IN the 19th century a pseudoscience known as phrenology, adherents of which believed that one’s personality could be determined by the shape of one’s skull, became popular. The father of phrenology, Franz Joseph Gall, hypothesised (partially correctly) that specific areas of the brain were responsible for specific faculties, going on to identify 27 ‘organs’ on the surface of the brain that related to these faculties, including ones that governed memory, poetic talent and even a ‘murder instinct’. He concluded that one’s personality could be determined by studying the surface of the skull, which he believed reflected the shape of the brain.

Years later the late great Sir Terry Pratchett would satirise the phrenologists with his fictional retro-phrenologists, who would attempt to alter the personalities of clients by bashing them on the head with hammers.

He wasn’t too far off the mark. There have been many documented cases of brain injuries leading to drastic changes in personality, and you may even have heard reports about people waking from comas suddenly able to converse fluently in languages they previously spoke haltingly at best. While foreign language syndrome, as this is called, has yet to be scientifically proven, foreign accent syndrome does exist. There are documented cases of a Britisher speaking with a Chinese accent after a severe migraine. If that doesn’t sound interesting, there’s Leslie Lemke who suffers from cerebral palsy and did not even learn to walk until he was 15, but only needs to hear a piece of music once in order to be able to play it perfectly, note for note, without ever having had any musical training. Alonzo Clemons suffered a head injury as a toddler; he can’t feed himself but can sculpt perfect animal figures from fleeting glimpses of his subjects on TV.

It seems we know very little about the inner space of our craniums.

What all these cases have in common is that we really don’t know how they are possible. In fact, it seems we know less about the inner space of our craniums than we do about outer space.

Well, maybe not all of us. Practitioners of meditation have long extolled its virtues and the positive behavioural changes it leads to, but it is only recently that these claims were tested scientifically. The results are astounding: a UCLA study found that people who have actively meditated over a long period lost less physical grey (brain) matter to age than those who did not, much like people who exercise regularly lose less muscle mass as they age. A Harvard study found that just eight weeks of mindfulness meditation increased thickness in the hippocampus, which governs learning and memory and decreased volume in the amygdala, which is responsible for fear and stress. Essentially it’s exercise for your brain, a kind of self-propelled rewiring. That latter idea is becoming more and more popular and you may have encountered ads for ‘brain training’ games while browsing the internet.

Then there are those who choose a more pharmaceutical approach to this. Certain psychostimulants that were developed to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder are often (mis)used by perfectly healthy individuals who believe these drugs ‘boost’ their mental faculties. Then there are Nootropics, an increasingly popular class of ‘cognitive enhancing’ drugs, the promoters and users of which claim are to the brain what vitamin supplements are to the body. The jury’s still out on what the long-term effects of these may be, but research is ongoing and well-heeled militaries, which are always interested in building better soldiers, have been looking into such products for years now.

There’s also the direct approach, using machines that directly interface with the mind like the system known as Braingate does. Simply put, this

is a sensor implanted directly in the brain which allows a paralysed person to, for example, control a robotic arm to perform tasks they were previously unable to. One Japanese company named RIKEN has even designed a wheelchair steered by brain waves. This kind of tech will also lead to more mundane miracles such as thought-activated phones and, inevitably, to nightmares such as cyborg soldiers and mind-controlled drones.

We’ve seen all of this in the movies, where the mysteries of the mind make for great plot devices, from Carrie’s puberty- and trauma-induced telekinesis to Scarlett Johansson’s Lucy, where a drug boosts her ability to use her brain from 10pc to 100pc. On that note, please note that the trope about humans using only 10pc of our brains is a myth.

But here’s something that’s very real: scientists recently managed to link together the brains of three monkeys, and then the brains of four rats in a subsequent experiment, effectively creating super-brains that were capable of greater function than the separate brains. Now imagine a day when that can be done to humans and it’s hard to suppress a sense of wonder and also fear. Because that day, as we explore this most final of frontiers, is fast approaching.

The writer is a member of staff.

Twitter: @ZarrarKhuhro

Published in Dawn, July 27th, 2015

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