Sanjay Manohar is an Associate Professor and Honorary Consultant at NDCN, and leads the Computational Neurology group. Adventures of the Brain: What the Brain Does and How it Works, is a funny and accessible guide to the brain for children eight years and above.
Hi Sanjay! Can you tell us a bit more about your research here at NDCN?
My research group looks at computational neurology, which bridges computational neuroscience with clinical neurology and tries to understand how neurological disorders are caused by computational changes: so how thinking processes are disrupted when you take a piece of the system out. As part of this, I study a range of neurological diseases that affect the brain, which includes neurodegenerative diseases (like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease), as well as focal damage from strokes.
What made you decide to work in neuroscience?
As an undergraduate studying medicine, I had an extraordinary professor called Roger Carpenter. He inspired a generation of people to go into neurology and neuroscience. He made me think about everything from the brain’s biology all the way up to consciousness and attention, and trying to think about them in terms of physiology. One of my first projects was actually writing computer programs to go with his textbook, so that’s how I first got into education and publishing.
Tell us about Adventures of the Brain. how did the book come about and how long did it take to write?
I had just finished writing another book on computer programming for scientists. A publisher who I knew asked me whether I’d like to write a book for eight-year-olds on the brain. It took about one full month in total to write. The thing that took the most time was reviewing all the art, to make sure it really told the story.
What is it about?
Although it’s called Adventures of the Brain I think it’s much more ‘adventures of cognition’ because to me, cognition is the pinnacle of the brain’s functions. It looks at the kinds of problems the brain is trying to solve, and the algorithms it’s employing to solve those problems. The book really straddles neuroscience and psychology.
The book is in a form of a comic strip – why did you choose to do that?
The publisher suggested it for this age group. I was very pleased when I knew it was going to be a comic book because I have an eight-year-old son, and I know the attention span is about five pictures, and then they get bored.
Did your son help you?
He did proof read it, yes! He gave me feedback that the brain character looked scary. So we had to change that!
What challenges did you face while putting the book together?
Negotiating with the artist on how to draw some of these bits and pieces – it’s very much the artist’s idea of what he imagined it might be like. Which is really fun, but you have to strike a compromise between what’s true and what is fun to see and understandable by a child.
Are there many children’s books on the brain?
There are only a few others, one of which is the excellent Usborne Book of the Brain by my colleague, Betina Ip. Betina is a vision researcher, also in NDCN. My book is complementary to Betina’s. I’ve focused on getting children to think about their own thought-processes in different ways than they’re used to.
What are you hoping that children take away from the book?
The main thing I want children to understand about the brain is that it produces thoughts, ideas, memory and experience. One thing that I hope a child really gets out of this, is the understanding of what’s involved in simple things like picking up a cup - it’s not really done by the hand, it’s a complex job done by the brain.
Why do you think it’s important that children learn about the brain?
I think it’s important to shift what some people call ‘folk psychology’ to be more mechanistic. Folk psychology is the way we’re all taught to think about our own thoughts. You might learn the word ‘want’ and couple it with all the things that drive your behaviour: like hunger generating certain types of action, or seeing something and forming a plan to reach for it. We build up these concepts from a young age, mapping words onto things our brain does – but they don’t actually match the underlying processes. So you can use the word ‘want’ to mean an internal hunger sensation driving the hypothalamus, or you can use the same word to mean planning to reach a goal – but they’re very different kinds of process. What I’d like this book to do is help children to see beyond those words, and have an introspective view of their own thought processes.
So it’s encouraging a more mechanistic approach to thinking?
Yes. Ultimately, it’s got scope to really change how people understand mood, identity, motivation, or agency - the idea that they are the authors of their actions. I think if you’re taught in childhood that all your thoughts and actions are the result of many steps of calculations and inferences, you might end up with a richer, more nuanced concept of free will. For example, ‘hard’ and ‘easy’ are words we use for certain types of brain operation. To do something that’s ‘hard’ simply means that a different kind of operation occurs in the brain.
That can really change a perspective.
I think that our self-understanding of agency, will, memory, planning, desire – the way we imagine these to ourselves – is very important to a number of diseases. That includes mental health, functional neurological disorders, and illnesses like chronic pain. A huge component of these illnesses involves biases in how the brain processes and reprocesses information. Reframing and conceptualising those cognitive elements from a young age could give people the tools to ‘tune’ their own biases. I hope it could really change the profile and management of those diseases.