Cosmos: Possible Worlds (2020) s01e05 Episode Script

1
TYSON: Can we know the universe?
Are our brains capable of
comprehending the cosmos in
all of its complexity
and splendor?
We don't yet know the answer
to that question because our
brain remains almost
as much of a mystery
as the universe itself.
We think that the number of
processing units in your brain
is roughly equal to all
the stars in 1,000 galaxies.
At least 100 trillion.
And it's possible that the
real number of processing units
is ten times larger.
We're inside a brain.
It's in the grip of a Category
5 hurricane of chemical and
electrical forces.
The storm came without warning,
spreading chaos and
heartache far beyond its path
But it also provided the
first clues to the nature of this
little cosmos.
(theme music plays)
♪♪
♪♪
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TYSON: We are traveling 2,500
years back in time to the island
of Kos in the Aegean Sea.
This is the story of
a giant leap in the
history of thought.
It was here that one of
the most powerful spells
ever to cloud the
mind was first broken.
Imagine you are the
loving parents of a
precious only child.
The boy is given to
moments of brilliance,
which charm and
impress your friends.
But there's something wrong
A storm is brewing
inside his head
GOVERNESS: Peleus! Peleus!
♪♪
TYSON: This was medicine
2,500 years ago in Greece.
The idea that the ritual
appeasement of one of the gods
could bring about the cure
for an epileptic seizure was
magical thinking.
When the Greeks and people of
other cultures performed their rituals,
some of the afflicted recovered,
due to the finite
course of the illness,
or to their own immune systems.
But to the patients
and their loved ones,
it meant that the gods
had been appeased.
And when the patient died?
That just meant the
gods were so angry,
nothing could be done.
This way of thinking was a by-product of
that great human strength, and weakness,
called pattern recognition.
In this case, false
pattern recognition.
The belief that epilepsy was
caused by the anger of the
gods was the confusion of
correlation with causation,
and the wishful thinking
that prevails when
people feel powerless.
That's not to say that the
ancient Greeks didn't have
remedies, plants and minerals,
they used as medicines.
But for a disease as
mysterious as epilepsy,
they could only light
their incense and pray.
They didn't even know it had
anything to do with the brain.
And then came Hippocrates.
Hippocrates rejected the
notion that angry gods were
the cause of disease and injury.
He wrote: "The physician must
investigate the entire patient",
his diet and his environment
The best physician
is the one who is able
to prevent illness.
"Nothing happens
without a natural cause."
For this alone, he could be
called the Father of Medicine.
He is credited with
codifying an ethos for doctors.
The oath ascribed to him
in the 3rd century BCE is still
taken today by those who
would practice medicine.
And it was Hippocrates
who was among the first
to declare the brain to be
the seat of consciousness.
It's hard to believe,
but this was once a
revolutionary concept.
The prevailing wisdom
being that we actually
thought with our hearts.
And it may have been
here where he made one of
the great prophecies
in the history of science.
Hippocrates understood
that he and his contemporaries
called epilepsy
"the sacred disease"
because they didn't
understand its physical cause.
He wrote, "When we do, we
will no longer think it divine."
That little boy wasn't cursed.
There was a physical
malfunction inside his brain.
As long as we searched
for it in the whim of the gods,
we had no hope of
helping him, or ourselves.
Yet thousands of years passed,
and the brain
remained a mystery.
Between 420 BCE
and the 19th century,
our understanding of the
cosmos grew by leaps and bounds.
We discovered
the speed of light,
the laws of gravity,
and we learned that our
Sun is part of a greater galaxy
of stars and yet, 2,300
years after Hippocrates,
we still knew virtually
nothing about the part of
ourselves that made it possible
to make these discoveries:
our brains.
It could be said that
we actually knew less.
The study of the brain
had become stuck in a
pseudo-scientific dead-end
called "phrenology,"
which held that from the
shape of a person's skull,
you could deduce
their intelligence and
trustworthiness.
A frenzy of
head-measuring ensued.
A gift for languages resided
above the cheekbone,
and marital fidelity
located behind the ears.
And not surprisingly,
European phrenologists
discovered that their
particular heads
represented the universal
standard of cerebral excellence.
The first real insight
regarding the connection
between the mind and the
brain was made in France in 1861.
And here again, epilepsy
played a critical role
The Bicêtre Psychiatric
Hospital was state-of-the-art
in Paris back then.
In the previous century,
it had been the first to
introduce humane practices
in the treatment of the insane
and the mentally disabled.
And among the doctors
there, surgeon Paul Broca was
especially admired for
his enlightened treatment
of his patients.
TAN: Tan
TYSON: The patient's
name was Louis Leborgne.
TAN: Tan
TYSON: But everyone
called him "Tan" after the
only syllable that he had
uttered since he was 30.
He was now 51.
Tan had been having epileptic
seizures since childhood,
but he was committed to
Bicêtre because he had lost
all powers of speech except
for being able to say "tan."
Now, poor Tan lay dying.
His right side had
become paralyzed,
and gangrene had set in.
Prior to Tan's medical crisis,
Broca had been speculating
that specific regions
of the brain might
be responsible for
the powers of speech and memory.
Broca wanted to know
everything he possibly could
about the dying patient
in expectation of what a
post-mortem might reveal.
We do not know if Tan's epilepsy
caused the damage to his brain,
or whether an
unreported childhood injury
caused his epilepsy
and later loss of speech.
TAN: Tan
TYSON: But
because of Tan's fate,
Paul Broca was able to connect,
for the very first time, a
part of the human brain,
in this case the region
that was damaged,
and its specialized function:
the ability to use language.
His reward
that part of our brain has
been known ever since
as "Broca's Area."
Paul Broca's own
brain ended up in a jar
like this one in a back
storage room of the
anthropological
museum he directed,
with shelf upon shelf of the
brains of mass murderers and
other master criminals,
as well as congenital
abnormalities that seemed
to fascinate the public of the
19th century.
Broca was a humanist.
He concluded that there
were deep connections in brain
physiology between
non-human primates and us.
He founded a society of
freethinkers in his youth,
and believed passionately
in the importance
of unobstructed inquiry.
He lived his life in
pursuit of that aim.
But he, too, was partly
blinded by the prejudices that
permeated his society.
He thought men mentally
superior to women,
and whites superior
to everyone else.
His falling short of humanist
ideals shows that even someone
as committed to the
free pursuit of knowledge
as Broca could still be
deceived by endemic bigotry.
Society corrupts the best of us.
It's a little unfair,
I think, to criticize a
person for not sharing
the enlightenment
of a later age,
but it is also profoundly
saddening that such prejudices
were so pervasive.
The question raises nagging
uncertainties about which of
the assumptions of our
own age will be considered
unforgivable by the next
Broca established for the
first time that there were
physical correlations
between anatomy and function,
but what of the crackling
energy of consciousness?
What of the stuff that
dreams are made of?
Can't put them in a jar
♪♪
TYSON: When the ancient
Egyptians looked up at night,
they saw the underbody of Nut,
Goddess of the Milky Way.
When they closed their
eyes and began to dream,
they believed they were
transiting to the afterlife.
And so, dreaming was
ritualized into a form of
worship, a means to
learn what their future held,
or to send a message to
the gods, as they slumbered.
The faithful would
make a pilgrimage to
a temple to dream.
To prepare themselves,
they would withdraw to a
place of isolation,
and fast to cleanse
their mind and body.
A prayer might be
written to a particular god
and burned.
It was hoped that its smoke
would convey the contents to
the underworld.
If we could only materialize
and decipher the dreaming that
went on at the Temple
of Dendera so long ago.
And what of your
dream just last night?
The ancient Egyptians were
mystified by the boundary that
separates our waking
and sleeping life.
They believed that we
were actually transported to
another physical realm,
and that dreams had
a material reality.
How else to explain
the stunning detail of a
particularly vivid dream?
More than 1,000 years after
the last dreamers awakened at
Dendera, there was a scientist
who believed that conscious
and unconscious thoughts
do have a material reality,
that dreams were actually
physical phenomena
that could be recorded.
And he found a way to do it.
In a place of broken minds
and shattered dreams
This is the
Manicomio di Collegno,
in Turin, Italy.
Built as a monastery
in the 17th century,
it had become a
psychiatric hospital by 1850.
It was abandoned decades
ago, but it still reverberates with
centuries of human
suffering and loneliness.
It was here that Angelo
Mosso came to perform
experiments on
dreams and thoughts.
Mosso was a child of
the working class who
boot-strapped himself
into becoming a scientist.
His primary research had been in
pharmacology and physiology.
And it was all focused
on making life better
for the working poor.
He viewed science as a means
to improve labor conditions.
In a time when people
were literally worked to death,
without recourse
or legal protection,
Mosso designed and
built an ergograph,
or "fatigue recorder," so
that he could demonstrate
experimentally what the
relentless stress of hard
labor did to the
human body and mind.
To Mosso, exhaustion was both
a physical and emotional state,
not a sign of human
weakness or a character flaw.
And it was your body's
way of telling you to stop
what you were
doing to avoid injury.
Mosso reasoned that fatigue
had an evolutionary advantage,
much like fear.
(screams)
(goats bleeting)
To demonstrate this, Mosso
began thinking about designing
an apparatus that could
record the body's blood flow.
The table that Mosso's
assistant floated on was
exquisitely balanced, and
was all attached to a rotating
drum with a stylus that
recorded the blood flow.
It was the beginning
of medical imaging,
a tool that had
never existed before.
But if the actions of the
heart could be recorded,
what about the brain?
How could you transcribe
the brain's delicate murmurings
when they were housed
in a protective skull?
There was no way to do that
without harming a patient
Or was there?
When he was not
even two years old,
Giovanni Thron fell
from a great height.
His skull had been so badly
shattered it was necessary to
remove some of the pieces.
As a result of the blow,
he began to have frequent
and violent epileptic seizures.
Fearing that they
might be contagious,
his parents abandoned
him at the mental hospital
in Turin by the
time he was five.
And there he
languished for six years.
The catastrophic injury that
had ruined Giovanni's life had
left a doorway to his brain.
Mosso designed and built the
machine so sensitive it could
register the blood
coursing through his brain.
But Giovanni was so agitated
during his waking hours,
Mosso could only
study him while he slept.
Mosso needed Giovanni
to be perfectly still in
order to record the faint
signature of his thoughts.
GHOST: When I saw
Giovanni in February, 1877,
he had a large opening in
the skull covered with skin.
The terrible fall
had forever arrested
his intellectual development.
It was a saddening circumstance,
that in the midst of the
ruin of his mind, one single,
higher idea had remained,
a remnant of his earlier
intellectual life, a motto
which he constantly repeated:
'I want to go to school.'
It was one of the most
interesting sights to observe
in the stillness of night,
what was going on in his brain,
when there was no
external cause to disturb this
mysterious life of sleep.
The brain-pulse remained for
10 or 20 minutes quite regular
and very weak
and then began suddenly,
without any apparent cause to
swell and beat more vigorously.
The dreams, perhaps,
come to cheer the repose
of the unhappy boy?
That the face of his mother
and the recollections of his
early childhood glow
bright in his memory?
Lighting up the darkness
of his intelligence,
and make his brain
pulsate with excitement?
Or was it an unconscious
agitation of matter,
like the ebb and flow of an
unknown and solitary sea?
TYSON: On that snowy night,
Angelo Mosso gave the brain
its first pen to write with.
He had invented neuroimaging,
and showed that even in sleep,
the brain is pulsing, throbbing,
flashing with the
complex business of life
dreaming, remembering,
figuring things out.
Our thoughts, visions,
fantasies and our dreams,
do have a material reality.
Three months after
the night of dreams,
Giovanni died of anemia.
He was not yet 12.
Angelo Mosso's breakthrough
in pioneering the field of
neuroscience inspired
another man to take Mosso's
work one giant step further.
He wanted to demonstrate
that psychic powers are real.
It all happened because
of a freak accident
(gunshots)
Hans Berger dreamed of
becoming an astronomer,
but it was too hard,
and so in 1892,
he enlisted in the German army.
Berger was shaken
by his brush with death,
but something happened
that night that shocked
him even more
A telegram had
arrived from his father,
a cold and distant man
who had never sent him
a telegram before.
Berger's older sister had
become panic-stricken with the
certainty that something
terrible had happened
to her little brother.
Was it possible,
Berger wondered,
that in the moment that he
realized he was going to die,
his brain had somehow
telepathically delivered a
message to the person he
was closest to, his sister?
Berger became a
physician and a professor at
the University of Jena.
By day, he worked with
his students and colleagues,
who found him to
be awkwardly formal,
and scientifically
unadventurous.
But by night, he went to a
secret laboratory where he
conducted experiments
on the brain's activity.
Berger believed that this
was his best chance of proving
that psychic energy was real.
He feared that if anyone
were to discover his real
scientific objective, he'd be
laughed out of the profession.
He kept his secret for 20 years.
Berger's
electroencephalograph made it
possible to interpret the
signals that the brain sends,
and to diagnose many
neurological diseases,
including epilepsy.
He never did find any
evidence for psychic energy,
or telepathic communication.
Berger sunk into
a deep depression,
and hanged himself in his
secret laboratory in 1941.
The EEG is still in use today,
although we now have far more
accurate ways of seeing and
recording what the brain does,
and we even have the ability
to decrypt the electrochemical
language of thought.
Exactly 100 years after
Angelo Mosso first recorded
the electrical whispers
of Giovanni's dreams,
the brain waves of a
woman newly fallen in love,
were included in the
Voyager Interstellar Message,
destined to sail the Milky Way
for a billion years or more.
From horse-drawn
carriage to interstellar craft,
in just a 100 years.
From telegrams to sending our
thoughts hand-delivered to one
another at the speed of light,
and our deepest feelings
to a billion years from now.
How did we make that leap?
And why us?
Of all the billions of species
that have ever lived on Earth,
why us and no other?
♪♪
TYSON: Primates who descended
from the African savannah have
sent their robot emissaries
to explore the red deserts of
Mars, and ring that
world with satellites.
We've only been at this
since the mid-20th century,
not even a lifetime, yet
look at how far beyond
our little world our
robots have ventured.
One of our craft, Voyager 1,
has broken free of the Sun,
and now sails the deep
ocean of interstellar space.
And every one of
those odysseys of
discovery began here.
It's easy to see why the
seat of all these mythic
achievements would
itself seem beyond our
ability to understand.
It's hard to believe that
our minds are made of
the same matter as our
stomachs and our feet.
Consciousness
seems supernatural.
Identity, awe
Skepticism, imagination, love.
How do you assemble
transcendence from the
periodic table of the elements?
We are at the bottom of the sea,
off the coast of Chile and Peru.
This is perhaps the largest
living organism on Earth.
It's a community of microbes
that is the size of a country
Greece.
But there's something even more
amazing about it than its immensity.
The ancient ancestors of these
colonies represent an early step in
the development of brains.
When the microbes living at the
center of this vast mat get hungry,
they dispatch
electrochemical messages to
their fellow citizens
at the outer-edge.
These communiqués travel
through passages called ion channels.
A message goes out on
amber waves of potassium from
"Sparta to Athens" saying,
"Hey, guys, stop
hogging all the food!"
And the residents of the
mat's outer edge respond
by reducing their
intake of nutrients.
It's possible that their
ancient ancestors evolved
cells called neurons
that specialized in
this kind of messaging.
Neurons are the basic unit
of nervous systems in almost
every life form in the
animal kingdom, including us.
And they vary very
little in nature, if at all,
from species to species,
but vary dramatically in number.
In fact, we now
think that epilepsy,
that so-called "sacred disease,"
is a misfiring in the brain
of our own ion channels.
Think of it: A microbial
mat and Isaac Newton,
separated by hundreds of
millions of years of evolution,
but sharing the same
basic currency of thought.
The messaging system
pioneered by the microbes
some four billion years ago,
is still inside us.
No one looking at a microbial
mat three billion years ago
could have predicted that
the one-celled organisms
of life on Earth
would evolve into you.
That's what happens when
living things and environments
interact over the eons.
New forms and ways
of being alive and aware
come into existence.
When the whole becomes
greater than the sum of its parts,
it's called emergence.
See the thing that looks
like a shred of a ruffle
from a gaudy dress?
You might think
it's kind of silly.
But, you would be so wrong.
Long, long ago, some
600 million years ago,
life first evolved something
new to planet Earth,
a command center that
could perceive and react
to its environment a brain.
Now, life inched
closer to the stars.
We think it first happened
inside a flatworm
this little guy's ancestor,
the first animal hunter.
A brain was just what
a hunter would need to
seek out and plan
a strategy for attack.
Binocular vision allowed
the flatworm to perceive the
dimension of depth more sharply
and objects with greater clarity,
all the better to
triangulate on prey.
The flatworm brain had a pair of
dense nerve clusters called "ganglia."
Cords extended from them,
carrying instructions and
sensations to the rest of its
body via some 8,000 neurons.
Not many compared with the
life forms that would come later,
but a momentous beginning.
Flatworms have something
called auricles on the sides
of their heads where
their ears should be,
but they're actually noses.
We may not look much alike,
but we have a lot in common.
We share the same chemicals
that control our nervous systems,
called "neurotransmitters."
We get addicted
to the same drugs.
Flatworms can learn.
They process information
about their environment
and act accordingly.
We think they're nature's
first animals to have a front,
a back and a head,
a blueprint that
remains state of the art,
600 million years later.
And they were the true
pioneers in the deepest sense
of that word.
Unlike any life
form before them,
they developed the habit of
venturing into the unknown
territory in search
of what they craved.
Okay, flatworms are cool,
but there's a big difference
between a flatworm
brain and ours.
How did we get
from there to here?
We don't yet know.
That's mainly because
brains tend to be squishy.
They don't leave distinct
imprints in the fossil record.
But the brain preserves
its evolutionary past
Why?
Because our brains are a
little like New York City
(honking and sirens)
(honking and sirens)
TYSON: Most of the world's great
cities have grown haphazardly,
little by little,
in response to the
needs of the moment;
very rarely is a
city planned for
the remote future.
In New York City,
many of the streets
date all the way back
to the 17th century
the stock exchange
to the 18th
the waterworks and the
electrical power system
to the 19th century.
And the communications
bandwidth to the 20th.
A city is like a brain: it
develops from a small center
and slowly grows and changes,
leaving many old
parts still functioning.
New York can't afford to
suspend its water supply,
or its transportation system,
while they're being replaced
by something more efficient.
Changes have to
happen piecemeal.
And that's how
it is for the brain.
There is no way for
evolution to rip out the ancient
interior of the brain because
of its imperfections and
replace it with something of
more modern manufacture.
The brain and the city both
must function continuously
during the renovation.
That's why our limbic
system is surrounded by
the cerebral cortex.
The old part is in charge of
too many vital mechanisms for
it to be replaced altogether.
So, it's sometimes
counterproductive.
But that's a necessary
consequence of evolution.
The city is a gift of
the cerebral cortex.
But the brain's language is
not encoded in the DNA of
genes because the
vocabulary of life is too small.
Our brains need a
language with 10,000 times
as many words.
The information content of
the human brain expressed
in bits is probably comparable
to the total number of connections
among the neurons
about a thousand trillion bits.
If all the contents of your
brain were transcribed into
written language, it would
amount to vastly more books
than are contained in the
largest libraries on earth.
The equivalent of more
than four billion books
are inside your head.
The brain is a very big
place in a very small space.
It's written in those
neurons pioneered by
the undersea microbial mats.
These are tiny electrochemical
switching elements,
typically a few hundredths
of a millimeter across.
Each of us has
86 billion neurons,
comparable to the number of
stars in the Milky Way galaxy.
The neurons and their
parts, axons, dendrites,
synapses and the cell
bodies themselves make up
a network in the brain.
Many neurons have
thousands of connections
with their neighbors.
Dendrites, those pathways sent out by
neurons to connect with other neurons,
extend these nerve
cells to synapses until
they create a full-blown
network of consciousness.
The neurochemistry of the
brain is astonishingly busy,
the circuitry of a machine
more wonderful than any
devised by humans.
Your brain functions are
due to those 100 trillion
neural connections
that make you, you.
Your deepest feelings
of love and awe
those moments when we
glimpse the grandeur of nature,
and all the elegant
architecture of consciousness
are made possible
by those connections.
This is the essence
of emergence:
tiny units of matter
operating collectively
to become something much more
than themselves,
to enable the
cosmos to know itself.
But there's a vision of emergence
that takes it even higher.
Can we know the universe?
And will it ever
come to know us?
TYSON: Can we know the universe?
All those galaxies, solar
systems, numberless worlds,
moons, comets, beings,
and their dreams
everything that ever
was, is, or will be?
Can we know the universe?
I'm not sure we can
even know a grain of salt.
Consider one
microgram of table salt,
a speck just barely large
enough for someone with keen
eyesight to see
without a microscope.
In that grain of salt there
are about 10 to the power 16
sodium and chlorine atoms.
What does that mean?
It means that there are 10
million billion atoms in this
and every other
single grain of salt.
To know the grain
of salt deeply,
requires us to know at
least the three-dimensional
positions of each
of these atoms.
In fact, there's much
more to be known
for example, the nature of
the forces between the atoms.
But okay, let's try
to keep it simple,
we'll leave that aside.
Is the number of all the
positions more or less than
the number of things
which the brain can know?
How much can the brain know?
If you do the calculation,
with all the neurons and their
dendrites, axons, synapses
we can know 100 trillion things.
But this is only 1% of
the number of atoms in
our grain of salt.
So in this sense, the
universe is unmanageable,
astonishingly immune
to any human attempt
at full knowledge.
We cannot, at this level,
fully know a grain of salt,
much less the universe.
But let's look a little
more deeply at our
microgram of salt.
Salt happens to be
a crystal in which,
except for defects in
the structure of its lattice,
the position of every
sodium and chlorine
atom is predetermined.
If we shrink ourselves
into this crystalline world,
we would see rank upon rank
of atoms in an ordered array,
a regularly
alternating structure
sodium, chlorine,
sodium, chlorine
specifying the sheet of
atoms we are flying through,
and all the sheets
above us and below us.
An absolutely pure grain of
salt could have the position
of every atom specified
by something like
ten bits of information.
This wouldn't strain our
brain's carrying capacity.
We'd still have plenty
of room for other stuff.
Now, imagine a universe
with natural laws that govern its
behavior to the same
degree of regularity that's true
for a grain of salt.
That universe would be knowable.
Even if it had many
complicated laws,
we'd still have a shot
at knowing that cosmos.
It wouldn't matter if the
reality of that universe
exceeded the
information-carrying capacity
of one of our brains.
We'd just go outside our
bodies and build a computer to
store the surplus information.
And we'd still, in some sense,
know the universe.
Now, imagine a universe
with no such laws,
one that behaves in a
completely unpredictable fashion.
That universe would contain
something like 10 to the 80th
elementary particles.
The inhabitants would find
everyday experience a muddled
jumble of events with no
predictability, no regularity.
And if they ever came to exist,
they would be in grave peril.
Lucky for us, we live in a
universe with important parts
that are knowable.
The universe
belongs to those who,
at least to some degree,
have figured it out.
It's an astonishing fact
that there are laws of nature,
rules that summarize
not just qualitatively
but quantitatively,
how the cosmos works.
But what about the
cosmos inside each of us
That unknown and solitary sea?
There are something
like 100 trillion
that is, one-hundred
thousand billion connections
in your cerebral cortex.
That's 100 times as many
connections inside you as all
the galaxies of
the visible universe.
We're just at the
beginning of a great
journey of exploration.
Just as biologists succeeded
in mapping the human genome,
neuroscientists are
attempting to map something
far more complex and unique
to each and every one of us.
It's called our connectome.
If we could truly know
another person's connectome,
the singular wiring diagram
of all their memories,
thoughts, fears, dreams
How would we treat each other?
Could we heal the brain
of its countless torments,
and free all the
Giovanni's of the world?
Could we send one of our
connectomes on a future interstellar probe,
or ever hope to
receive one from the
being of another world?
Would that be the ultimate
realization of emergence
a cosmos interconnected
by thoughts and dreams?