The late Francis Crick, one of Britain's most famous scientists, won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962. He is best known for his discovery, jointly with James Watson and Maurice Wilkins, of the double helix structure of DNA, though he also made important contributions in understanding the genetic code and was exploring the basis of consciousness in the years leading up to his death in 2004.
I think that physicists and computer scientists are interested in the brain. Everybody is interested in the brain. So they naturally like to apply the idea they have to what they’ve learned about the brain. This, I would say, has had mixed success. Because a caricature of what can happen- a physicist works in a certain area, and he has a certain expertise; he learns something rather superficially about the brain. He thinks, Oh, my expertise or my way of thinking about it will be useful for the brain. He produces a theory without having any close knowledge of really what the problems are in the brain or even, it seems to me in many cases, not really caring how you would test the idea experimentally on the brain. They just like the idea because it’s such a pretty idea. I’m not- obviously, in some cases that will be useful because it will introduce new ideas from outside. But it does seem as if it produces too many ideas which are unlikely to be right. So there’s an awful lot of noise among the good stuff. And I would say the same thing- thing has been happening with people working in artificial intelligence using computers because it’s doubtful if the actual way that you program a von Neumann computer, the sort of thing you have in a personal computer at home, that type of computer, is really the sort of thing that goes on in the brain. And the new type of computing, the parallel distributive processing, which is more brain-like, is- ideas based on that are likely to be more useful, but you can’t be sure. In a subject like this, since we don’t know the answers, we can’t say in advance which- for sure which is going to be useful or not. We can only just have our prejudices. When we know what we think are the right sort of answers, we can look back, of course, and say, you know, that approach was a waste of time. But at the moment, it must- it can only be somebody’s individual opinion.
Title: Interest in the brain
Listeners:
Christopher Sykes
Christopher Sykes is an independent documentary producer who has made a number of films about science and scientists for BBC TV, Channel Four, and PBS.
In 1993 he and his wife, Lotte, made a series for BBC2 called 'Seven
Wonders of the World', in which outstanding scientists were invited to
talk about themselves and their own seven wonders... Francis Crick
declined to play this particular game (on the basis that 'everything is
wonderful'), but he did agree to spend a couple of hours talking about
his life and and work. The footage did not appear in the 'Seven
Wonders' series, and has never been publicly shown. When Crick died in the summer of 2004, BBC TV kindly gave permission for it to be included in 'Peoples Archive'.
Technical note: the videotapes from which the Peoples Archive streaming version has been prepared had timecode-in-vision in the lower third of the picture. We have reframed the material to exclude this timecode because it is distracting, although this does mean that the image is sometimes a more extreme close-up than either director or cameraman ever intended!
Duration:
2 minutes
Date story recorded/uploaded:
1993
Date story went live:
08 January 2010
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