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    <title><![CDATA[All in the Mind]]></title>
    <description><![CDATA[All In The Mind is Radio National's weekly foray into the mental universe, the mind, brain and behaviour - everything from addiction to artificial intelligence.]]></description>
    <link>http://abc.net.au/rn/allinthemind/</link>
    <copyright>Australian Broadcasting Corporation</copyright>
    <language>en</language>
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      <title><![CDATA[All in the Mind]]></title>
      <link>http://abc.net.au/rn/allinthemind/</link>
    </image>
    <itunes:author>ABC Radio National</itunes:author>
    <itunes:summary><![CDATA[All In The Mind is Radio National's weekly foray into the mental universe, the mind, brain and behaviour - everything from addiction to artificial intelligence.]]></itunes:summary>
    <itunes:image href="http://abc.net.au/rn/podcast/feeds/image/itunes/aim_600.jpg"/>
    <itunes:category text="Science &amp; Medicine"/>
    <itunes:category text="Health"/>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[2008-11-22 Extraordinary Cases in psychology: Part 2 of 4 - The wild boy of Aveyron ]]></title>
      <description><![CDATA[In 1800, a young boy emerged from the woods of the Aveyron District in France, naked and wild. He became a scientific enigma to influential psychologist Dr Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard, and redefined the nature vs. nurture debate. His legacy lives on today, especially in the Montessori approach to learning. NB: The All in the Mind podcast edition is a different program from the broadcast edition this week for copyright reasons. And, the streaming audio is on the BBC's website here.]]></description>
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      <pubDate>Sat, 22 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +1000</pubDate>
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      <itunes:author>ABC Radio National</itunes:author>
      <itunes:summary><![CDATA[In 1800, a young boy emerged from the woods of the Aveyron District in France, naked and wild. He became a scientific enigma to influential psychologist Dr Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard, and redefined the nature vs. nurture debate. His legacy lives on today, especially in the Montessori approach to learning. NB: The All in the Mind podcast edition is a different program from the broadcast edition this week for copyright reasons. And, the streaming audio is on the BBC's website here.


 TRANSCRIPT: NOTE - we cannot bring you the podcast or transcript of this series because it comes from the BBC and the ABC does not hold copyright.

This week's podcast comes from All in the Mind archives instead. Details and transcript are below.

You can hear the BBC series again on their website as streaming audio. The link to that is also below.]]></itunes:summary>
      <itunes:duration>28:02</itunes:duration>
      <itunes:explicit/>
      <itunes:keywords><![CDATA[science and technology,social sciences,community and society,youth,family and children,education]]></itunes:keywords>
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    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[2008-11-15 Extraordinary Cases in psychology: Part 1 of 4 - The story of Kitty Genovese (broadcast not podcast only) ]]></title>
      <description><![CDATA[When a young woman, Kitty Genovese was brutally killed in a prolonged attack in New York in 1964, not one of 38 witnesses called for help until too late. The case led to the naming of the phenomenon known as the Bystander Effect. The first of four compelling programs on influential cases in the history of psychology. NB: The All in the Mind podcast edition is a different program from the broadcast edition this week for copyright reasons. And, the streaming audio is on the BBC's website here.

Details below.]]></description>
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      <pubDate>Sat, 15 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +1000</pubDate>
      <guid isPermaLink="false">99a6c705f9590e830150d9a6cd0c905b</guid>
      <itunes:author>ABC Radio National</itunes:author>
      <itunes:summary><![CDATA[When a young woman, Kitty Genovese was brutally killed in a prolonged attack in New York in 1964, not one of 38 witnesses called for help until too late. The case led to the naming of the phenomenon known as the Bystander Effect. The first of four compelling programs on influential cases in the history of psychology. NB: The All in the Mind podcast edition is a different program from the broadcast edition this week for copyright reasons. And, the streaming audio is on the BBC's website here.

Details below.


 TRANSCRIPT: NOTE - we cannot bring you the podcast or transcript of this series because it comes from the BBC and the ABC does not hold copyright.

This week's podcast comes from All in the Mind archives instead. Details and transcript are below.

You can hear the BBC series again on their website as streaming audio. The link to that is also below.]]></itunes:summary>
      <itunes:duration>29:04</itunes:duration>
      <itunes:explicit/>
      <itunes:keywords><![CDATA[science and technology,research,health,medical history,law,crime and justice,mental health]]></itunes:keywords>
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    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[2008-11-08 The voices within... ]]></title>
      <description><![CDATA[Many people hear voices inside their head -- some are diagnosed with schizophrenia, others live privately with the experience. International leaders in the Hearing Voices Network gather in Australia this week, controversially challenging the belief that voices are a pathological symptom without psychological meaning. They argue people can find it therapeutic to 'dialogue' with the voices. Meet three clinicians pushing the boundaries.]]></description>
      <link>http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/current/audioonly/aim_20081108.mp3</link>
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      <pubDate>Sat, 08 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +1000</pubDate>
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      <itunes:author>ABC Radio National</itunes:author>
      <itunes:summary><![CDATA[Many people hear voices inside their head -- some are diagnosed with schizophrenia, others live privately with the experience. International leaders in the Hearing Voices Network gather in Australia this week, controversially challenging the belief that voices are a pathological symptom without psychological meaning. They argue people can find it therapeutic to 'dialogue' with the voices. Meet three clinicians pushing the boundaries.


 TRANSCRIPT: Natasha Mitchell:  Well itīs that voice in your head again; itīs letting you know youīre tuned to All in the Mind, itīs saying this is ABC Radio National and it wants you to feel welcomed and she says her name is Natasha Mitchell.  Now some of us experience relatively benign voices in their head like this one but, for others, they can be a constant and disabling torment.

Rufus May:   I think thereīs a big cultural fear of voice hearing in the west. If you go to more traditional cultures voice hearing is a much more accepted experience and generally people donīt have a problem when they start hearing voices because thereīs a whole wealth of wisdom about how to live with voices. If you go to rural India or parts of Africa 40% or 50% of the population will hear voices and itīs not seen as a problem. I think in our culture itīs a very taboo experience and so what weīre trying to do is create understanding about -- these are experiences that up to 10% of the population can have, you can learn to live with the experiences, you need a safe trusting allies to talk to about that experience, and you can build up your confidence and courage and not be a victim of those experiences and learn from them.

Natasha Mitchell:  Dr Rufus May is a clinical psychologist with the National Health Service in Bradford in the UK. For some he takes an unorthodox approach, as youīll hear. It stems from his own experience of being hospitalised in a psych ward as an 18-year-old.

Madness, he provocatively says, is when people choose to stop trying to understand you. 

Dr May and other leading figures in the international Hearing Voices Network gathered at the Recovery from Psychosis conference held in Perth this week. Controversially theyīre challenging the mainstream medical orthodoxy that voices are a pathological symptom of schizophrenia with little psychological sense or meaning. There is a real risk here of course of romanticising what can be a frightening experience for people at the height of psychosis. But my guests today are three people pushing the boundaries and encouraging people to enter a therapeutic dialogue with the voices in their head as part of their recovery process.

Dr Sandra Escher is co-founder of the Hearing Voices Movement with her long time colleague at the University of Maastricht, Professor Marius Romme, and theyīve penned a book called Making Sense of Voices - A guide for professions who work with voice hearers.

And Dr Dirk Corstens is a social psychiatrist and psychotherapist in Maastricht who, with Sandra, Rufus and others, has developed a therapeutic approach to working with voices. Dr Rufus May, Dr Dirk Corstens and Dr Sandra Escher, welcome to Australia, thanks for joining us on ABC Radio National.

Dr Sandra Escher youīre a co-founder of whatīs called an international movement, really, of the Hearing Voices Movement. What prompted the formation of that movement, over 20 years ago now?

Sandra Escher:  Well actually it was a patient that Professor Romme had, I worked together with Professor Romme and this patient didnīt agree with the way he treated her. He didnīt want to talk about her voices and it took her nearly two years to persuade him to take a different attitude and from that way on we started to work. We found that it was revealing and we got a lot of contact from people who were so happy to talk about the voices and we started to develop a way to approach it, to make sense to the experience.

Natasha Mitchell:  I mean 20 years ago this was a direct challenge to mainstream medicineīs thinking about the origin and meaning of voices, they are called auditory hallucinations in clinical speak. I mean it still is a challenge as you point out -- what was the core challenge at the beginning?

Sandra Escher:  To let people accept that the voices were real and that you could use the experience to build up a knowledge and to use it in therapy if needed. Because 2% of normal people hear voices and they donīt need therapy but the people who need therapy we learned that their voices should be used. What is important is that people started to develop themselves; voices stop development and if they learn to have a different attitude they start to develop themselves again.

Natasha Mitchell:  Rufus May I want to come to your experience in just a moment but what was the challenge that the Hearing Voices Movement presented to mainstream medicine or psychiatry?

Rufus May:   Well hearing voices has always been seen as a symptom of schizophrenia, a biological disease and that the experience in the last 100 years has been seen as a meaningless thing that must be stopped or silenced with strong medication. And what the Hearing Voices Movement was saying was no, actually these experiences can be meaningful, they can be messages about the personīs life, you can actually learn from them. Youīve got to accept them and work with them rather than work against them. So it was a completely different way of thinking really to sort of invite the voices in rather than try and push them away or silence them with numbing levels of medication. Because medication can be helpful in calming emotions down in the short term but if youīre just using it as a cosh itīs not going to be helpful, itīs going to slow the person down and not allow them to develop and learn from their experiences.

Natasha Mitchell:  But Rufus and perhaps to you all on what basis do you claim that we should listen to the content of voices as a meaningful and interpretable experience rather than a symptom of say schizophrenia?

Sandra Escher:  We learn that over years, I think I have interviewed about 350 people hearing voices, through the interview they learned the message of the voices so itīs the people who give the proof. It helps them to learn to live their lives again as they wanted it. People who are afraid of this approach they see it as that we are very much against the medical model but what we do is challenge the medical model to take one step further.

Rufus May:  What Marius Romme and Sandra Escher did was interview voice hearers and they compared people who were coping with the experience with people who werenīt coping. And people who werenīt coping very often had some kind of understanding with their voices, they were able to set limits for their voices, they were talking to their voices and the people who werenīt coping were more afraid of their voices, didnīt want to talk about the experience. And weīve learned over the last 20 years with self hel-groups how people can move from that group that are not coping to the group that are coping by learning to talk about their experiences, have a dialogue, confront the experience. 

Sandra Escher:  You know what the problem is in psychiatry mostly people come who canīt cope, so psychiatrists only meet people who are powerless and all their knowledge is based on a small group that canīt cope.

Natasha Mitchell:  You really speak, and Iīm interested in how you conceive of the voices in your own work because you really speak of them as a rational player. What do you think voices actually are?

Rufus May:   One way to describe them is sub-personalities; they might be representing difficult relationships a person has had in the past, so if youīve had a really strict headmaster who caned you a lot, you might hear his voice. Another way to describe them is as emotions, they might be representing emotions that youīve cut yourself off from because they are too painful to look at. Another way to look at them is as kind of dream beings, beings from the unconscious who are telling us, have got messages about our emotions. There are different ways to describe voices but I would see them as part of our psychology.

Natasha Mitchell:  You come to this discussion with your own experience and some have described your approach now as a fairly maverick approach as a clinical psychologist. But take us back to your own experience at age 18 in 1986 -- what happened to you?

Rufus May:   Well I'd had some difficult adolescent years, I wasnīt very happy at school, my mother had been quite ill, and then about 18 after my first girlfriend left me, instead of getting depressed I sort of escaped into a fantasy world where I was a spy. I had lots of experiences like the radio talking to me, giving me special messages, and developed a lot of ideas about being involved in a battle between good and evil. And those ideas eventually became quite overwhelming and I wasnīt sleeping and I got quite anxious, and obviously my family thought youīre behaving very strangely. So they asked for help and I ended up getting hospitalised and given a diagnosis of schizophrenia and given strong medication.

So that was my initiation into the world of mental health, and what I found was that people werenīt listening to my experiences, they were just trying to sort of silence them with medication.

Natasha Mitchell:  What was that experience of being hospitalised at 18 like?

Rufus May:   It was very frightening. It was frightening for a lot of my friends and they didnīt want to come and see me. It was a real sense of powerlessness having your freedom taken away from you so you werenīt allowed to leave. But no one was actually trying to sit with you and make sense of what was going on, you were just being observed. So you felt alienated, the best I could do was try and survive so I developed quite a mad laugh to make myself seem more dangerous than I was because other people seemed quite dangerous in there because they were older than me and bigger, and stronger, and tougher. So I pretended to be more mad that I was to get by, which was great for surviving in hospital but wasnīt very good for adjusting back to community living, or trying to get a job. So I was caught a bit in the system for a while.

Natasha Mitchell:  Did you hear voices?

Rufus May:   I did hear voices from the TV and radio speaking to me, and reflecting my thoughts, but I didnīt hear disembodied voices that were constantly talking to me like many people I helped.

Natasha Mitchell:  But what you were experiencing were for psychiatrists were a classic symptom of schizophrenia; delusions, a sense that objects were talking to you, have messages just for you. And yet you today think very differently about that diagnosis you received, donīt you?

Rufus May:   Yeah, well I think it was one way of coping with the depressing situation. I just didnīt find it helpful to be told I had a biological disease; Iīd always have to take medication. I just believed that having had some experiences could learn from them, they could become a wit source of wisdom not something to be ashamed of and I believed that I could recover, get on with my life. And I developed a mission really to get back into the mental health system. So I donīt think I had schizophrenia, I donīt think anyone has schizophrenia, I think people who have unusual experiences that are kind of a dissociative reactions to difficult life experiences. So I think schizophrenia is a bit of a - creates misunderstandings. Thereīs a whole movement to try and get rid of the label of schizophrenia.

Sandra Escher:  And also the message thatīs given, lifelong illness, lifelong medication.

Rufus May:   Yeah, because you can become a schizophrenic, it can become a lifelong role.

Natasha Mitchell:  I mean itīs a very radical thing youīre saying for the mainstream, that schizophrenia is in effect a non-existent entity and yet thereīs a huge body of research in neurobiology and genetics, in psychiatry dedicated to probing, to understanding what many would consider as a heritable biological illness.

Sandra Escher:  There you say something thatīs also not true, itīs not heritable, they are doing research but they havenīt proven it yet.

Rufus May:   The British Psychological Society produced a report back in 2000 with all the top psychologists contributing to that report, and back then they were saying we need to move away from the diagnosis of schizophrenia. If you carefully look at the scientific evidence it doesnīt tell us anything definite about the cause of peopleīs experiences, the content of their experiences or the outcome -- the three things the diagnosis should tell you about. so in England, in many academic circles itīs not seen as radical to not use schizophrenia and the international...


Sandra Escher:  The Americans are move fond of it.

Rufus May:   Yes, the countryīs more influenced by a drug company.

Sandra Escher:  Yes.

Natasha Mitchell:  Drs Rufus May, Sandra Escher and Dirk Corstens are my guests today -- in Australia this week for the Recovery from Psychosis conference in Perth; all key figures in whatīs called the Hearing Voices Network, an international collective of people who hear voices, or are researchers and clinicians, who believe that these voices are meaningful, not simply medical symptoms to be medicated away.

Itīs a position many argue is perhaps irresponsible; others find it a relief. This is All in the Mind on ABC Radio National, going global on Radio Australia and as podcast with me Natasha Mitchell.

Dr Dirk Corstens can I come to you. Together with Dr Rufus May youīve developed a therapeutic approach that involves people dialoguing with the voices in their head -- whatīs the principle here?

Dirk Corstens:  The principle is that we consist of several sub-personalities and from that on we discovered we could talk with these voices and we found out that most voices we talk with display whole characteristics of personalities, of knowledge that people contain about their life history. Why these voices came in our perspective, many voices try to protect peopleīs emotions for in their lives dangerous situations.

Natasha Mitchell:  Dirk, you talk about working with people to explore the motives of the voices and also about developing a more productive relationship between the voices and the voice hearer. It really sounds like youīre treating the voices as a real entity, almost another person.

Dirk Corstens:  Yeah, thatīs right. When I talk to voice hearers I talk to several persons and these voices they interfere in our communication and they have their own opinions and things they want.

Rufus May:   Often living with voices is like living with a wife or a husband that you donīt get on with. Itīs a bit like marriage in the 1950s.

Dirk Corstens:  Itīs like being married without divorce as an option.

Rufus May:   So you need to learn how to make peace with that partner.

Natasha Mitchell:  Dirk take us then inside a session where youīre getting someone to dialogue with a voice -- because you know thereīs a very real risk of romanticising the experience of internal voices. I mean people with schizophrenia or with a diagnosis of schizophrenia experience these voices as often vicious, constant, intensely disabling; they can tell a person to harm themselves, to harm other people, that they are worthless -- itīs an intensely disabling and unsettling experience. So Dirk how do you work with that situation?

Dirk Corstens:  Well one good example is that -- letīs call him Fred -- came to me and he heard one voice telling him to kill himself, to jump before a train. When I just had a conversation with this voice and this voice started very angry also at me, but after a while told me that Fred was a very anxious guy. And this voice wanted Fred to stand up for himself, become stronger and more forceful. So in this conversation I asked this voice if he thought that his attitude towards Fred helped or not. And he said no, it doesnīt help because Fred is more anxious instead of more stronger. We discussed about how this voice could help Fred to become stronger.

Natasha Mitchell:  You are actually sitting down with a person and you are talking to both that person and their representations of the voices in their head with they are experiencing during the session.

Sandra Escher:  But I have one thing to say, you assume that all voices are negative about 45% of the voice hearers also hear positive voices and thatīs one of the problems. The media mostly talk about only about aggressive, negative voices.

Natasha Mitchell:  Well itīs not just the media talks about this; I mean Iīve met lots of people with schizophrenia who have terrible experiences of the voice talking in their head.

Sandra Escher:  Yes, but itīs more diverse than you say.

Rufus May:   But weīre not glamorising the experience we teach people to interpret the voices symbolically so if a voice is telling someone to hurt someone else we look at whatīs the symbolic meaning of that, are you angry about something, do you need to learn assertiveness, to stick up for your rights more. Obviously not to literally respond to the voices and do what the voices are saying. So we are teaching people to -- a bit like dream analysis, if you have a nightmare itīs telling you about some repressed fear or anger and you need to process that. So thatīs what weīre doing by helping people face those difficult voices.

Natasha Mitchell:  Rufus are you actually presenting an overlay, a set of symbols in the way that a Freudian or Jungian analyst might do, or are you letting the person make their own meaning of the voices. Whatīs the theoretical principle here?

Rufus May:   Well weīre doing it together, so if somebodyīs got a voice that bullies them and tells them what to do I would suggest to the person, well have you ever been bullied, letīs talk about that. Itīs common sense really, but itīs working together.

Dirk Corstens:  And we donīt start immediately relating to the voice itself. First we want to learn to know the person and his or her history. And we found that often in 30% the voices relate to what happened in peopleīs life history so in our opinion these voices are reactions at things that are happening in peopleīs lives.

Natasha Mitchell:  What sorts of experiences, Dirk, and you certainly use an interesting interviewing instrument, donīt you, thatīs a little different from what a psychiatrist might generally use when they are sitting down with a client.

Dirk Corstens:  Yeah, so at the interview itīs about characteristics of the voices, who are they, do they have a name, many voices have a name; does the voice resemble somebody you have known or know. We ask for the characteristics of the voices, what are they telling you, how do they sound, do they yell or do they whisper. And the most important thing I think is when did the voice start? And often we find that voices started in a moment in their lives when people were overwhelmed by emotions. Voices in our opinion are dealing with emotions that the person himself canīt cope with and we try to change the relationship between voice and voice hearer.

Natasha Mitchell:  Do you want to eliminate the voices? Because for many people thatīs what they want to do; they want to have them removed.

Dirk Corstens:  But thatīs an illusion, thatīs a dream. That's I think the critical point about our discussion with medical model oriented psychiatry, they want to silence voices but with the medication only a part of voice hearers voices are silenced. Only one third of the people hearing voices -- our hospitals are full of people who hear voices, who still hear voices although they get huge doses of medication.

Natasha Mitchell:  Rufus May, do you advocate that people donīt take medications so that you can work with them with their voices?

Rufus May:   Thatīs an informed choice that the person makes. They can choose to use medication or not and Iīll support them with both choices.

Natasha Mitchell:  I guess the one risk here is that people hearing your own story -- and you did manage to get off medication -- that people might feel that if they are benefiting from medication or they are feeling overpowered by their voices that somehow they are a failure if they elect to take medication and not work with the voices?

Rufus May:   You can do both, you can take medication and work with your voices, so the two arenīt in opposition to each other. But where somebody thinks that the benefits of not taking medication may outweigh the benefits of taking medication because sometimes there are big health risks with taking medication over a long period -- the problems of weight gain, for example, with some of the new antipsychotics and people want to try weaning themselves off them, Iīll support that. But itīs not to say that itīs a failure if you donīt manage to stop taking medication, itīs about lifestyle choice and we all use substances and different activities to moderate our emotions and thoughts. I just want people to have more choice about how they do that, even with voice hearing or unusual beliefs.

Natasha Mitchell:  Your suggestion is that some people can in fact learn to quite comfortably live with the presence of voices.

Rufus May:   Weīre all saying that.

Natasha Mitchell:  How so?

Rufus May:   Weīve all just got lots of experience, we know hundreds of people doing that, living with voice hearing, not taking medication and it can be done.

Dirk Corstens:  And also research shows that only a minority of voice hearers become our patients and the majority of voice hearers can cope with their voices.

Natasha Mitchell:  Dr Sandra Escher, the focus of some of your work and research interest is in fact working with children and their experience of hearing voices. Is that a common experience for children? 

Sandra Escher:  Thereīs a taboo on voice hearing, so itīs difficult to say how many, but some research shows about 8% of the children hear voices and only a small percentage needs care. About 85% of the children started to hear voices after some traumatic event or circumstances they couldnīt cope with.

Natasha Mitchell:  What sorts of events and traumas might trigger voices in young children -- because youīve interviewed children as young as 8 or 9 who have experienced voices.

Sandra Escher:  Yes, about a third of them had problems in school with the capacity to learn. They found the school too difficult, they couldnīt cope with that. Thereīs a group of 19 children started to hear voices in grieving process when their grandmother died or a friend died and there are some children who started to hear voices in a long physical illness. Divorce -- there were 6 children who started to hear voices in the divorce process.

Natasha Mitchell:  This is in a sample of 80 children that you studied some years ago.

Sandra Escher:  Yes.

Natasha Mitchell:  Weīre talking about something quite different to say the internal dialogue that some small children have with an imaginary friend, arenīt we?

Sandra Escher:  Yes, therefore my research started with children from 8 years on because with 8 years a child must be able to make a distinction between fantasy and reality.

Natasha Mitchell:  What were you trying to investigate with them, this group of 80 children that you looked at who were experiencing voices?

Sandra Escher:  What we wanted to see if it was a continuous phenomenon because the idea is that once hearing voices you are always hear voices and 60% of the children lost the voices within the three year research period. Thatīs one of the things. The thing is they have no language for it so they first have to develop a language for their experiences. We saw that if the children learnt to cope with the problems also the voices changed, they learned best to cope with emotions related to problems. And what we saw that was very important that we normalised the experience. That helped parents also to be able to talk with the children about the experiences and learned to find ways to cope with it.

Natasha Mitchell:  Because this is very distressing for parents isnīt it.

Sandra Escher:  What I mostly do when I get in contact with parents I say hey, calm down because if you are afraid, your anxiety is going to your child, so donīt make it worse.

Natasha Mitchell:  Your suggestion is that voices in children donīt always warrant a diagnosis of schizophrenia?

Sandra Escher:  Oh no, definitely not, mostly not. Donīt get over-excited, donīt start on medication immediately, go and look at what the problems are.

Rufus May:   The trouble with giving a young person a diagnosis of schizophrenia is that they can often then give up on the idea that they can live a full life, and voices can often get more scary once people are given a diagnosis of schizophrenia because the person is fearing the experience more, and voices are responding to that.

Sandra Escher:  I totally agree, you take away hope and I think this is one of the things that people need -- hope. All the stories of people that we met prove that you can give hope.

Natasha Mitchell:  I guess stories are one thing, but people would be demanding good clinical evidence here, wouldnīt they Rufus, and where are the randomised placebo-controlled clinical trials, whereīs the evidence that this therapeutic paradigm has good outcomes?

Rufus May:   Well thereīs a lot of evidence for psychological therapies working with psychosis and we're starting to develop research into the approaches weīre talking about. But obviously people are really benefiting from them already within self help groups. They are difficult to research because by their very nature they are very independent, they donīt like researchers coming in, a bit like Alcoholics Anonymous groups wouldnīt like researchers coming in and studying them.  Thereīs a kind of lived experience evidence base thatīs emerging thatīs more about emancipation than about an evidence based from randomised control trials. Because randomised control trials were designed to measure drugs, not to measure peopleīs holistic recoveries.

Natasha Mitchell:  Rufus I have to ask, I mean some people have considered your own approach with clients or patients or people in need as quite unorthodox, quite maverick and even dangerous.

Rufus May:   That was a journalist who said that.

Natasha Mitchell:  I wonder though, is it suitable for everyone to dialogue with their voices in the way that youīre advocating and developing -- or are some people simply not suited to this.

Rufus May:   Dialoguing only works with people who hear voices that respond to them. Some voices will refuse to actually acknowledge the person and respond to their thoughts, so they will carry on a commentary but not have an actual dialogue with the person. So you canīt, itīs very difficult to get a dialogue with voices like that so you need other approaches like distraction, or the person building up their self-esteem so they are not bothered by these voices. But I find my approach is very popular amongst people I work with in Bradford. And maverick, the original maverick, he refused to brand his cattle, so he was independent minded so I donīt mind that side of being maverick as long as Iīm not considered reckless. I think my approach is very safe because itīs all based on building good relationships with the people I work with.

Natasha Mitchell:  People are scared of this approach though arenīt they, family members will say that they experience a lot of fear and a lot of distress with family members electing not to take their medication and experiencing psychotic symptoms that are very distressing to themselves and their family. So thereīs a lot of risk in this conversation for people isnīt there?

Sandra Escher:  I found that therapists are more afraid than the people themselves.

Rufus May:   Yeah, biological psychiatrists are very afraid of this approach and so are drug companies because they want to just treat it in one way. We are saying we need to have a much more holistic approach.

Dirk Corstens:  We donīt advise people to stop their medication. We try to find other ways but many patients still take their medication and can cope with their voices.

Sandra Escher:  No there are people who are forbidden -- if you talk about your voices in hospital and they give you more medication you stop talking about your voices but it doesnīt mean that the voices are away, the voices are still in your head. So what we do is get in the open with it and learn about it.

Rufus May:   The scary thing is when youīre isolated with an experience, if youīve got friends and family who you can talk to about the experience and share ideas about ways to cope with it, half the problem is gone already.

Natasha Mitchell:  Well itīs difficult for us to bring out the nuances and complexities of this whole discussion in just a half-hour program. I do appreciate you coming on the show Sandra Escher, Dirk Corstens and Rufus May, thank you for joining me on All in the Mind.

All: Thank you very much.

Natasha Mitchell:  And my guests with some radical words for some from their collaborative work Dr Dirk Corstens is a psychotherapist from Maastricht, Professor Rufus May a clinical psychologist from West Yorkshire and Dr Sandra Escher co-founder of the Hearing Voices Movement sheīs based at the University of Maastricht. And Iīve popped links and more info up on our website abc.net.au/rn/allinthemind and this being a topic that always divides, I fully expect your comments in my All in the Mind blog too, always welcome or via email on our website which is where youīll also find the downloadable audio and transcript. 

Thanks to producer Kyla Brettle, studio engineer Russell Thompson, Iīm Natasha Mitchell. Next week kicking off a series with curious tales from the history vaults of psychology -- youīll love it. Catch you then.]]></itunes:summary>
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      <title><![CDATA[2008-11-01 Future mind: are computers radically changing the way we think? ]]></title>
      <description><![CDATA[We live in a world mediated by flickering screens. But do 'people of the screen' think fundamentally differently to 'people of the book'? What will the brain look like in generations to come? Eminent neuroscientist Baroness Susan Greenfield paints an apocalyptic picture of an identity lost, and cognition fundamentally compromised, forever stuck in the sensory chaos of early childhood.]]></description>
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      <pubDate>Sat, 01 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +1000</pubDate>
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      <itunes:author>ABC Radio National</itunes:author>
      <itunes:summary><![CDATA[We live in a world mediated by flickering screens. But do 'people of the screen' think fundamentally differently to 'people of the book'? What will the brain look like in generations to come? Eminent neuroscientist Baroness Susan Greenfield paints an apocalyptic picture of an identity lost, and cognition fundamentally compromised, forever stuck in the sensory chaos of early childhood.


 TRANSCRIPT: Natasha Mitchell: Well if youīre anything like me, computers have come to augment the way you think, write, interact with the world, socialise, you name it, they are psychologically ubiquitous. Hello, Natasha Mitchell with you this is All in the Mind on ABC Radio National. Welcome.

When my home computer died recently I felt digitally and cognitively amputated, and then quietly relieved. The daily glare into a screen at a desk or in the palm has become a 24/7 reality for many of us. The question is, what will future generations and their brains look like as this digital age frames human evolution.

Weīre coming today from the gorgeous art deco splendour of the Capri Theatre in Adelaide. And my guest is neuroscientist Baroness Professor Susan Greenfield, sheīs splitting at the seams with ideas, so much so itīs hard to get a word in!

She's director of the Oxford Centre for the Science of the Mind, and Susanīs latest book, which you might have heard mention of earlier on Radio National, is called ID: The Search for Identity in the 21st Century. Itīs really a warning beacon about the future of our heads. Susan is also director of the Royal Institution, or RI, of Great Britain and was the inspiration behind this yearīs launch of RI Australia with its headquarters in Adelaide, where she was a Thinker in Residence.

Which is why the premier of South Australia, the Honourable Mike Rann was there to introduce the event and kicked off with an old chestnut of a question.

Mike Rann: So Iīm going to introduce Susan Greenfield by posing the first question, and that is, can she tell us tonight what is the difference between the brain and the mind -- and along the way talk about the concept of self, of soul and also define what spirit is? Will you please welcome a great friend of South Australia, our Emeritus Thinker in Residence Baroness Susan Greenfield.

Susan Greenfield: Thank you Premier Rann, oh these easy questions people ask.

Natasha Mitchell: We should just cut straight to the chase I think, letīs ask that question, what is the difference between the brain and the mind? I mean itīs an age old question.

Susan Greenfield: It is, well letīs start with the easy one brain, I think we all know what that is, itīs the sludgy thing that you can get under your finger nails thatīs normally between your ears. The mind I think the fact that we use the two words means that theyīre not interchangeable, you know, you donīt say Iīm going to eat some mind now do you? Anyway for me the exciting thing is the personalisation of the brain. When we talk about mind normally itīs usually emphasising the personal qualities, broadening your mind, developing your mind and the basis for this if I can only have two seconds to have the fastest neuroscience course in the country taking about two seconds, people donīt necessarily realise just how sensitive your brain is to the environment and how changeable it is. Itīs what we call plasticity in neuroscience, meaning your brain is very impressionable. So even if youīre a clone, an identical twin, youīll have a unique brain. 

Now the uniqueness comes as follows: that youīre born with pretty much all the brain cells you will have but the growth of the connections between the brain accounts for growth of the brain after birth and itīs these connections that rather like when you exercise your body different muscles will prosper and strengthen the more you activate them and use them. So it is with brain connections and the more connections that are used, the stronger they will become and others will die off or atrophy or fall into disuse. The famous example of this is London taxi drivers who have a burden on their working memory because they have to navigate the streets of London, and I think a really interesting study showing that an area of the brain relating to memory on scans is bigger in London taxi drivers than in other people. 

Natasha Mitchell: So that process of becoming a mind emerging from a brain is highly individualised.

Susan Greenfield: Itīs highly individualised and thatīs what a mind is. Your mind, no one has had a mind like yours for 100,000 years -- quite an exciting idea.

Natasha Mitchell: But that doesn't get to the hard problem...

Susan Greenfield: We are getting to the hard problem: Weīve got mind, weīve got brain which is the personalisation of the brain through these physical changes and connections. So imagine when youīre born you evaluate the world in terms of how sweet, how fast, how cold, how bright, but gradually a certain configuration of eyes, nose and mouth a certain texture, a certain voice, perhaps a certain smell will be your mother and, like with the London taxi drivers, these connections will be exercised, exercised, exercised so they will prosper, they will be strong, and if your Mum features every day in your life that will trigger more connections and that is the personalisation of your Mum. So thatīs the first thing.

The third thing that you just mentioned is different again, is consciousness. And what Natasha meant when she said the hard problem is because sheīs been talking with someone called David Chalmers who is an Australian philosopher who invented this phrase, which is actually seductively simple but itīs actually very hard. The hard problem is how do you go from the sludgy physical brain, the thing you get under your finger nails, to -- how does the water turn into wine, effectively -- how does that translate into consciousness? 

Natasha Mitchell: And thatīs a distinct subjective feeling of the need?

Susan Greenfield: Thatīs a subject that no one but no one can hack into the world and see the world through your eyes. Now thatīs very different from the mind, a separate issue because you can lose your mind, but youīre still conscious, you can blow your mind and still be conscious. When you go to sleep and you lose consciousness you donīt say youīre losing your mind when you go to sleep. So my own view is that the mind is the long-term kind of hard wiring of the brain personalised and reflecting and absolutely faithful to your experiences. So that as you grow everything that happens to you will change its connections and you will evaluate every experience youīre having in terms of those connections -- a two way street.

Consciousness is a momentary experience, the subjective inner state so it can be distinguished from it, because what you can do is you can knock out consciousness, the connections are still there, or you can knock out the connections-- for example if people choose to take drugs, or put themselves in a situation thatīs very, very strongly sensory, theyīve lost their mind, theyīve blown their mind, they are out of their mind -- they are still conscious. So there is a difference between the two.

Natasha Mitchell: You make it sound all so easy but you probably get though a theory of consciousness every week, I certainly do, I get one theory of consciousness sent to me via email, on the phone, or via fax. But look letīs come to the book, shall we, in it you argue that we are potentially; humanity is potentially on the cusp of an identity crisis. Now themīs big words.

Susan Greenfield: Well identity and crisis and humanity.

Natasha Mitchell: Are you heralding the coming of a psychological apocalypse?

Susan Greenfield: I wouldnīt say apocalypse. It is in the nature of all of us that if thereīs a change to fear it and always to be full of doom and gloom, itīs like the wonderful thing in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy with the rocket fuelled by the fastest thing there is, bad news, because nothing travels faster than bad news. And people love -- you media people love bad news particularly. So the crises is as follows: that in western societies in the last century especially most of us define ourselves -- well people still do define themselves, their status -- by perhaps what they own, because advertisers as you may know, they say things like the kitchen that says something about you, the sneakers that are as individual as you are. And this actually comes from some very clever work by a man called Bernais, who was a nephew of Freud, who in the early 20th century started advertising by realising that you had to get people to buy things they didnīt need. And what he had was very pretty young girls at a time when women didnīt smoke and they were trying to increase the market by getting women to smoke, by having women with cigarettes saying 'the torch of freedom'.

Natasha Mitchell: 'The torch of freedom...'.

Susan Greenfield:  See the cleverness there, the cigarette will say something about you, it will say youīre a liberated, modern woman. Not what it will do for you, or why you need it, but it will say something about you and that is what we are all hooked on. To plug someone elseīs book Oliver Jamesīs book Affluenza, he actually, there was a sort of critique of this and saying how this is leading to the biggest illness this century, which is bigger than AIDS, and thatīs depression.

Natasha Mitchell: So much of our identity is hung on the hook of status.

Susan Greenfield: It has been and people are realising you know you buy a kitchen and I come back and find youīve got the same kitchen and then I buy another kitchen. And we enter into this kind arms race where youīre never happy. So thatīs what Oliver Jamesīs book said, and I took that as one of my starting points. 

So what are the options? I call that if you like the 'someone' scenario, where you want to be a someone, you want to be someone, you might be individual but youīre not very fulfilled. So what are the alternatives? Well people in the past and now increasingly are turning to extreme ideologies in some cases that reject materialism altogether, that say subscribe to a collective story line and one only has to point to Al Qaeda or the Taliban or in the last century Marxism or Fascism in the extreme, where the emphasis is on the movement, the idea, the collective narrative, and itīs always an interesting story that they have, or plot, with the individual at the limits, as we know, sadly, completely disposable. So that I call the 'anyone' scenario and I think I donīt need to spend time discussing with you why thatīs not a particularly happy way to go.

The reason I think now that we are at a juncture without a blueprint (because the things I mentioned so far have been around for ages), but what hasnīt been around for ages are the pervasive and invasive technologies that give us a new option, an option that weīve never had before and thatīs what the book explores.

Natasha Mitchell: You actually think weīre heading towards a nobody scenario?

Susan Greenfield: I call it the nobody scenario.

Natasha Mitchell: The next generation of minds may not be minds at all?

Susan Greenfield: Exactly. But again, I donīt want to sound apocalyptic. What Iīm just putting before you is a new scenario that people born in the 20th century didnīt have, which was exposure on average, kids in the west on average are being exposed six hours a day to a screen. Weīre looking at a situation where you have certainly in the UK and I donīt think itīs that different here, a threefold increase in Ritalin prescriptions over the last ten years for attention deficit disorders. We have childhood obesity and we have certainly in the UK increases in knife crime and people putting that on YouTube and so on. So weīre looking to scenario where people are behaving in ways that donīt necessarily have a precedent previously.

Natasha Mitchell: You put an awful lot of things in the grabbag, though, of computer use?

Susan Greenfield: I do, Iīm just going to give you a snapshot of some of the things that are concerning people. We then say well could it in anyway be related to the environment, given that the brain is so sensitive to the environment, as weīve looked at with the taxi drivers and so on. So what I do is explore, and I just really want to share thoughts with you rather than say itīs the case, and thatīs very important because these are not proven, but nonetheless I think we ought to flag them so we can decide what we want to do about it. 

Letīs say working with a screen, one can sum it up by saying when you play a computer game to rescue the princess, letīs be honest, do you care about the princess? I bet you donīt care about the princess, do you? But when you read a book, the whole point of reading the book is because you care about the characters, you care about the princess, you want to know what happens, you want to know exactly what sheīs feeling. 

 And Iīd like to draw this distinction between process and content. That is to say the actual experience of the feel of something, of doing something, the thrill of getting something right, that little rush that you get that little reward feeling (which incidentally is very similar to drug addiction in extreme cases in brain terms) that little reward system tapped into, versus putting something into a context and seeing and understanding in what we would call a cognitive sense. When you read a book the author is the authority and I know and Steven Johnson says this is bad because itīs passive, itīs linear, youīre just taken by the hand, youīre led, youīre going on the journey that the author is leading you on -- thatīs fine. But itīs a journey that you may or may not like but you certainly end of somewhere different from where you started.

Thereīs another book by someone called Steven Johnson called Everything thatīs bad is good for you.

Natasha Mitchell: Well thatīs a sort of antithesis.

Susan Greenfield: It is, isnīt it. Itīs a good book even though I donīt agree with it, itīs a good book, I disagree with it, I mean itīs very well written and articulate and argues a strong case. And one of the things he says is that one of the positives, and this is important, is that the shift in IQ with kids may be due to tapping into the same kind of skills as computer games, that is to say to see patterns and sequences and to think very quickly and to see a overall pre-sequence in some kind of abstract thought process and this is important, it doesnīt necessarily depend on knowing a lot being able to place things into some kind of historical, or geographical, or economic setting that mandates that you know a certain amount of facts on something.

Natasha Mitchell: So in a sense modern kids minds are sort of suited to doing IQ tests?

Susan Greenfield: Yes, so the emphasis is on process rather than what I call content.

Natasha Mitchell: Yes, you draw a quite strong distinction between in effect generations -- the people of the book and the people of the screen.

Susan Greenfield: Indeed, whatīs interesting obviously being a total person of the book...

Natasha Mitchell: Iīm a bit of both.

Susan Greenfield: I work with the screen, but if youīve read books this means that youīve gone on journeys, lots of different journeys, with lots of different people, some of them dead, many of them foreign and every journey youīve gone on, every book youīve read youīve evaluated in terms of what you know already.

Natasha Mitchell: You could do the same in your interactions and experience.

Susan Greenfield: Ah, but can you? You can, you can. So then each journey you go you evaluate and change your views and ideas and you build up this conceptual framework which is endlessly updated and modified and changed with every book that you read. Sometimes when you read a book you put it down and stare at the wall, and reflect on what it said, thinking doing the checks and balances against your conceptual framework. Now when you or I go Wikipedia or Google fine, we do the same thing, we see what we are reading against the checks and balances of our conceptual framework of what we know, we assign a significance or otherwise to what we are reading because things that are important to us, or significant to us are things that trigger lots of associations. 

So we can intelligently navigate the screen and itīs great and we can use the screen and Iīm not for one minute saying this is bad. But imagine youīre two years old, or three years old, imagine no-one has read a story to you, youīve never been on journeys with people, youīve never then read books. All youīve done is have in your face literally a very fast image; sensory, visual noisy image in your face -- quick, quick, quick, very, very fast. Now you canīt tell me itīs going to be the same and that someone whoīs been that exposed can have the same meaning and understanding as perhaps people who have been led in one way or another on different journeys and had things explained. 

And what concerns me is that we are perhaps in some cases -- and Iīm saying perhaps -- keeping peopleīs developing minds at the stage of the young child of the boom, banger, bang, of the yuk and the wow of the literal what you see is what you get. Youīre not seeing things in terms of other things, you donīt have a notion of the abstract but whatīs happening is youīre living in a literal world of movement but not of thought.

Natasha Mitchell: Itīs interesting you say that, there was a study that came out this year that revealed that the so-called Google generation, people of the screen, in fact arenīt very good at using Google and they are not very analytical in how they approach it.

Susan Greenfield: Well we are living in a world that conceivably -- and again it sounds somewhat glib -- of answer rich and question poor. Where we lived in a world that was question rich and answer poor,where you had to work hard to find answers and one was very sniffy and very exacting about what was right or wrong or a good or bad answer. But if youīre deluged with facts in an unconnected way, facts on their own are very boring, itīs information, itīs not knowledge. And I think we often confuse information and knowledge.

Natasha Mitchell: Bit isnīt the brain intrinsically an organ that seeks meaning?

Susan Greenfield: Totally.

Natasha Mitchell: That pieces together information, so I think we can underestimate how kids are using a tool like Google or the internet.

Susan Greenfield: I think there are two separate issues there. Certainly human beings are brilliant at learning, thatīs what we do, we donīt run particularly fast, we donīt see particularly well, weīre not particularly strong, but the reason we occupy more ecological niches than any other species on the planet is that we learn and we adapt and brains are meant to do that. Which means that whatever environment you put you in as the Jesuit said, give me a child until year 7 and Iīll give you the man. If you put a child in an environment where there is a premium on being very agile and fast at computer games thatīs what they will be. Thatīs what you adapt to doing, like if you exercise in a certain way with a certain part of your body that is the bit that will prosper and grow. So we canīt have, I think, complacency thinking that weīll all shake down and it will be OK.

What I want to do is not be a Luddite but share with everyone and talk about what you want your kids to learn, what kinds of things you want them to be, what sort of society do you want, what are you going to do with this hour after hour of your days stretching into old age, what are we going to do with this time that makes you feel fulfilled and above all an individual? How do you see your identity?

Natasha Mitchell: Neuroscientist Susan Greenfield head of the Royal Institution of Great Britain is your companion here on ABC Radio Nationalīs All in the Mind, Iīm Natasha Mitchell with Susan at the Capri Theatre in Adelaide and reaching you wherever you are in the world on Radio Australia and as podcast.

Susan Greenfieldīs book ID: The Quest for Identity in the 21st Century is concerned that the future brain could be one trapped in early childhood well into adulthood. Why? Blame computers.

Letīs come back to something you said earlier; this prediction you have that in fact our interaction with technology might produce a brain, a mind that is permanently underdeveloped, that's permanently stuck. I mean in the book you draw a connection between babiesī brains, people who have schizophrenia and this absent mind that youīre eschewing here.

Susan Greenfield: Well letīs start with something we all like doing, letīs say itīs dancing, or food, or wine, or sex, or skiing, or anything where you literally let yourself go. We talk about having a sensational time. And one thing all those experiences have in common is an abrogation of the sense of self. We all know that youīre a pretty bad dancer if youīre self conscious. The very word ecstasy in Greek means to stand outside of yourself. And what has fascinated me a long time is that in the human condition we have this tension between on the one hand we like letting ourselves go and blowing our minds, and other times achieving things and fulfilling things and having our little niche, our little personal identity, our brick in the wall. Now the physiological basis for that is as weīve seen in the development of the mind is thatīs how you become an individual thatīs different from any other and if you want to blow your mind you put yourself in a situation that is stripped of cognitive content. 

So at the limit you go to a rave where thereīs flashing lights and sweaty bodies and loud music and abstract patterns, some people might take drugs, something Iīm personally against but thatīs another issue, where what you do is actually aid and abet the impairment of those connections by modifying the little chemical messengers that normally they need to work, to communicate. So if you combine messing up your brain connections chemically and at the same time giving your brain an experience it doesnīt require any cognitive processing, thatīs purely sensory and in the moment, you've put yourself into that situation. Or skiing or dancing. We all like doing this, we pay money to do this.

However, what I think is the shift now is that by working with a screen we are giving that scenario too much time. You know on the one hand with young developing brains by increasing the time when we do this, when you let yourself go, youīre having a sensory experience, weīre ignoring the cognitive, weīre ignoring the beginning, the middle, the end, the past, the present and the future. Itīs the here and now, itīs the sensation.

Natasha Mitchell: So the result for the brain might be...

Susan Greenfield: Itīs very interesting, in certain people who live for the moment and ignore the consequences, quite often itīs people who have damage to an area at the front of the brain called the pre-frontal cortex and people who have damage to this part of the brain are unusually reckless in gambling tasks, for example, they are usually reckless. Now whatīs very interesting is that obese people perform compared to non-obese people the same as people with damage to the front in gambling tasks, they are unusually reckless.  Now what might they have in common and indeed that children might have in common? And I would suggest the reason that people are gambling in reckless ways is they love the thrill of the moment just the same as you might like the thrill of eating the food, irrespective of the consequences. Itīs where, and we all have this balance, most of us.

Natasha Mitchell: The executive brain, doesn't sort of kick and go, hang on, let me modify my behaviour.

Susan Greenfield: I mean for all of us when weīre tempted to eat that second bit of chocolate or have that final glass of wine and we all know the consequences, thereīs always that balance of do you...

Natasha Mitchell: Most of the time.

Susan Greenfield: Yes, exactly, some of the time we succumb. But for people with damaged prefrontal cortex there can be too much emphasis in the direction of the sensation, the here and now, the process as opposed to the cognitive, the consequences.

Natasha Mitchell: You say this about the life of the screen and you say this of computer games too, sort of fast wham, bam, yuk and wow factor interaction that people are having; short sharp attention spans come of that. But many people who are participating in online gaming for example which is a massive enterprise now across the world, itīs this incredibly social, interactive, considered sort of interaction with a community of people, itīs not an isolated sort of experience.

Susan Greenfield:  Well yes, you say that, it reminds me of when I was talking to someone the other day who was putting forward just that argument and I said well how do you mean? Well he said Iīve got lots of friends. And I said how many friends have you got -- and he said 900 friends. Now I would venture that having 900 friends really is not quite the same kind of friend as a friend whoīs up all night for you, whoīll lend you money or be there when youīve just been dumped by your boyfriend of girlfriend.

Natasha Mitchell: Well they are up all night.

Susan Greenfield: They are up all night but not there, so this notion that just because youīre writing sound bites to 900 people that thatīs friendship I find somewhat sad. The second issue is it's well known that autistic people, and I remind people an autistic person is someone who has very little empathy with others, who canīt really read or understand that other people are feeling something different from yourself. Autistic people are very comfortable with Second Life, they are very at home on Second Life.

Natasha Mitchell: Second Life being...

Susan Greenfield: As its name suggests where you could be Vlad the dragon slayer, or you can be whatever you want to be. But this same person who had the 900 friends said that he felt more comfortable doing that. And again, because we adapt so well, if youīre always working with a screen, working off line or working remotely, you can therefore not have to fess up to some of the hard things about when you are talking to someone face to face. So youīve got these pheromones and body language and you are having to process things very quickly, think of your reply, youīre giving off certain signals that they are unaware of as well. Itīs a much more challenging issue to have a face to face conversation with someone in the flesh.

Natasha Mitchell: I do love how you describe the real world as sort of being littered with banana peels and elephant traps.

Susan Greenfield: It is...well the analogy I give, and this might seem a bit far fetched, but bear with me. In the old days anyone eating meat, and this is not a cry for vegetarianism, but anyone eating meat in the old days would have always killed it and/or they were the woman skinned it and butchered it. Nowadays even meat eaters might go Ughh couldn`t do that, Iīll take it off the supermarket shelf, sanitised in cellophane. Killing something and chopping its arms and legs off and ripping its fur off -- ugh -- no way could I do this. Perhaps in the future and this sounds extreme, someone will say ugh - a real life conversation - oh I couldnīt do that, ugh with those pheromones and body language, oh ugh, not knowing whatīs happening, Iīd much rather have this sanitised offline screen persona where I can be anything. You know it might be like that, I do fear that again the brain adapts so if you donīt practise you wonīt be good at it. If you practise youīre good at it. You canīt expect people to have marvellous empathy and be able to read body language if they havenīt had the opportunity to be exposed to social interactions.

Natasha Mitchell: Well letīs consider though how technologies and our interaction with them have augmented us cognitively and thereīs a wonderful hypothesis amongst cognitive science circles, or philosophy circles, called the extended mind hypothesis which is that we are always cognitively coupling with our technologies. so you know our mobile phones, and our watches, even our street directories are actually a part of our mind, our extended mind. And that when we lose those tools we are cognitively compromised, so weīre constantly augmented, itīs the sort of cyborgian vision that we are cyborgs, natural born cyborgs.

Susan Greenfield: Well yeah, there are several thoughts, one you could say is that just mixing socially youīre naturally augmented by being with a group of people youīre interacting with.

Natasha Mitchell: Sure, well they are they a part of our minds... 

Susan Greenfield: Well this is someone called Chardin, who 50 years ago, a Jesuit monk developed the concept of the noosphere, which was that all of us in this room could be collectively thinking together and we were just nodes in this collective thought that was owned by no one but was sort of out there. So I donīt think you need to invoke high technology to invoke the notion that Socrates for example in dialogue obviously discovered that you could develop ideas as a pair that you couldnīt on your own by just having a dialogue, someone saying 'Oh really?'. And you answer back, 'Oh really?' It doesnīt have to be high tech to do this -- thatīs the first issue. The second issue is that high tech interaction certainly is already delivering therapeutically, I mean the one I mention in the book is really astonishing, mind blowing almost literally is with quadriplegic people where you can put implants (these are people who are paralysed completely) by virtue of implants in the brain they can now will a cursor to move on a computer screen.

Natasha Mitchell: Thoughts move matter.

Susan Greenfield: Now neuroscientists have tapped into that interface between a thought and a movement and what this guy Nicoladis has done is actually repeat that in rats, and the rats suddenly realise they are not paralysed that by virtue of just thinking they can avoid the muscular effort of pressing a bar and you can see the suddenly go think, drink, think, drink. So those I think are astonishing both medically and also the philosophy that it raises, which is what is a thought and when does a thought become an action and so on. But the sinister side of that, I donīt know if youīve heard of the concept of trans-humanism, which someone said is the worldīs most dangerous idea, and that is that you can augment your physical and mental prowess technologically but that does beg the question of why you want to do this.

Natasha Mitchell: Thereīs a massive movement of trans-humanism so they basically investing in every kind of technology they can to extend their lives beyond whatīs possible.

Susan Greenfield: But also to have a better memory than someone else, to have a better brain than someone else. I mean leaving aside I think stronger than someone else, or seeing out side the normal range of vision or hearing, but why would you want to, what is a better brain? Well my own view is that people with the best brains ever, letīs think of Einstein, letīs think of Mozart, or Shakespeare, those people -- what do they have in common, those brains are all very different. The whole point of Einstein, Shakespeare and Beethoven and Mozart is that they were highly individual. The point about their brains was they were highly original brains, they saw the world in a very special way and shared it with other people. It wasnīt that they had better memories than other people in a scanned computer type way. So I think itīs a hiding to nowhere to try and think that if you have a better memory that that will make your brain better.

Natasha Mitchell: A question then, if we donīt want to be an anyone, a nobody, or a someone, whatīs your optimistic sense of how we might use technology?

Susan Greenfield: I should say if Iīm plugging this book that I donīt end on a gloomy note. I think there is nothing wrong with having a goal and fulfilling it. I took six attempts to pass my driving test, when I finally did I was so proud, you know. I donīt want to knock achievements as long as I donīt hurt other people which in my case the driving might have, but I think thatīs a good thing within reason as long as itīs not used to invoke superiority against someone else. The someone scenario within limits is a very understandable endeavour to give you a narrative and a goal to your life. The no-one scenario, where we say abrogate a sense of self, we would like to do that, wine, women and song, drugs, sex and rock and role have for many years been the way we achieve the no-one scenario and, within reason, again, there is nothing wrong with from time to time letting yourself go. Most people would like to do that. The anyone scenario, the great collective narrative, well we all know the virtues of working in a team, of sublimating your particular needs to your family, or working with your country, or with a sports team. We all know that there are times when itīs important to not be full of ego but to work collectively. Again, but you donīt want to take it to the extreme of al-Qaeda or the Taliban.

Ditto Eureka moments, creativity, fabulous that it is, do we want a scenario caricatured by say the west coast of the States where you have everyone egocentric and eccentric and so strange and so dysfunctional that they donīt mix in society in any way. Theyīre so busy having all these kind of weird ideas. So in a sense none of those four scenarios on their own are perfect and for my mind the goal is to get that balance right, to get all four in play so that none can be extreme and all can be beneficial.

Natasha Mitchell: Well on that note I think we need to call it a night. Letīs thank Susan Greenfield very much.

Susan Greenfield: Thank you.

Natasha Mitchell: And as you can imagine, Susan Greenfieldīs thesis has provoked all sorts of interesting reviews and consternation, and Iīll link to some of those articles from our website for you to take the ideas further. And I look forward to your comments via email or on the All in the Mind blog, let it rip, which is where Iīll also upload the audio of the great Q and A with the audience at the Science Outside the Square Night at the Capri Theatre. All at abc.net.au/rn/allinthemind.

Thanks to co-producer Kyla Brettle, studio engineer Joel Church. Iīm Natasha Mitchell -- catch you next week.]]></itunes:summary>
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