On an average working day, Dr Hannah Critchlow has the privilege of watching the brain come alive in bright, electric lights. She maps its circuits, sees how they are affected by the environment, and tries to unlock the secrets of the most complex organ in the body.
Hers is magic work but it is not especially glamorous, so it came as a shock to the 35-year-old when she appeared at the Hay Festival in May and blew everyone away. The neuroscientist left with an army of fans and a string of publishers desperate to sign her up and launch her as science’s next big thing, a sort of female Brian Cox. Dr Critchlow, announced Peter Florence, the festival director, “has the power to completely change the way we think about thinking”.
Dr Critchlow’s talk, which was a whistle-stop tour of the brain, made headlines around the world after she said it was perfectly feasible humans would one day be able to upload their brains to computers and live forever. We meet later at the Pitt building in Cambridge. She is sunburnt but smiley, a bundle of energy and nerves — no wonder, given the journey she has made in a matter of months.
Since Hay, she has found representation in the glamorous form of Caroline Michel, whose other clients include Simon Schama, Bear Grylls, William Hague and Jeanette Winterson. A book about the machinations of the brain is in the offing, and hopefully a major television series, too.
“It’s all been quite crazy,” she says, on a smaller scale, she will soon present an event in Cambridge to celebrate women scientists. I am curious to know, then, what on earth she makes of Professor Tim Hunt’s comments about the problems with girls in science laboratories?
“Well it wasn’t very clever, was it? I’m not sure what his forced resignation has achieved other than for his hosting university to make an example of him specifically.” It would have been more effective, she believes, if universities acknowledged there was a problem and formulated policies to change this.
“I know women who have taken top positions in academia and been told by rival men that they only got the job to fill a quota.” Later, she sends me links to papers that show women are paid less than men and that they are less likely to get jobs at all.
Has she experienced sexism herself? “There was a time I was doing a presentation to a group of colleagues. I was wearing a T-shirt that rode up a bit as I was pointing at a slide. Afterwards, a male academic told a friend that he couldn’t concentrate on any of my talk as this was too distracting. I just thought, ‘Would you say that about a man who accidentally showed a bit of his boxers?’”
Dr Critchlow may not have engaged that academic in quite the way she had hoped, but given that she’s now got the attention of some of the biggest publishing houses in Britain, I don’t think she should worry too much. She is nothing but a woman in demand — and she casually drops in that she is four months pregnant with her first child.
How is she going to cope with a new baby and a book? “Well, I’m hoping it will be a bit like when I was finishing my PhD, and I was completely immersed in this world, writing about psychosis. Then I bought a completely dilapidated houseboat on a whim, for three-and-a-half grand — and I did it up. I had to make both parts of my brain work, the practical and the analytical.” She smiles. “Maybe the baby will be the houseboat.”
We talk about the idea of intelligence being downloaded to artificial systems, as she mentioned at Hay. “Well, someone asked, ‘If our brain is just made of circuitry and electricity, could we just upload and store our brains on a computer?’ So I said very shortly and succinctly that if we were to understand those 10 trillion connections, if we were to be able to map them in my brain right now, and then have the technology to emulate that in some kind of computer system, then yeah, you would be able to upload a snapshot of your brain.”
But what is the likelihood of that? “I don’t think that anything is impossible.”
Naturally, Dr Critchlow has been watching “Humans”, the hugely popular Channel 4 drama about a world in which robots become our slaves (with predictably disastrous consequences). “It’s scary, but I think it’s incredibly likely in the future and actually, it’s happening now. I’ve interviewed a Canadian professor, Goldie Nejat, who develops robots to look after the elderly. They offer companionship. There’s one that plays bingo, another that cooks meals. The professor has specifically designed them to look like robots so the elderly person isn’t duped into thinking they are being looked after by a human.”
Dr Critchlow, who was born in Northampton, decided on a career in neuroscience when she worked as a nursing assistant at a local psychiatric hospital. She was 18 and found herself looking after seriously disturbed young people who were her exact contemporaries. “These were adolescents who had everything from schizophrenia to psychosis to bipolar disorder.”
She vaguely thought about studying medicine and then veering into psychiatry, but her experiences at the hospital changed her mind. “I just found it far too upsetting, and I realised I wasn’t emotionally tough enough for it.”
But an experience with one patient set her on her intended path. “I used to read “Harry Potter” with her at night. I could see that the drugs weren’t working, and that the psychiatrists were quite frustrated because they weren’t having much of an impact.”
It was then that she decided to research the brain. She studied at Brunel University, where she did an industrial placement at GlaxoSmithKline, which at that time was pumping lots of money into psychiatry. Hounding the head of the Psychiatry Centre for Excellence in Discovery, she landed a work placement, before starting a PhD at Cambridge, part-funded by the company.
She studied how connections in the brain can change as you learn new things, and how people with some types of schizophrenia have problems with some of these connections (it turns out you can, actually, read people’s minds, with an EEG machine that can read how electrical signals travel in the brain as we think).
“It’s a sort of faulty wiring. While 80 per cent of the contribution is genetic, a lot of the genes are involved in laying down that [faulty] wiring, and the flexibility of that wiring, and how it changes with the environment.”
Now, in her job, Dr Critchlow lays out the nuts and bolts of our brain, and tries to explain how they make us who we are. “I’m hoping that neuroscience can help to break some of the stigma that’s attached to mental health issues. When people break their legs, they see that they have to look after themselves a bit. That’s not always the case with mental health, but it would be great if that could change,” she says.
We talk a bit about what else she has planned (apart from a book and baby and changing the way we look at mental health). Turns out she is moving to New Zealand, as her husband-to-be, a barrister, is from there. “But I can always come back and stay on the houseboat,” she says with a smile.
The Telegraph Group Limited, London 2015
