Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Pioneering brain scientist, Professor of Pharmacology at Oxford, first woman to give the Royal Institution Christmas lectures, and ambassador for science and wo
On the island
Eight records
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.
Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125 'Choral': Ode to JoyFavourite
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 BLAST OF OPTIMISM
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.
Richard Beymer and Natalie Wood
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.
Michael Tilson Thomas and the Los Angeles Philharmonic
I was very lonely in New York. This was in the early 80s. It was way before I was married. 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.
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.
Al Bowlly with Ray Noble and the New Mayfair Orchestra
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.
I Heard It Through the Grapevine
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.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:30What do you mean by that, Susan, that women are only taken seriously in science at a certain level?
I think that when you're Foley Junior … You're not a threat to anyone, and so therefore you fit into the order of things quite well. 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. … I think people feel uncomfortable with women who um tend to be assertive. They use words like strident. … Or bossy. … I think it's particularly marked in academic science.
Presenter asks
2:38Is the male brain bigger than the female brain?
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 … 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.
Presenter asks
5:14Why the brain specifically?
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. … is absolutely the fact that the brain generates consciousness, absolutely without question. 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.
The keepsakes
The book
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
I've bought about twenty copies of this book and I always give it away to people... It's about Sicily in the last century... It was written by someone who was dying... and yet at the same time there's again this optimism and yet cynicism about death.
Presenter asks
8:01Why do you say that the comparison with a computer is not a good one for the brain?
For me, it the c the analogy of the computer, I … 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 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. 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.
Presenter asks
14:42Was that [cutting up brains] when your interest in the brain first began?
My interest in the mind began when I was very young. Um my mum said, Um oh I s when I see red 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. 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
Presenter asks
18:37What progress have you made [in researching Parkinson's disease]?
Well 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. … 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?
“the individual triumphs over gender, which is one of the themes of my life.”
“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.”
“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.”