a good one for the brain.

Dr Susan Greenfield8:06

Uh

Dr Susan Greenfield8:09

For me, it the c the analogy of the computer, I

Presenter8:09

Uh

Dr Susan Greenfield8:12

It doesn't help at all, it doesn't work at all. Because to my mind, consciousness is intricately related to chemicals. You only have to look at Prozac or LSD or morphine to know that you can modify your consciousness with drugs. And until the computer scientists start to factor in or take on board the qualitative, not the quantitative, the qualitative fact that different compounds, different chemicals do different things in different ways, until somehow that's brought in, and until somehow they build a computer that

Dr Susan Greenfield8:37

Is happier when it has Prozac and doesn't have pain when it has morphine, or where aspirin cures its headache until it does that.

Dr Susan Greenfield8:44

I'm not impressed by its learning or memory skills because already computers that aren't conscious can outstrip us in learning and memory skills. So learning and memory is not the key, it's feelings that are the key. Record number two.

Dr Susan Greenfield8:54

When I was a graduate student, the lot of graduate students is not a happy one, and one has very little money.

Dr Susan Greenfield9:00

He worked very long hours for no great thanks. And I was in a particularly not a bad time, but it was a flat time for me. And it was one Sunday afternoon when the experiments weren't going well and it was raining outside and there wasn't much to look forward to and I didn't have much money and I was sitting in my shared house and you know what shared student houses are like and I turned on the then record player as it was in those days and uh one of the flatmates had left this on and suddenly I thought well it doesn't matter that it's raining and it just felt a great hit a direct

Dr Susan Greenfield9:28

BLAST OF OPTIMISM

Speaker 49:48

Amen, I'm as rhyme as right to find May I show time I love the home, I am a fear, time and

Presenter10:30

Part of the choral finale of Beethoven's Symphony No. nine in D minor, Opus one two five, The Ode to Joy, sung by Simon Estes, Julia Varadi, Jad Van Ness, and Keith Lewis, with the Berlin Philharmonic, and the Ernst Zenf choir, conducted by Carlo Maria Giulini.

Presenter10:46

Not only do you have no formal early training in science, but you also don't have any really academic background, do you, Susan? Your parents were.

Dr Susan Greenfield10:54

Oh, certainly. Absolutely not. I I wasn't brought up in a background where there were lots of books and and lots of classical music around there. They're they're not educated in that sense. On the other hand, um I think partly because my father's Jewish.

Dr Susan Greenfield11:07

I came from a mixed marriage, so it's not so much I was brought up in a religious way, but I did have a lot of the Jewish culture in my home and in the extended family, and the Jews have a huge respect for education.

Dr Susan Greenfield11:18

My mother won a scholarship before the war to the school that I went to, Godolphin and Latimer. So she certainly had a lot of wit. But in those days, the class system was such that she was made to feel a scholarship girl and she loved dancing anyway, so she ran away at fourteen and went on the stage. And this, when I heard this story, I thought it was a very romantic one. And I think it instilled me several things, which was, again, to be yourself, to stand up and say, I don't want to do this or I do want to do this. And I think because she herself had asserted herself at an early age, she recognised in me my particular talents and therefore didn't try and pigeonhole me.

Presenter11:49

But the other interesting thing about you at school, at at Godolphin

Dr Susan Greenfield11:49

Didn't think about it.

Dr Susan Greenfield11:51

Oh, at Edgar Dolphin in West London.

Presenter11:51

London in West London.

Dr Susan Greenfield11:53

Is that you apparently weren't in the A street? No, no, I wasn't no. I didn't realize because I'd never had. No one had ever told me that you you had to do a lot of work or prepare for lessons, and I used to just do it on the bus or in front of the T V or something. And it wasn't uh until later that the a great revelation came that you did things.

Presenter12:10

But something must have happened at some point because you ended up doing four A levels including

Dr Susan Greenfield12:12

Do you think that

Dr Susan Greenfield12:13

That was including Greece. All that happened was, and I'll name names here because I'm entirely indebted to her.

Presenter12:14

That's right.

Dr Susan Greenfield12:19

And she was one of the most formative influences on me as Veronica Lemon.

Dr Susan Greenfield12:23

Who was teaching classics at cool at the time. And she was a kind of Jean Brodie figure. Because I've always wanted to be different and enjoyed being different, I wanted to do Greek. And when I applied to do it, she actually said, Look, I'll make no bens about it, it's a difficult subject. And you know, wouldn't you be better off doing cookery or something like that? And I saw that as a challenge, and I said, No, please let me try.

Dr Susan Greenfield12:43

And it says a lot of good olfin and this has been

Presenter12:43

There's a lot.

Dr Susan Greenfield12:45

A hallmark of my life, people let me always have a go at things. And I think this is really important to let people have a go.

Presenter12:50

So what marker view then, presumably, that you're bloody-minded?

Dr Susan Greenfield12:52

I'm certainly bloody-minded, yeah. And anyway, so I had a go, and because I desperately wanted to impress her, and because she was a very inspirational woman anyway, I did some work, and this suddenly was a revelation because I got 90% in the first exams, and I suddenly realized that if I did this with the other subjects, then this might have the similar kind of returns. Teenagers across the land, please note.

Dr Susan Greenfield13:13

Record number three. In those days, if one went applied to Oxford and Cambridge, you did it after your A-levels.

Dr Susan Greenfield13:18

Which meant you had nine months off before going up. And in those nine months off, I'd never been abroad before and I was very lucky to get a scholarship to Israel, otherwise I could never have afforded to go, under a scheme called Bridge in Britain, um which sent out young people to work on a kibbutz and in um social service placements and so on. And there was one particular person in uh who befriended us, straggly English people, and uh we used to sit around in his flat as a great group playing.

Dr Susan Greenfield13:42

among other things, Bob Dylan. This I think is sheer poetry. I think it's very dramatic, his juxtaposition of ideas and images. So as well as the music, which is very haunting and makes me really think and takes me back to those days. It's just the images that crowd in as one hears it.

Speaker 413:59

With your pockets well protected at last And your street car visions Which you place on the grass

Speaker 114:13

Uh

Speaker 414:16

And your flesh lacks silk and your face lacks

Speaker 414:23

Uh

Presenter14:23

Uh

Speaker 414:23

Uh

Presenter14:23

Uh

Speaker 414:23

Uh

Presenter14:25

Bob Dylan and Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands. So you read Psychology, Susan, which you expected to be about Freud and analysis. It is.

Dr Susan Greenfield14:30

Mm-hmm.

Dr Susan Greenfield14:33

I thought I was going to get insights into people and be able to analyse all my friends there.

Presenter14:37

And instead you ended up studying rats in mazes and cutting up brains on benches.

Dr Susan Greenfield14:40

That's your brain.

Presenter14:42

W was that when your interest in the brain first began?

Dr Susan Greenfield14:46

My interest in the mind began when I was very young.

Dr Susan Greenfield14:49

Um my mum said, Um oh I s when I see red

Dr Susan Greenfield14:53

I don't know what you're seeing as red, and I'll never know. And of course, I said, well, it's the same as a cherry. And someone says, yes, but what I'm actually experiencing.

Dr Susan Greenfield15:00

I don't know what you're experiencing when we're looking at the same colour. And now she was touching on the issue of qualia as it happened on this quintessential um component of the subjective which still gets philosophers really worried although she didn't know the terms of the time of course and still doesn't. But that really fascinated me and that certainly coloured when I finally was roadworthy in Greek, coloured my interpretation of the sort of things I would read when I was doing

Presenter15:20

Still a large leap from having those kinds of thoughts and as you say, applying them to to Greek and the philosophers.

Dr Susan Greenfield15:20

A large leap from having

Dr Susan Greenfield15:24

Did

Dr Susan Greenfield15:25

The philosophers and so on.

Presenter15:26

Mm.

Dr Susan Greenfield15:26

To cutting up brain.

Presenter15:27

Well, yes.

Dr Susan Greenfield15:31

This perhaps, if one talks of turning points, was a turning point. I thought, well, say I've got a bit under my fingernail.

Dr Susan Greenfield15:36

Is that the bit that someone loved with? Is that the bit they liked Beethoven with? Is that the bit that made them fidget? And it was that absolute juxtaposition of the mental, the mystical, the whatever you like, the special, the personal, the individual, with this very sordid, banal-looking thing, how that related, which fired me enormously. And actually made me want to do the brain more than just look at behaviour.

Presenter15:58

Switch to science, which was remarkable, as we said. There must have been those who were appalled that he provided.

Dr Susan Greenfield16:01

Send them

Dr Susan Greenfield16:03

Yes, there's always there's always got this post. Well, there's always people in life, you know, who are there to nag and whinge and try and.

Presenter16:06

Oh well there's always people in line.

Dr Susan Greenfield16:10

And be pessimistic. But luckily there's always people who are not like that as well. And again, I'm very indebted, and I'd like to name names to Jane Mellonby, who was the second Miss Lemmon, if you like. And she was my tutor at St Hilda's College. And she thought it'd be a laugh. And that's another thing I like, is people that have fun in life and don't take it too seriously. And the very fact she thinks I'll be a hoot if you're a scientist.

Presenter16:30

But you've got to be quite a strong personality then to put up I mean you working i i wi alongside scientists who were heavily qualified you must have

Dr Susan Greenfield16:30

Because

Dr Susan Greenfield16:33

Uh

Dr Susan Greenfield16:37

You must have been a very good idea. Oh, yes, listen. I had a real Barry Mackenzie type, and I'm fond of him now, but at the time, he used to really make me angry.

Dr Susan Greenfield16:44

Not have anything against Australians, but he happened to be an Australian and very large. And I don't want to sound, you know, sizist or Australianist or anything. But he kept saying to me over and over again, ah, you're square pegging around, huh? Don't know what you're doing here, and so on. And again, that was a bit like Veronica Lemmon saying to me, Greek was hard. My particular mentality is if someone tells me I can't do something, I really resent that because I want to find out for myself what my limits are. Tell me about your next record.

Dr Susan Greenfield17:08

If each of my selections is a sense an example of a particular classification of types of music, and this is the musical now.

Dr Susan Greenfield17:16

And I'm a I'd like to think I'm a romantic, and I think that if one starts to abandon the romance of life, then one's the sadder for it. So the one I finally settled on is from Westside Story, uh where Maria and Tony are singing tonight.

Speaker 417:32

Tonight the world is full and bright with suns and moons all over the place Tonight, tonight the world is wide and bright Going mad should exparts into space

Presenter17:58

Richard Behemer and Natalie Wood singing Tonight from the original soundtrack recording of Westside Story.

Presenter18:04

Parkinson's disease, then, in Susan Greenfield, is a a disorder of the consciousness, in that a sufferer makes involuntary movements, shakes.

Dr Susan Greenfield18:13

They want to move, but they can't.

Presenter18:13

They won't

Presenter18:15

So

Dr Susan Greenfield18:17

The translation of the mental into the mechanical. You want to move, but you can't. So the person is perfectly conscious.

Dr Susan Greenfield18:23

So it's not a problem with their consciousness. But imagine everything you do in life requires movement.

Speaker 118:27

Uh

Dr Susan Greenfield18:30

Imagine that you can't smile at someone. So, forget about running and things like that. Forget about running for a bus. Just imagine you can't smile at someone as you'd like to. How you're feeling.

Presenter18:37

Now you've been researching into this for twenty-three years. What progress have you made?

Dr Susan Greenfield18:39

It's for twenty-three years.

Dr Susan Greenfield18:42

Well

Dr Susan Greenfield18:43

To the general public, it might seem very unglamorous, the progress we've made, because it's nowhere near being realised clinically. But in our own small way, in our scientific way, using scientific standards, we are making progress. But that's, I say, a long way off being realised in terms of developing a better therapy. Our work is still considered very heretical and very sort of offbeat, if you like. Why? Well, we work on a particular protein, a very large molecule. That I showed a long time ago was released by the cells that were lost in Parkinson's disease. And what we're working on is what is the job of this big molecule? What does it normally do?

Dr Susan Greenfield19:20

And if it we understood what it did and how it helps keep the cells normal and functional, could we exploit that? Could we use that molecule as a target for therapy?

Dr Susan Greenfield19:28

So to go back to

Presenter19:29

Your analogy about the puddle and the ripples that are stone falling into the puddle, this is this is one little tiny portion of one little one.

Dr Susan Greenfield19:30

Yeah.

Dr Susan Greenfield19:35

This is my bullshit.

Dr Susan Greenfield19:37

The funnel

Presenter19:37

Yeah.

Dr Susan Greenfield19:37

This is um one tiny way of recruiting up, of of creating ripples. It's one tiny mechanism of which there are many in which you can recruit cells, I think, into working all together.

Dr Susan Greenfield19:48

So

Presenter19:48

Day upon day

Dr Susan Greenfield19:50

You're working on this same thing. Slogging about the same old problem. Which is why I like working on consciousness as well, because the two complement each other. People find it very hard to understand. My mainstream science colleagues think I've gone a bit balmy because I'm interested in consciousness and wrote a book on consciousness. But to me the two are complementary in that day after day you work on this very specific nuts and bolts phenomena, this very specific problem to do with the brain. And so there's a danger if one just works on that that you can't put it into the wider context. At the same by the same token, if you work on just the wider context, just consciousness, it's very hard to think up specific experiments. Some people find that a strange combination. For me it works perfectly.

Dr Susan Greenfield20:26

Um at some stage in my life I did what a lot of young um scientists do.

Dr Susan Greenfield20:32

Which is to do the postdoc abroad. And this is a a sort of rite of passage that you have to go by. And I've done two in my life. One was in France. But the one that I want to speak about now was when I was in New York.

Dr Susan Greenfield20:41

I was very lonely in New York. This was in the early 80s. It was way before I was married.

Dr Susan Greenfield20:46

I had no money. And in any event, I think any female, single female that ventures out in New York at night does so with great trepidation. So most of my weekends were totally I spent whole weekends without speaking to a soul. But at the same time eating lots of pastra and watching T V and just sort of thinking and for me it was a very reflective time, a sort of exciting time, because New York is of course a very challenging and exciting place. And I have very mixed feelings about that period, but it certainly was a turning point in my life and one that I would want to mark.

Presenter22:13

George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, played by Michael Tilson Thomas with the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Presenter22:18

So the brain, Susan Greenfield, is not so much computer as chemical soup.

Dr Susan Greenfield22:20

It is not so.

Presenter22:23

You've put it.

Dr Susan Greenfield22:23

But you found it.

Presenter22:24

It's not surprising, then, that when you pop in an ecstasy tablet, the soup bubbles.

Dr Susan Greenfield22:29

Yeah, I think um soup is a word I've used, or chemical cauldron, but even that isn't really accurate because soup or cauldron implies just a stew, just a sort of random mixture of chemicals. It's not like that. Imagine very carefully balanced chemical seesaws and made of all these different types of chemicals that all interact, so as soon as one changes, it will change all the others in a great cascade.

Dr Susan Greenfield22:51

It's put together with huge precision.

Dr Susan Greenfield22:53

That at the same time is highly dynamic. So, unlike a computer, every moment your brain is different from it was a moment ago. The chemicals are changing and shifting in different parts, different tiny amounts are being squirted out in different regions, balancing that little seesaws, multi-way seesaws. Now, imagine. That sounds so frightening that you wouldn't put any kind of a brain. So, now here you go, welly booting in.

Presenter23:07

Not in my sounds.

Presenter23:09

Quite so.

Dr Susan Greenfield23:13

And you kind of marinate the whole thing.

Dr Susan Greenfield23:15

drench it in vast amounts of one chemical. Imagine what you're doing. So even though you're manipulating a tablet like X is manipulating a naturally occurring chemical in the brain, as indeed morphine does,

Dr Susan Greenfield23:27

Morphine hits the same targets, or heroin hits the same targets as a naturally occurring chemical does. But whereas n in the natural situation, very tiny amounts are released in particular areas, if you take something by mouth, you are not being selective to the areas, you are smashing in to you are disregarding the seesaws basically. It's like putting your foot on one of the seesaws. But not just that. I'm trying to think of a metaphor that's extreme enough, and it's very hard to find an extreme metaphor.

Presenter23:46

But

Presenter23:51

But what about when you swallow a paracetamol?

Dr Susan Greenfield23:54

Well, I mean to a certain extent one it's a payoff. As you know all drugs, even those prescribed by doctors of course have side effects and uh one doesn't swallow paracetamol every day of one's life. One does it when for a specific reason, if you if there's a dysfunction and you're prepared to put put up with side effects. For example, I'm I used to suffer from hay fever and in the old days um you'd feel sleepy if you took an antihistamine, but I would know this and I would have to do that and put up with the the dozy side effects because of the terrible effects of the hay fever. But just to follow the ecstasy tablet swallowing

Speaker 124:05

Is it

Presenter24:22

It's following

Dr Susan Greenfield24:22

Yeah.

Presenter24:22

You swallow that. You don't know quite what you're doing. But you're certainly disrupting this very finely balanced.

Dr Susan Greenfield24:25

Yeah, you're

Dr Susan Greenfield24:27

I feel very strongly and very sad when I hear about people taking ecstasy, because whereas taking medication prescribed by a doctor or indeed for something like hay fever, you're doing it because you really have a problem and you know the side effects and it's a a payoff and you try and minimize the amount you take. Someone that takes drugs people that take drugs recreationally.

Dr Susan Greenfield24:47

Have nothing no pain?

Dr Susan Greenfield24:50

No serious problem like that. And yet there they are, welly booting in and smashing into this lovely mind that they've grown. And this lovely mind that's been cultured over the years they've been growing up, that's their individualized brain. I'm a great one for the individual, as perhaps I've I've been reiterating overmuch, but my credo is the celebration of the individual and the development of the individual in life. And for someone to abrogate that, to try and swamp it and stifle it, I find just so very sad.

Dr Susan Greenfield25:15

Record number six. Is Edith Piaf is a heroine of mine, partly because here was a woman who stood up again and was an individual and led her own life, plowed her own furrow and inspired and excited lots of people. So for those reasons alone I w I would want to have her. Also I love those lovely R's that she rolls and I think no one sings like her.

Speaker 425:36

Oh yeah, oh yeah.

Speaker 425:53

Sacomo save

Presenter26:01

It is Pière and no je regrettor.

Presenter26:04

You have a research team of twelve, Susan. Is there drama in the lab? What's the sociology?

Speaker 126:06

Uh

Dr Susan Greenfield26:06

Yeah, yeah.

Dr Susan Greenfield26:10

One tends to think there was an old soap powder advert at one stage, and I won't say the name, I sort of can't advertise, but where it was a kind of Busby Berkeley advert. There was a load of women in white coats dancing down shiny stairs saying, I found the answer, I found the answer. It's not like that. No one ever goes screaming out saying, I found the answer. On the other hand, there is drama to a certain extent because you are really seeing people up against it. You're seeing people very excited sometimes, very depressed sometimes, usually depressed rather than excited, suddenly very hopeful, then suddenly having those hopes dashed, and you're on this real roller coaster of highs and lows. What people don't realize about doing science.

Dr Susan Greenfield26:45

is it's not just doing an ordinary job. It's not like

Dr Susan Greenfield26:48

The sort of thing that you could easily be replaced by. Each person does it in a highly personalized way. If you and I were to do an experiment, we'd probably design a different experiment, interpret it in a different way, and have a different order of priorities as to what to do next. So it's highly personalized, which means it means a lot to you. You're not just doing it for you're certainly not just doing it for the money or for security.

Presenter27:05

And this applies to men as well as to women too. It's quite an emotional discussion. It's a very emotional discussion, yes, certainly.

Dr Susan Greenfield27:06

Well, absolutely. It's quite an emotional business. It's a very emotional discussion. Yes, certainly. Certainly.

Presenter27:11

Let's have some more music.

Dr Susan Greenfield27:12

I'm obsessed by the period between the wars. I find it a very exciting time in terms of history and and sociology and so on. I love that slightly fragile, totally affected, rather delicate, whimsical mood that they had, because again, that's so different from what we have nowadays. And I wanted a piece of music that reflected that era and that whimsy. I also wanted a piece of music that reflected, again, the transience and the frailty of falling in love. You know, it's like when you fall in love with someone for the first time. It's a very delicate, frail, flimsy thing. So bringing those two things together, I chose Love is the sweetest thing.

Speaker 427:52

This is a tale that never will tire, This is the song without end.

Speaker 428:04

Just from the stage.

Speaker 428:07

The old is

Speaker 428:09

Yet the latest thing.

Speaker 428:12

I only hope that fate may bring.

Speaker 428:17

Love story to you.

Presenter28:19

Al Boli and Love is the Sweetest Thing with Ray Noble and the New Mayfair Orchestra, and that was recorded in 1932. Can you imagine yourself on a desert island, Susie?

Dr Susan Greenfield28:30

Okay.

Dr Susan Greenfield28:30

I can imagine myself on a desert island in the daytime, but not at the night time. Um during the day I like to contract into being by myself and just having time to think. Because if you're a scientist, usually it's like being in the railway station, the phones are ringing and people are bustling in and out, and in a sense it's good that it should be like that. It should be a kind of beehive.

Dr Susan Greenfield28:47

At the same time, if you want to try and think things through, you need to distance yourself. And I like contracting into solitude. I don't like having it imposed on me, as it was in New York, but I do like.

Dr Susan Greenfield28:56

Going down to my college room and sitting there with all my books. But you'd be okay at snaring the rats or the rabbits, because you're not squeamish about all that. No, no, and then.

Dr Susan Greenfield29:04

I enjoy making things happen. I enjoy doing things. Um I'm not very good at just sitting still. I'm a sort of I'm one of these A-type personalities, you know, these A-type personalities who are are destined to have coroneries. And when I did the test for that and they said, you know, if you get more than five out of ten, you're A-type, and of course I got ten out of ten and

Dr Susan Greenfield29:19

It's things like, you know, do you finish people's words for them? Do you speak quickly? You know, do you get irritated waiting in queues? And, you know, I ticked all those things, and I know I'm a sort of manic type.

Presenter29:27

And have you tried to change, therefore

Dr Susan Greenfield29:28

No, not really, I quite no,'cause I I like that's the problem with V A types. We're proud of the fact that we're hyperpunctual and um in a supermarket queue, you won't just look at the length of the queue, you'll try and assess the efficiency of the operator and things like this. So I think I'd spend most of my time trying to do things. Even if it was just dancing, I'd be doing that a lot with all this music.

Speaker 129:43

It was

Dr Susan Greenfield29:46

Uh well despite the fact that I wasn't ever going to dance as a profession, I do love dancing enormously and I still do, although have sadly less chance to do so now. But I guarantee if this is played, however tired, with the opening bars, I'm there on the floor and I would defy anyone not to be.

Speaker 430:04

Be yourself that you love someone else instead of you the great fan

Speaker 430:15

That much longer would you be mad?

Speaker 430:19

Oh, you the great one

Speaker 430:23

And I'm just about to lose my mind.

Presenter30:30

Marvin Gaye and I heard it through the grapevine.

Dr Susan Greenfield30:32

So if you could only take one of those records, Susan. That really is hard.

Dr Susan Greenfield30:36

I'll whittle it down to two and then to one. It's a choice, I think, between I Heard It Through the Grapevine and Beethoven.

Dr Susan Greenfield30:44

I think it would probably have to be Beethoven, even though I couldn't dance as easily to it as the Marvin Gates, simply because it is so complex and so rich.

Dr Susan Greenfield30:53

What about your book? The book is The Leopard, which is a translation from the Italian, Il Guattapado, which I've never read in the original, sadly, because I don't speak Italian, by Giuseppe De Lampedusa. Why do you want that?

Dr Susan Greenfield31:04

That's oh, I've I've bought about twenty copies of this book and I and I I always give it away to people, which is why I've bought twenty copies. It's about Sicily in the last century.

Dr Susan Greenfield31:13

And it's set in one generation. It was written by someone who was dying.

Dr Susan Greenfield31:17

And yet at the same time there's again this optimism and yet cynicism about death.

Dr Susan Greenfield31:21

Um basically um death is the ultimate thing we have to come to terms with and and think about. And I I think perhaps a day doesn't go by without I'm I'm aware of my own mortality in some way. Do you think about the dying or the de or the being dead? Being dead.

Presenter31:25

I I I think

Presenter31:29

Do you think

Dr Susan Greenfield31:33

The dying doesn't worry me, it's the being dead, which makes me want to do a lot now. I think that perhaps accounts for my type apersonality. I'm I'm aware very much of my immortality and indeed of my friends and and family. What about your luxury? The luxuries is a problem because many things that used to be luxuries are now necessities. Things like mascara, I'm afraid of such necessities they wouldn't count. Um and being someone who adores eating.

Dr Susan Greenfield31:52

Um, I finally settled on on food because I'm also a lousy cook, so

Dr Susan Greenfield31:56

I'd need, therefore, an incessant supply of my favourite food, which is curry.

Dr Susan Greenfield31:59

So um endless curry I think is

Presenter31:59

Um

Presenter32:00

Susan Greenfield, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert idea. Thank you.

Dr Susan Greenfield32:03

Thank you.

Speaker 132:11

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