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Brain Story - 1/6

All In The Mind

The story of how science has begun to understand the astonishing complexity of the brain is revealed ' from the earliest crude studies of the effects of brain injury, through to the latest insights from direct stimulation of specific areas in patients undergoing brain surgery whilst wide awake. Professor Greenfield meets Sarah Kitchen while the latter is undergoing surgery to remove a brain tumour, performed by neurosurgeon Henry Marsh. Because of the site of the tumour, there is a danger that the surgery could result in damage to the area of Sarah's brain that appears to be responsible for her speech. So she is kept awake for this part of the operation and asked to keep talking.

But what about more complicated processes than even speech? Susan asks if it is possible that artistic and even spiritual feelings are merely the result of electrical activity in the temporal lobe area of the brain.

Susan meets a woman whose particular form of epilepsy causes her to see colours very vividly and to experience intensely religious hallucinations ' two distinct characteristics of painter Vincent Van Gogh, another sufferer of temporal lobe epilepsy.