The Story of the Human Brain

The most remarkable and mysterious object in the cosmos sits inside our heads. Our brains, the centres of consciousness, logic, and creativity, have nearly 100 billion neurons forming some 100 trillion connections, a complexity found nowhere else in the universe.

So how did the conditions on planet earth drive its evolutionary marvel through planetary catastrophes and epic conflicts, through death, sex, and love. Based on his forthcoming two-part Horizon special on the BBC, Jim will share what he has learned from geologists, palaeontologists, neuroscientists, behavioural psychologists – and from having had his own brain scanned, imaged and 3D-printed.

In this Darwin Day Lecture, Jim Al-Khalili will take us through the brain's 700 million-year evolutionary history: how it developed from simple nerve cells to control movement and detect light in early organisms into the remarkable system that defines what it means to be human.

About Professor Jim Al-Khalili

Jim Al-Khalili is an academic, author, broadcaster, and one of the UK’s best known science communicators. In the UK, he is most familiar as the host of the long-running BBC Radio 4 programme, The Life Scientific. As an academic, Jim is a quantum physicist at the University of Surrey where he is Distinguished Professor Emeritus. He received his PhD in theoretical physics in 1989 and has published over 150 papers in the field. 

As well as his regular articles in the media, he has written 15 books on popular science and the history of science, between them translated into 26 languages. His book on Medieval Arabic science, Pathfinders (The House of Wisdom in the US), was shortlisted for the Warwick Prize, and his 2020 book, The World According to Physics, was shortlisted for the Royal Society Book Prize. Many people will also know him from the many TV science documentaries he has hosted over the past two decades, such as Atom, Shock and Awe: the Story of Electricity, Everything and Nothing, and the Bafta-nominated Chemistry: a volatile history. 

Jim is a past president of both the British Science Association and Humanists UK, and is a recipient of the Royal Society Michael Faraday medal and the Wilkins-Bernal-Medawar medal, the Institute of Physics Kelvin Medal, and the Stephen Hawking medal. He is a fellow of the Royal Society and Honorary Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Physics, and the Institution of Engineering and Technology. He received an OBE from the Queen in 2007 and later a CBE in 2021, both for ‘services to science and public engagement in STEM’. He has received honorary doctorates from nine universities. He is a trustee and commissioner on the board of the 1851 Royal Commission, and a Fellow of the Science Museums Group.