Foreword

Science was never my strong suit. As a student, the mathematics and graphs, the test tubes and pipettes, all the wizardry that transforms science from what someone once called “making nasty smells in a laboratory” into a dynamic engine of discovery left me baffled and confused. I was interested in the humanities—in poems and stories which seemed to me to be asking the essential questions about what it is to be human. Perhaps that is why I was drawn to making a series of films on the brain, for no other organ can tell us as much about who we are and what we might become. But now, with the television documentary The Secret Life of the Brain finished, when people ask me what I learned about the brain, I begin by telling them what I found out about science.

The first thing I learned was how a scientist confronts a problem. When I asked neuroscientist Susan McConnell, for example, how, out of the union of sperm and egg, a human brain could grow into the most complex thing in the universe, with billions and billions of nerve cells making trillions of connections, here’s what she told me: “It’s almost overwhelming to think about the whole thing. If you think about how the whole brain and nervous system get assembled . . . you just want to throw up your hands and say, ‘It’s way too complicated.’ ”

Scientists explore enormous questions like mine, McConnell explained, by breaking them down into smaller ones, designed to yield incremental answers. My question, ‘How does the brain build itself?,’ translates into a series of investigations: How do neurons first form? How do they find their place in a growing brain? How do they make connections with other neurons? Then these questions are parsed into still smaller questions—anatomical, cellular, molecular—piling speculation upon speculation, experiment upon experiment, hypothesis upon hypothesis.

Suddenly I saw why science had always been so difficult for me. Lost in a thicket of proliferating questions, I was unable to find my way back to that initial curiosity and wonder that inspired the investigation in the first place.

Here, then, was the first challenge for our documentary: to explore the various levels of complexity at which scientists work without losing sight of the fundamental questions about the human condition that are at stake.

I’ve always felt confident that television can communicate complex ideas as long as they are rooted in the emotional contours of our lives. For me, television works most effectively when thought resonates with feeling. Television may make information hard to digest, but not ideas. Too many facts interrupt the emotional flow of the narrative, threatening to sink it under the weight of endless detail. That’s why I wanted our films to elaborate scientific ideas in the context of real-life human situations. If the stories were intense enough, people would remember them, and the concepts they embodied. I soon discovered that my instincts about television were supported by science: studies of memory have demonstrated that the ideas and facts we remember best are those charged with emotion, proving to me once again how surprising, and gratifying, making documentary films can be.

Our central concept, the theme that we would pursue in every program, emerged slowly. When we began research, exploring brain functions like memory, vision, and cognition, we were calling the series Secrets of the Brain. But with the help of science reporter June Kinoshita and the assistance of the Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives, I soon learned that, more and more, neuroscientists were looking at the brain from the point of view of its development, studying the brain’s plasticity—that is, its ability to change and grow over the course of a lifetime. When we are young, our brains are at their most plastic, a real advantage during a period when we have to learn as quickly as we can in order to equip ourselves to survive. Contrary to what was once generally believed, however, the brain continues to evolve and change along with the rest of the body throughout our lives.

The brain and its capacity for change became the central theme of our series, and with it came a new title, The Secret Life of the Brain, with an emphasis on “life.” I liked the feel of that. I imagined five programs—the brain of the baby, the child, the teenager, and the adult, and the brain in old age—each program framed by a question:

How does the brain form?
How does a child acquire language?
Is there a connection between brain development during adolescence, the onset of schizophrenia, and the prevalence of teenage addiction?
How does an adult find a balance between reason and emotion?
Why do some people remain energetic and vital in old age, while others do not?

The Secret Life of the Brain pursued these questions by telling stories about the brain’s remarkable journey over the course of a lifetime. In our first program, for example, we tell how a baby, born with a cataract, needs to have the lens clouding her vision removed as soon as possible because, in order to develop normally, the areas of the brain responsible for vision require the stimulation of electrical pulses generated by light striking the retina. If the brain cells devoted to vision do not form the proper connections with one another early on, they never will. Without an operation in the first few months of her life, the baby risks blindness in the clouded eye, even if she has the cataract removed later, and regardless of the subsequent health of the eye itself.

To my taste, when a single instance becomes emblematic of a larger concept, television is working at its best. The cataract story embodies a large idea: Our brains and the world around us are involved in a delicate duet; our brains change and adapt in response to an environment acting upon our genetic endowment. But emblem making can be misleading. It’s easy to construe meanings too broadly —in this case, to extrapolate from visual development to the development of other parts of the brain. With the help of neuroscientists Pat Kuhl and Helen Neville, I learned that the brain consists of many different systems, each developing at its own pace and in its own way.

Development, in other words, isn’t etched in stone; the brain doesn’t run on a deadline like a train leaving the station at an appointed hour. Our brains evolve gradually over a lifetime – which is good news for parents. Eager to encourage the intellectual and emotional development of their children, some parents worry obsessively about providing “developmentally correct stimulation” and earnestly turn to science for guidance. Because of one well-publicized but misconstrued study suggesting the beneficial effects of Mozart on the brain, for example, eighteenth century harmonies drift sweetly over the cribs of thousands of infants with no real evidence that music does anything for the baby other than to soothe a well-meaning parent’s anxiety.

Fortunately, parents can relax. The first years of life are only the beginning of a slow process of growth that fathers and mothers can encourage by simply spending time enjoying their children. What once used to be referred to as “critical periods” of development, scientists now call “sensitive periods.” We humans could hardly have survived as long as we have if our species were solely dependent upon specific experiences at specific times. As dramatic as the cataract story is, infancy and early childhood are the first stages of brain development, but not the last. It’s like laying the foundation of a house, one scientist told me. Without the foundation, the house cannot stand, but construction doesn’t stop there. During those first years, the infant brain develops very quickly: language, cognition, perception, and the major behavioral systems are put into place, but it is the fine-tuning of these systems throughout our lives that ultimately accounts for who we are.

Bringing good science to television is a complicated business. I was fortunate to work with a group of talented filmmakers who were comfortable with complex ideas and could examine them in all their human dimensions. Sarah Colt, Jenny Carchman, Ed Gray, Tom Jennings, Michael Penland, Amanda Pollack, and Annie Wong spent many months bringing the series to life, with Lesley Norman ably keeping the machinery of production running smoothly.

I was equally fortunate to work with Richard Restak, who has taken the concepts we developed for The Secret Life of the Brain and expanded and elaborated them into this clear and thoughtful book, traveling down pathways where our series had no time to go, and lingering in a way that only a good book can. In a film, nothing stands still. Our series takes you on a visual journey into the brain, down nerve fibers, across the microscopic synaptic gap between nerve cells, even into the cell itself, but Restak’s book gives you the time to pause and reflect. Adding his own research to ours, Restak provides new layers of analysis and insight, giving an interested reader time to consider and re-consider. His book is the perfect complement to our film.

Now that The Secret Life of the Brain is done, what strikes me is not only how much scientists have discovered in just the last ten years, but how much there still is to know. Perhaps that’s why, in making this series, I so often turned to poets to articulate the mysteries that remain. After all, Wordsworth called poetry “felt thought,” or, put another way, “how an idea feels.” Scientists and poets, I learned, share the same passions and puzzle over the same problems.

Pondering the immensity and power of the small, crinkled organ weighing less than three pounds, Emily Dickinson tells us that “The brain is wider than the sky,” and more, that “The brain is just the weight of God.” Theodore Roethke, attempting to fathom the delicate relationship between cognition and emotion, writes, “We think by feeling,” anticipating the research of neuroscientist Antonio Damasio and Joseph LeDoux, among others. And poet laureate Stanley Kunitz speaks directly to the theme of The Secret Life of the Brain when he writes:

“I’ve walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I’m not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray...”

At 95 years old, Kunitz is himself a testament to the brain’s remarkable ability to learn and adapt, even into old age:

“... no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.”

David Grubin