One night, Lotje Sodderland, then a 34-year-old producer at an advertising agency, woke with excruciating pain in her head. She remembers looking at her phone, recognising it as something that could help her, but not knowing how it worked. Then she lost consciousness and someone else called 999. Emergency surgery removed half a cup of blood that had leaked into her brain from a burst vessel.
The stroke that didn’t quite kill Lotje did fundamentally change her, and the way she saw the world. It also left her fascinated by the science that had saved her life, and by the pioneers at the cutting edge of technology doing it. So, she embarked on a journey to find out what is possible in the outer reaches of what she calls “brain fixing”.
Not a neuroscientist herself, then, nor a science journalist, but an expert in another way, in that she has experienced coming round in a strange world she didn’t recognise. She sees a certain amount of irony in it, too. “I think it’s fun that I have a dodgy brain and that my dodgy brain is trying to understand how this incredibly complicated, delicate thing works,” she says.
In Bristol, Lotje meets lovely Deirdre, a retired nurse with Parkinson’s disease, which she describes as like being “invaded”. Deirdre is having deep brain stimulation, which starts with Steven Gill, the neurosurgeon, using a robot to drill a hole in her head, then implanting electrons in there. Lotje is watching, and says: “It’s like he’s diving into her soul to bring back the person she was before.”
Whoa, no sign of any language loss there, that’s good, even if Gill might not describe the procedure in exactly the same way. It really works – not Deirdre’s deep brain stimulation (we won’t know that for a few weeks), but the way Lotje has done this documentary, a journey of discovery by someone who has a deeply personal interest in the subject, which makes here a compelling travelling companion for the viewer. Plus, she asks questions, not just about the science, but philosophical and ethical ones as well. Such as: does science really know what it is playing with? Where is all this heading?
To the US, where they have been doing research with people on the autistic spectrum, using a magnetic field on the brain to unlock emotions. With profound effects – not always great. John, a classic car enthusiast and dealer in Massachusetts, found his awakening and new emotional connections after just one session of exposure to magnetic pulses really difficult. It was not, as he had imagined, only the beauty and sweetness and light he had been missing out on, but also anger and fear, jealousy and angst. “Now I realise that my autism really in many ways was a protective shield,” he tells Lotje.
You think that is pushing things? What about optogenetics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology? By making neurons sensitive to light, they can dial information into the brain, upload sensations, make the brain more anxious or calm, trigger memories to be recalled or erased …
Brilliant, you say – think how that could help people with PTSD. But look at this study on a bunch of mice that will attack whatever is next to them, even a rubber glove, when triggered to do so with light. This experiment was at the California Institute of Technology. Scary, no? Imagine if it got into the wrong hands – they could create an army of fearless psychopaths. I wonder if Charlie Brooker is watching. Could be one for him.
Back to the old country – Bristol, England – where Deirdre is having the electrodes in her brain switched on, to see if it will bring a bit of control back to her life again. For the first time in 12 years she walks, unaided, in a straight line. Brilliant, then, as well as terrifying.
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Oh God, another of these marathon countdown shows. First dogs, now Britain’s Favourite Walks: Top 100 (ITV). With Julia Bradbury and Ore Oduba … and coast paths, and city walks, and Robert Bathurst, and The Lake District (of course), and Yorkshire, and Janet Street Porter (of course), Ben Nevis and Snowdon ... There are more African elephants in the world than grey seals? That is surprising. As is the winner, the No 1 walk: Helvellyn. Oh.
