2017 Edinburgh Fringe

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Baba Brinkman, who presents Off the Top: Neuroscience With Attitude alongside his wife Dr Heather Berlin, answers three questions about their show...

"Peer-reviewed rap" - how on earth does that work?

The concept was coined in 2009 by Prof Mark Pallen who was organising a symposium for Charles Darwin's 200th birthday at the University of Birmingham. Mark reached out to me and asked if I could perform some evolution-themed rap songs at his event, and when I took the job he told me sternly that the world was rife with misunderstandings of evolution and he didn't want me to butcher the science in my raps.

So his condition was that I had to send him the lyrics in advance so he could fact-check the content and correct errors, and then when he introduced me for my set on Darwin Day, he said, "Baba is now the world's first rapper that's been peer reviewed!" The crowd laughed, but in the back of my head I thought: there's a whole new career path in that concept.

Since then I've done albums and shows on religion, medicine, psychology, climate change, and now consciousness, and for each one I collaborate with researchers and run drafts of the script by them, until I reach the point where I can say that I'm representing the scientific consensus on the subject. Unexpectedly, this has also enhanced my hip-hop swagger, since when I rap I am speaking for an army of experts. Check out the recent TED Talk by Anil Seth, the main science advisor on my Consciousness show.

You rap about what it's like to be a baby in terms of consciousness: tell us a bit about that.

A recent neuroscience study shows that one-year-old babies have a similar pattern of brain activation to adults when they consciously perceive a face, but five-month-old babies don't have that pattern, so it's possible (though not certain) that the kind of first-person subjective experience we associate with consciousness doesn't start until after five months, and until then it's all automatic actions and instincts without any awareness. Doesn't that sentence just reek of blasphemy? Babies aren't conscious? How dare you!?

That's why I find this topic so fascinating and subversive, and when I was researching this show and came across that study, my son Dylan was three months old at the time. He sure seemed conscious to me, but I decided to write a whole song about how he might be less conscious than he seems, as an exercise in radical skepticism. Evolution can account for a lot of behaviours that seem intelligent, but animals don't have access to the "reasons" for what they are doing. If they did, their behaviour would be a lot more flexible. So does Dylan have reasons? Or is he just acting out the behaviours evolution programmed into him? Ironically, now that he's eight months old, the light of consciousness might have switched on at this point. He's not old enough to be offended by the song yet though, that will come later.

Do you think you're the most scientifically qualified husband and wife team at the Fringe?

Yes, my (cognitive neuroscientist) wife Heather and I are a combined force of nature when it comes to scientific expertise, just like me and J.K. Rowling put together are the two highest-earning writers in the industry.