Love Your Brain-1

“When we personify our human parts in poetry, we often equate our humanity, and our love, to our hearts. But the heart has its twin flame in life, and that is the brain. The mysterious organ that holds not only the energy, but the expanse of the universe within the folds of its matter. It is this unique bond that makes us our species what we have decided to terms as human.”
— Mickie Kent

As we stand in our moment of which we call time, the universe is still a mystery and wonder. The key issue is what we still don't know. Was there a beginning? Are we alone in the universe? What's the future of the cosmos? What is nature-reality? According to religion God created everything, and only God knows why we are here, but science came to a different conclusion. It found no evidence for a grand plan, and yet recent discoveries have made science think again.

It seems ancient notions may be closer to the truth than science has ever imagined. Perhaps after all there may be a creator, and creation is not what we think it is - and in asking "are we real?" some believe the answers we are looking lie much closer to home. For although we have made progress tackling, what are to us, very fundamental questions, with each new advance new questions come into sharper focus. We have no idea how wide intelligence is spread in the cosmos, and from our present knowledge the most complex thing we know about in the universe are ourselves - and in particular our brains.

What's remarkable is that atoms have assembled in entities which are somehow able to ponder their origins. We have always been fascinated about our existence, and of all the wonders of creation, life is the most mysterious, and of all creatures, we believe we are the most special. We attribute this specialness to our brains, and the benefits it construes upon our species. This mini-series on the brain aims to tackle some questions about our most complex organ, offers practical tips on how we can nurture it well, and in the process, by showing it love, open a door to love for ourselves and others.

When it comes to life on Earth, the bonobo or pygmy chimpanzee, out of all the animals alive today, is our closest relative. We share 99% of our DNA, but yet from the moment of birth our lives are very different. In time, as a human, our lives develop a richness far beyond that of our ape cousins. So what is it about our bodies, our genes, and ultimately our brains, that sets is apart? What is it that truly makes us human?

As well as humans, the family of great apes is made up of gorillas, orang-utans, chimpanzees and bonobos, but what makes one particular ape - the human - so different from all the others? Professor Alice Roberts investigated this very subject for a BBC Horizon documentary. As Professor Roberts delved into what exactly makes human beings different from the animal kingdom, as an anatomist the first thing she did was to look at the differences in our bodies.

Rather than focusing on the similarities and differences between their anatomy and ours and its relation to how we move around, in this article on the brain, I will focus more on that aspect. But we humans, uniquely, habitually walk around upright on two legs, and our face proportions are different from other apes, too. Our eyes are about half way down our heads, if we measure from up from the top and down to the chin, whereas apes have their eyes right up at the top, because their brain case is much smaller than ours. They don't have such a large forehead, or a large brain inside it.

We've long known that these two features, big brains and upright walking are the hallmarks of humans. And somehow these big brains must explain the vast gulf that we see between ourselves and our closest ape relatives, the chimpanzees. The amazing thing is, we now know from studies of DNA, of ours and theirs and other apes, that we are more closely related to chimpanzees than either of us is to gorillas. There's this close-knit family of us, common chimpanzees and bonobos. Professor Roberts expressed in the BBC Horizon documentary that this not only said something really important about our place in the primate family tree - but made the vast differences between our lives and theirs even more extraordinary.

So what exactly has changed in the six million years since we shared a common ancestor? We certainly have bigger brains, and we think we're more intelligent, although chimps are full of surprises. Work on ape intelligence is casting a fascinating new light on what it means to be human. Chimpanzees are intelligent in some surprising ways, and not so in others; we like to think we're the most intelligent species on the planet, but we have to be careful about what we exactly mean about intelligence.

The first thing we have to get rid of when we think about animal intelligence is the idea that there is some kind of ladder of intelligence, that goes from low to high, and animals can be just placed upon it. It's more complicated than that; different animals have different intelligences. For instance, the best memorisers in the world (which include us) are squirrels and birds that hide their nuts in different locations and can remember dozens of locations, far more than we can. In the case of apes, what science shows is that they are especially good at cognising things about the physical world, and understanding space, and causal relations like when using tools, or what causes something to move, and are not that different from human children in that kind of understanding.

Homing in on the specific aspects of human intelligence and behaviour that sets us apart from our ape cousins, the ability to use lateral thinking is an ability you might think chimps don't have, but at certain tasks, chimps are cleverer than you might think. Intelligence is a complex subject; some researchers have found that the level of our measured "IQ" might even affect how we perceive the world differently, not just from other species, but from other people, too.

But what really makes us different is our ability to put our heads together, and to do things that neither one of us could do alone, to create new resources that neither one of us could create alone. It's really all about communicating, and collaborating and working together.

Scientists say working together is an important part of being human.

Subsequently, it is thought that there is some kind of add-on effect of teaching and of being in a human society and culture that builds on those innate abilities. If you raised a child on a desert island with no social contact - no teaching, no contact with humans - their intelligence as an adult would be very similar to that of other apes. It would be a little different, but we are evolved to learn from others, to communicate and collaborate with others. If there is no one around us, no culture, tools or language, then the natural human intelligence just wouldn't develop. Some say the way fish are born expecting water - they are born ready - made with fins and gills - humans are born expecting culture.

At the heart of being a human then is our culture, and something that goes hand in hand with human culture is our ability to co-operate. Scientists believe there is a specific piece of behaviour that separates us from chimps, that defines us as a species, and truly makes us human. Simply put, people pull together. Co-operation in the chimp world, on the other hand, is a fragile thing. For our closest relatives, studies suggest that chimps will co-operate, but only for selfish ends.

The idea is that individually human kids are not that naturally generous with sharing, either, but when they work together and generate rewards together, they tend to want them to be divided equally. Scientific studies have shown that young kids at an age you wouldn't normally think would be interesting in sharing, do so when they work together. It's a seemingly small, but crucial difference between us and chimpanzees.

Human children will do something no other ape will do - in that small act of sharing is revealed something that really does lie at the heart of what it is to be human. It's a tiny but profound difference between us and the other apes, and it's a way of thinking that underpins our ability to cooperate and create human culture.

Somehow these huge brains that we've got - and what goes on inside these huge organs in our heads - encapsulate the main differences between ourselves and our closest cousins. It is amazing how the whole complexity of the human body comes from a single fertilized egg, that single cell with genes passed down, to end up with a human being. Six months as a brand new human still in the womb, and you can see structures inside the brain growing fast, which will already be half the size of an adult chimpanzee's brain. That growing head can't fail to remind expectant mothers of something that is especially tricky for us humans - birth.

The enormous size of our brains, together with the other uniquely human trait of walking about on two legs, conspire to make human birth something of a squeeze - as any mother will tell you. It brings it home that human childbirth is really something special and unique, even amongst all other animals. It's remarkable how quick and easy it is to give birth in the animal kingdom, certainly when compared to the rather more drawn-out and painful business of a human birth.

When looking at the anatomy of childbirth, you can see why it's such a difficult process, the baby's head is only about a centimetre smaller than the birth canal. It's always been thought that there are constraints on the width of the pelvis, which are all about walking on two legs, that the hips can't actually be pushed any further apart, because that would make walking inefficient. For our big-brained babies this means that they couldn't actually stay in the womb any longer, else their heads would be too big to fit out through the birth canal. And so our babies are born at a relatively early stage of development. Our new born babies are helpless.

This is one of the most puzzling paradoxes about being human. For all our brilliance as a species, compared with other apes, our babies come into the world a bit useless (amazing cute factor notwithstanding). For decades we've assumed that our helpless babies are an unfortunate consequence of walking upright and having big brains. It's called the obstetric dilemma, and it's in all the textbooks: The female pelvis is struggling to do two different jobs and we're stuck with these "helpless" babies. Some believe if we could explain this dilemma, we'd start to open the door to a treasure trove of insights about being human.

There's some science emerging from the east coast of America that's shaking up the traditional view of women's hips - and our brains. What is it about our evolution that sets up such a difficult childbirth experience as compared to other chimpanzees and apes? With natural selection acting on the size of our brains and walking upright has brought them together to create a difficult process of birth. The female pelvis is a comprise between something that needs to be wide to let a large-brained baby out, but needs to be narrow in order to make walking physically efficient.

Although this dilemma is unique to humans, no one thought to question the assumptions it is based on. In America, researchers have been testing these assumptions about the female pelvis, where it was always assumed that a woman's hips muscles attached to a wider pelvis meant females had to work harder than men at walking and running. But what the experiments revealed was that women's hips may be wider, but their "wobble" adjusts their balance and weight minimising any difference. New science is suggesting that for decades we have got it wrong about women; there isn't a constraint on how wide the pelvis is in terms of being efficient at bipedalism.

The data suggests that the female pelvis has not been comprised at all, and is just as efficient as men at running and walking. So why didn't the female pelvis evolve even wider, to allow our babies to grow a bit bigger and be a bit less helpless at birth? The length of the birth gestation, it turns out, has nothing to do with the width of the birth canal, but everything to do with energy. As the child gets bigger in the womb, it needs more and more energy. Our bodies are limited in how much energy it can burn, and it doesn't matter how much we eat to give more energy to the foetus, because you can't metabolise any quicker.

It would be metabolically impossible for gestation to continue for a few months more. Usually a woman gives birth at the maximum energy expenditure level we would expect of a normal body, which becomes unsustainable just about nine months in. The baby comes out at a moment in time just when it's about to start demanding for more energy than the mother can give it via the placenta. The revolutionary research reveals that however wide female hips became, our babies couldn't stay inside a womb a moment longer than they do. The female pelvis isn't a design compromise, and new born babies - although we might feel they are coming into the world too early - are actually entering the world just at the right time.

It also works within the context of human society, because otherwise we wouldn't be here in the numbers we are. We gestate for as long as we should for primates our body size, and maybe a little longer. We give birth to babies at the right size for primates our body size, or maybe a little larger. It's just that once they're born they have so much more growth to experience, particularly in the brain, and while we are achieving that growth, we also have much more to learn about how to be a human than a chimp has to learn about how to be a chimp.

It seems, then, that the very nature of human birth - of bringing a seemingly underdeveloped baby into the world - is in fact a key ingredient in the baby's path to become human. Our babies may be born helpless, but far from being a dumb idea, it turns out to be one of the smartest moves we ever made. Because in order to develop their full human potential, the brains of our human babies need the stimulation of other humans. Somehow, the secrets of being human are locked away inside the brain, the most complicated mysterious object in the universe.

Scientists have speculated that the human brain features a "God spot", one distinct area of the brain responsible for spirituality. Now researchers have completed research that indicates spirituality is a complex phenomenon, and multiple areas of the brain are responsible for the many aspects of spiritual experiences. In one sense, there is no single spot where your authentic self resides, the entire brain is "God" or what makes us human.

Read how to search for your spirit.

But the brain is an organ that has thus far kept its secrets wrapped up tight. One of the characteristics of the human brain is how incredibly folded the cortex is, and under dissection you get the impression that there is a lot of information being packed into a small area. Rather appropriate then, for it's the organ, more than any other part of our body, that is us. A physical object that contains our personality, the main seat of our emotions and where we experience the world and hold our memories.

Despite several hundred years of probing, exactly how the human brain achieves all that remains shrouded in mystery. What little we do know only makes it seem all the more extraordinary. We know that a human brain contains a staggering one hundred billion neurons, but it's not just the number of brain cells that matters. What makes the human brain so incredible is the huge number of connections between those cells, the vastly complex internal wiring. Human brains have about 40% more connections between cortical neurons than the brains of other primates. That is around a hundred trillion connections in every brain.

We know the basic anatomy of the brain quite well, but if we want to begin to understand this extraordinary level of complexity, some believe we need to look at the brain in a whole new light. To discover exactly how our human brains came to be so highly connected, scientists are now researching into the human genome, the recipe for making a human being. There are three billion letters in the human genome, stored in the 23 chromosomes that hold the recipe in every cell of our bodies. Each letter A G C and T represents one of the four bases, the chemical building blocks, which make up the long strands of our DNA. For geneticists, these letters hold the clues that could unlock the secrets of the human brain.

The whole genome would fill 670,000 sheets of paper and it would take two people more than a week working 24 hours a day to lay out the entire human code. It's fascinating to think that our entire life lies in this code. And if we want to find out what makes the human code unique, we need to compare our recipe with others. The breakthrough that allows us to this is that, as well as the human genome, scientists have sequenced the genomes of many other animals. But finding the crucial sections of code that make us human is a monster puzzle.

One of the important steps in this process is to try to identify what lies in our human genome that make us human by trying to find differences at the base pair level in the coding sequences between us and other species - for example of our closest living relative, the chimpanzee. Geneticists have focused in on one particular change that is specific to humans and is thought could be fundamental. It involves a gene called SRGAP2 that is found in all animals and mainly affects the developing brain. Only in humans is this gene duplicated four times.

The SRGAP2 gene is one we have in common with the other apes, but we have three more copies of it. The human duplication of this gene has been discovered by geneticists to have a dramatic effect on the connectivity of neurons. In this context, human beings stand apart completely. Human neurons have about 40-50% increase in the total number of connections made onto them, which we know is a feature that distinguishes them from other species. For me, this is when genetics gets really exciting, because we've got an actual, observable physical difference between the brains of chimpanzees and the brains of humans which could potentially be explained by something in our genome.

Every nuance of human behaviour somehow springs from this massive, branching network of hyper-connected neurons in our huge brains. It's what makes the human brain so adept - this complex wiring diagram of connections that holds our memories, our emotions, our ability to be creative. It's what makes us human. But to even contemplate unravelling the mysteries of this diagram, we need a whole new way of looking.

Neuroscientists have set themselves the ambitious task of creating the ultimate map, a wiring diagram of the human brain, one connection at a time. The numbers are astronomical, and some equate it to looking at galaxies and counting stars, but if completed, some believe this monumental map could finally reveal the mystifying workings of the human brain. Technology needs to advance rapidly for us to be able to do this in a realistic time frame, but the small attempts out there are already giving us a glimpse into the inner workings of the brain, revealing a tiny cross-section of the maze of wires at the heart of the brain.

Creating a three-dimensional model of the individual wires that connect the brain of a mouse, for example, shows that circuitry is incredible dense. Other scientists have created a way to make a human brain transparent, enabling them to take deep three-dimensional tours through the mysterious organ and trace its circuitry down to the molecular level. It's hoped it will bring accelerate investigations into Alzheimer's disease, schizophrenia and a host of other brain maladies, while bringing significant insight to the peculiar characteristics of neurons associated with Down syndrome and autism.

For humans trying to contemplate this, the difficulty is that it's hard for a human brain to understand the extraordinary complexity of a human brain. We think we're really smart and that we can understand everything, but in fact the machine we're using to allow us to understand things is way more complicated than the comparatively simple thoughts that come out of our minds. Scientists accept accept that current computer technology is insufficient to simulate complex brain function. But within a decade, supercomputers may be sufficiently powerful to begin the first draft simulation of the human brain.

Our brains are not only large, they have many more connections than the brains of any other animal. Ultimately, by reaching down to these individual neurons, by mapping the trillions of connections, we may be able to pinpoint exactly how these hyper-connections translate into the psychology and behaviour of human beings. For most animals, their brains are largely encoded by their genes. A fruit fly does not have to go to school to fly, and doesn't even have to learn how to fly. In humans, it's very hard to know what kinds of behaviours we have intrinsically - possibly coughing, bowel movements, breathing and a few other things we can definitely do. But learning how to read or use language you think with, all requires learning. We are obligate learners; it's not an extra, but an essential ingredient for being a human being.

Into this mix comes the discovery of epigenetics - hidden influences upon the genes - which proponents say could affect every aspect of our lives and how we understand the brain. At the heart of this controversial field is a simple but contentious idea - that genes have a "memory". That the lives of your grandparents - the air they breathed, the food they ate, even the things they saw - can directly affect you, decades later, despite your never experiencing these things yourself. And that what you do in your lifetime could in turn affect your grandchildren.

Do human cells have memory?

The conventional view is that DNA carries all our heritable information and that nothing an individual does in their lifetime will be biologically passed to their children. To many scientists, epigenetics amounts to a heresy, calling into question the accepted view of the DNA sequence - a cornerstone on which modern biology sits. For them, the data tends to lean towards humans having essentially more behaviour which is learned, and less behaviour which is programmed right from the beginning.

Science suggests we come into the world seemingly knowing much less about the world than almost any other animal. It takes us a year to walk, 18 years to leave the nest (much longer for some of our species depending on our culture) - and during all that time, humans are building up information about how to behave, and the neural circuits for behaviour are believed to be based on experience, rather than genetic information.

A human being today, as an adult, is doing an entirely different set of things than humans were doing thousands of years ago, and in the main, any young person will tell you that their parents seem old-fashioned and their grandparents seem positively ancient. But imagine what people were doing thousands of years ago - it's because humans constantly evolve in a cultural way, even though our genetic heritage has not changed very rapidly. Some scientists believe that's the real genius of being a human being.

But whether we are a more of a mixture of one, than another, or a harmonious blend of the intrinsic and external experiences, we end up with brains that are capable of amazing feats. And although all these complex dense connections of our brain begin in the womb, the point at which we start to become truly human - not just in a physical sense - is the point where we get that interplay between nature and nurture - the process that really carves out a human mind, and that starts at birth. Having emerged into the world, we are full of potential, and we are ready to learn to become a human being.

We have a mind-bending brain

One of the most fundamental question in the cosmos from our perspective is trying to look inside our mind and understand how it works. How much do we know about our own brains, and what do our own brains say about us? When we look at the way our brain interprets the world and its complex systems, things are not always what they seem.

Our senses constantly bombard us with information, and most of the time they give us a fair idea of what's really going on. For instance, we learn to read each other's feelings (and understand our own) from facial cues over time, which includes breaking down human emotions that we kind of intuit, to a certain extent, into a set list of 412 emotions, and these emotionally engage us with each other. But sometimes our brains take one short cut too many, and the result is an illusion - something that is not what it appears to be.

Illusion rely on tricking the brain, playing with our expectations of how the world works and what we're presented with. We believe what we see so easily, for instance, that we have had to learn not trust everything we see on the screen. Meanwhile, scientists have realised that these glitches in perception could be useful in furthering our understanding of the brain, and providing valuable insights into how we make sense of the world and the way the brain works.

Our susceptibility to illusions is because the brain has to make sure it cuts a little time in predicting the world around it, so it makes certain assumptions, rather than working everything out from first principles. It is those assumptions that can sometimes take us down the wrong track, and that's why we have these effects where sometimes what we think we see, is not really what is there at all.

Thus, if we rely solely on our sense of sight, the powerful brain can be easily fooled. Part of this also involves the map your mind has already made being suddenly different to the information it's getting - so it's not just influenced by what it assumes it sees at that moment, but by assumptions based on stored information it saw previously. However, our brain is very plastic, so it remoulds itself very well. It's very flexible. It can adapt to changes and recalibrate. It will learn to accommodate those changes, known as residual correction, and it is amazing how quickly the brain can adapt.

We often describe the brain as the most complicated structure in the universe. Now this may be to partly flatter ourselves, but the exact internal workings do remain an enigma. However, over the last few years, neuroscientists have been attempting to decode the patterns of electrical activity in our brains. Researchers in this area believe the brain to essentially be an electrical machine, and so running any sort of "noise" through it would disrupt its processes. Thus the brain's processes is said to be affected by magnetic fields and similar currents.

In studies with Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS), scientists put an electromagnet very close to the brain. The current generated by transmagnetic stimulation disrupted the normal firing of the motor cortex to show that despite our willpower and control, when the electrical activity of the brain is disrupted, no amount of will can change such an effect (i.e., a loss of coordination). We can lose motor control of our bodies, and it can play havoc with our senses - excommunicating us from our authentic self.

In time, some scientists believe that computers can be trained to read the signals fired off in our brain, and thus read our thoughts and mind. When the brain fires off signals, there is now technology out there that can use these to "read our minds" and decode our thoughts. This has been possible because scientists have discovered a pattern to how we think.

For example, when we perceive or think of an object, we think about how we physically interact with it, how we hold it, whether or not we can eat it, and whether or not you can take shelter in it. This is how we index the world. What this tells us about what's going on in our heads is that the brain's representation of the world is its record of how it interacts with the world. In effect, these are the fundamental ways we learn to interact with our environment. Our responses almost represent an underlying code that scientists are saying technology may in the future recognise, and if it becomes portable, we may all be able to read each other's with our smartphones.

Although at an early stage, such studies seems to prove that mind-reading is possible, and it's only likely to get more sophisticated. The nature of the world is that people will try to exploit this for commercial or covert use (as believed by theorists who say magnetic waves are used to take over the control of your brain), because if technology can read thoughts, they may also detect the suppression of them. Brain decoding technology as forensic evidence - a brain scan lie detector - has already been used in America, with positive results.

Detractors to such technology do point out that machines cannot tell what we are thinking, and the carrying out of crimes is too complex for a simple yes or no answer, but in the recognition of objects, and the suppression of thoughts it might be useful - as in asking a suspect if he or she recognises an object only the murderer could have known, for instance. There are others that believe that we can differentiate a psychopath from a normal person because of a marked difference in their brain scans.

Scans show that a psychopath's frontal lobe is not as active compared to a normal brain, which arguably means they lack empathy, the ability to take someone else's perspective, and are too self-regarding - the "traits" of a psychopathic nature. There are written questionnaires that have been developed to do much the same thing, and weed out these traits in a person's personality. According to new research, however, psychopaths do not lack empathy, rather they can switch it on at will, so a brain scan might not be any more conclusive than a written questionnaire working on a points system.

Furthermore, having a psychopathic character, or being associated to psychopathy, does not always mean you're going to be a serial killer, either. If you want to be a statesman or a soldier, it is sometimes believed to be beneficial to be able to remain cold and rational, although many would say that those in power need more empathy in decision-making, not less. Others also say, when it comes to thought suppression detection, you can beat such technology by engaging in some other thought process. But if nothing else, it shows just how far we have come in our ability to read minds as we go deeper to unlock the brain's secrets.

How to manage your inner chimp

As human beings we’re always seeking to understand why we act and react to things in life in the way that we do. Our mind is the most powerful tool that we have. It can either build you up or tear you down.

How you think affects everything you do. Maybe we’re irrational and fail to see logic, or maybe we just get lazy. Then there’s worry, stress, and lack of confidence, which are all bound to happen at different points in our lives.

The Chimp Paradox, written by consultant psychiatrist Dr Steve Peters, can help find a simple way to understand our minds. It isn't a recipe for instant success, rather it offers up a blueprint or framework that people can apply to themselves and their life. Dr Peters wrote his book with men in mind, but the principle is not gender specific.

To get quality of life - to be happy, confident, self-assured, inspirational and successful - acquiring an understanding of the structure of the mind in a simple way that’s accessible is important. Once we understand the rules of the mind and how it works, we can apply it to ourselves individually, so that we can actually work out from our perspective how our particular mind is functioning.

The Chimp Paradox begins by offering up a concept that simplifies how the human mind works and introduces us to our inner chimpanzee. The chimp, as Dr Peters puts it, is simply an "emotional machine" that makes up one of three parts in our unique psychological mind alongside our "human brain" and our "computer brain".

Dr Peter goes on to elucidate on his theory that the chimp can be a good thing, but generally it doesn't help and it sabotages people. It’s got a reason for doing that because it has its agendas and its own way of thinking about the world. More often than not these agendas or "drives" are highly emotional, and at times very illogical leading to a huge conflict of interest with the "human brain".

Our "human brain" is the person we really are and acts in a logical way after gathering all available facts. The "computer brain" is where both our human and chimp store information and experiences and acts as a reference point for both as we grow older.

Critically all three brains operate at different speeds and power. Our computer brain is by far the quickest but this is followed by the chimp, which is five times stronger than our human one – which is where things get interesting in learning how to manage it.

Picture this: It’s 6:30am, your alarm buzzes, and, as the rain pours outside the window, that run in the park you promised to do suddenly seems like a very bad idea. And when thoughts saying it's best to stay in that nice warm bed begin to swirl in your head, within a flash your hand has slapped snooze and you tell yourself "I’ll do it tomorrow". Your inner chimp has just won the battle. We all need to learn the skills that will help us understand our brain, and thus get the chimp from out under the covers so we can get on with life.

It's a method that helps us to overcome mental hurdles, and basically is asking us to elicit more psychopathic tendencies in a crisis, rather than listen to our emotions. As I wrote in my "When Should We Let Love Decide?" article, it is better to boost your emotional intelligence, and evolve Dr Peter's "inner chimp" into a human one, rather than try to switch it off with rationalism. However, every individual will find their own way of attaining an understanding with their own brain. The main point is to apply the knowledge gained to achieve harmony through thought and action.

Another such secret is to how many parts we are brain, and how many parts instinct. Case in point, why is it people behave differently in groups than they would on their own? The science behind unconscious group behaviour - or swarming - turns out to be a fundamental behaviour right across nature. Flocks of birds, shoals of fish, armies of ants, swarms of locusts - even we have it.

People in the past believed it had to be telepathy that coordinated such large groups, but scientists now believe swarming is a basic instinct. It's super-fast reaction in time where when our closest neighbour moves, we move doubly faster to spread that action as a wave throughout the group. Even if - say fish - are individually comparatively intelligent to the predator stalking them, as a collective group they can act as some kind of collective mind to get out of the way.

So, what about humans? Do we just follow the quickest person to react? What is it that makes our brains work in a group as one uniform entity? We know crowds seems to have a life of their own, and although we are all intelligent individuals who like to think we go through this world making our own rational decisions about everything we do, what the research shows is that subconsciously we love to part of crowds way more than we think. It's chilling in some ways just how easily led we are.

Different situations will affect the crowd mentality differently, for example crowds in panic situations may just be led by a different part of the brain, while there are parts of the brain that respond to mimicry, too. We do copy each other when we like each other, for instance, we'll adopt the same posture of the person we like. It could also be a manifestation of humans "working together" as mentioned earlier. But often in a crowd situation it may just be that, where you don't have time to think, you're hedging your bets by going with crowd mentality.

Or is human instinct simply mind over matter? If so, can we control our cravings with our mind, or trick our mind to control our cravings? When we see images of food on our screens, our mouths water, but how much is it a relationship with our food, and how much is it our brain putting a spin on things? Well, we've all heard the phrase, "You eat with your eyes", it seems there is scientific evidence that we do eat with our eyes, or at least our brains. So, in fact, the colour of the food, for instance, doesn't just affect what it looks like, but it affects what we taste in our mouth.

It is said that we have five taste centres of salty, sweet, bitter, sour and umami (and a few others we haven't worked out yet), but tests have shown that we will often taste foods with a summery redness as sweeter, because we associate it with sweet berries of that colour. This is something that is common to all people around the world; our brain can be tricked by the presentation of different types of food. The food itself, the colour, the smell, all affects our taste of food, while some believe the utensils we eat the food with also adds to the taste. The atomic reactivity of different metals affects how much they interact with your mouth and the food, and therefore the taste. Stainless steel (like gold) is neutral, so affects the taste of the food as little as possible.

As our taste can be affected by other factors, our receptors in our tongue can also be tricked, or fooled to trick the brain. It is thought that 25% of people are super-tasters, which means they have an extra reception in their tongue for a bitter taste. They have more receptors on their tongue, and these receptors can be tricked to taste sour as sweet. Synsepalum dulcificum - known as the miracle berry - works to damp down the bitter receptors in the tongue. It binds to the sweet receptors and changes their shape, sort of turns them up full volume, if you like, where you have a low pH and so something acidic like lemon will seem very sweet to taste, because of the heightened the sweet receptors. Any sweet in the lemon will suddenly seem intensely sweet and drown out the sour.

How can we use this knowledge to affect what we eat? Could we use it to trick ourselves to like less unhealthy foods? Some are now asking - if our brain can be tricked through taste - whether it can also be tricked to eat healthier. Our brain tells us to go after sugar and sweet, because we are hard-wired for it, but what if we could fool our brains into thinking we are eating something sweet with this miracle berry or fruit? Could we use it to make healthy food taste better than junk food?

Meanwhile some researchers believe they have found evidence that shows appetite control could be rewired. Scientists have identified a group of brain cells which have the power to control appetite and could be a major cause of eating disorders such as obesity. It was previously thought that nerve cells in the brain associated with appetite regulation were generated entirely during an embryo's development in the womb and could not be altered - but it seems the plasticity of the brain knows no bounds.

Surely such an organ as the brain, with its mind-bending properties, must have developed for a purpose? After all, it is this breadth of the brain which underpins all religions about our species, that human beings have a special place in the universe. Some people believe that as science replaced religion in our search for answers, our place in the universe became less special. But as the science of the brain shows, we are anything but.

And as we continue this "love-fest" for our brain, in part two of this series we will delve deeper into science to understand what it is to be who we are. We shall see how interconnected our brain is with our perception of humanity, and how we can strengthen our brain power to improve those qualities we have come to label as human.

Read more in this series: -1 -2 -3

Yours in love,