Kind: captions
Language: en
the following is a conversation with
david eagleman a neuroscientist
and one of the great science
communicators of our time
exploring the beauty and mystery of the
human brain
he is an author a lot of amazing books
about the human mind
and his new one called livewired
livewired is a work of 10 years on a
topic that is fascinating to me
which is neuroplasticity or the
malleability of the human brain
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let me say that the adaptability of the
human mind
at the biological chemical cognitive
psychological
and even sociological levels is the very
thing that captivated me
many years ago when i first began to
wonder how would i engineer
something like it in the machine the
open question today
in the 21st century is what are the
limits of this adaptability
as new smarter and smarter devices and
ai systems come to life
or as better and better brain computer
interfaces are engineered will our brain
be able to adapt
to catch up to excel i personally
believe yes
that we're far from reaching the
limitation of the human mind
and the human brain just as we are far
from reaching the limitations
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and now here's my conversation with
david
eagleman you have a new book
coming out on the changing brain
can you give a high level overview of
the book it's called live wired by the
way
yeah the thing is we typically think
about the brain in terms of the
metaphors we already have like
hardware and software that's how we
build all our stuff but
what's happening in the brain is
fundamentally so different it's um so i
coined this new term livewear
which is a system that's constantly
reconfiguring itself physically
as it as it learns and adapts to the
world around it it's physically changing
so it's uh live wear meaning like as
like hardware but
changing yeah exactly well it's the
hardware and the software layers are
blended
and so um you know typically
engineers are praised for their
efficiency and making something really
clean and clear like okay here's the
hardware layer then i'm gonna run
software on top of it there's all sorts
of
universality that you get out of a piece
of hardware like that that's useful
but what the brain is doing is
completely different and i
am so excited about where this is all
going because i feel like
this is where our engineering will go so
currently we build
uh all our devices a particular way but
you know i can't tear half the circuitry
out of your cell phone
and expect it to still function but you
can do that
with uh with the brain so just as an
example kids who are under
about seven years old can get one half
of their brain removed it's called the
hemispherectomy
and and they're fine they have a slight
limp on the other side of their body but
um they can function just fine that way
and uh and this is generally true you
know sometimes children are born without
a hemisphere
and their visual system rewires so that
everything is on the
on the single remaining hemisphere what
thousands of cases like this teach us is
that it's a
very malleable system that is simply
trying to accomplish the tasks in front
of it by
rewiring itself with the available real
estate how much of that
is uh is a quark or a feature of
evolution like how
how hard is it to engineer because
evolution took a lot of work
billion trillions of organisms had to
die for to create this thing we have
uh in our skull uh like because you said
uh you kind of look forward to the idea
that uh
we might be engineering our systems like
this in the future but creating live war
systems
how hard do you think is it to create
systems like that great question it has
proven itself to be a difficult
challenge but what i mean by that is
even though it's taken evolution
a really long time to get where it is
now
um we all we have to do now is peek at
the
at the blueprints it's just three pounds
this organ and
and we just figure out how to do it but
that's the part that i mean is a
difficult challenge because
you know uh there are tens of thousands
of neuroscientists were all poking and
prodding and trying to figure this out
but it's an extremely complicated system
but
it's only going to be complicated until
we figure out the general principles
exactly like if you you know had a magic
camera and you could look inside the
nucleus of a cell and you'd see
hundreds of thousands of things moving
around whatever and then you know it
takes crick and watts and say oh you
know you're just trying to maintain the
order of the base pairs and all the rest
is details
then it simplifies it and we come to
understand something
that that was my goal in livewire which
i've written over 10 years by the way
is to try to distill things down to the
principles of what
plastic systems are trying to accomplish
but to even just linger he said it's
possible to be born with just one
hemisphere
and you still are able to function
first of all just just to pause on that
i mean that's kind of that's amazing
that's that's uh i don't know if people
quite
i mean you kind of hear things here and
there this is what i'm kind of i'm
really excited about your book is
i don't know if there's definitive uh
sort of uh popular
sources to think about the stuff i mean
there's a lot of
i think from my perspective what i've
heard is there's like been debates over
decades about
how how much neuroplasticity there is in
the brain and so on
and people have learned a lot of things
and now it's converging towards people
that are understanding this
much more in europe much more plastic
than people realize
but just like linger on that topic like
how malleable
is the hardware of the human brain
maybe you said children at each stage of
life
yeah so here's the whole thing i think
part of the confusion about plasticity
has been that there are studies at all
sorts of different ages
and then people might read that from a
distance and they think oh well
fred didn't recover when half his brain
was taken out and so
clearly you're not plastic but then you
do it with a child and they are plastic
and so um part of my goal here was to
pull together the tens of thousands of
papers
on this both from clinical work and from
you know all the way down to the
molecular and understand what are the
principles here the principles are
that plasticity diminishes that's no
surprise by the way we
should just define plasticity you know
it's the ability of a system to
to mold into a new shape and then hold
that shape that's why
you know we make things that we call
plastic um
because they are moldable and they can
hold that new shape like a plastic toy
or something
and so maybe we use maybe we'll use a
lot of terms that are synonymous so
something is plastic something is
malleable
uh changing livewire the name of the
book is
is like so i'll tell you exactly right
but i'll tell you why i chose livewire
instead of plasticity so i used the term
plasticity in the book but
um but sparingly because
that was a term coined by william james
over 100 years ago
and and he was of course very impressed
with plastic manufacturing that you
could
mold something in shape and then it
holds that but that's not what's
actually happening in the brain
it's constantly rewiring your entire
life you never hit
an end point the whole point is for it
to keep changing so
even in the you know few minutes of
conversation that we've been having your
brain is changing my brain is changing
um next time i see your face
i will remember oh yeah like that time
next time i sat together and we did
these things and
i wonder if your brain will have like a
lex thing going on for the next few
months like you'll stay there until you
get rid of it
because it was useful for now yeah no
i'll probably never get rid of it let's
say for some circumstance you and i
don't see each other for the next 35
years
when i run into you i'll be like oh yeah
that looks familiar
yeah yeah and we yeah we sat down for a
podcast back when there were podcasts
yeah
exactly back when we lived outside
virtual reality yeah
exactly so you chose livewire exactly
exactly because plastic implies i mean
it's the term that's used in the field
and so that's why
we need to use it still uh for a while
but yeah it implies something gets
molded in shape and then holds that
shape forever but in fact the whole
system is completely changing then then
back to uh
how malleable is the human brain at each
stage of life
so what just at a high level
is it malleable so yes
and plasticity diminishes but one of the
things that i
felt like i was able to put together for
myself after reading thousands of papers
on this issue
is that different parts of the brain are
have different
plasticity windows so for example with
the visual cortex
that cements itself into place pretty
quickly over the course of a few years
and i argue that's because of the
stability of the data
in other words what you're getting in
from the world you've got a certain
number of angles
colors shapes you know it's essentially
the world is
visually stable so that hardens around
that data
as opposed to let's say the
somatosensory cortex which is the part
that's taking information from your body
or the motor cortex right next to it
which is what drives your body
the fact is bodies are always changing
you get taller over time you get fatter
thinner over time you you might break a
leg and have to limp for a while stuff
like that
so because the data there is always
changing
by the way you might get on a bicycle
you might get a surfboard things like
that um
because that data is always changing
that stays more malleable
and when you look through the brain you
find that it appears to be this
you know how stable the data is
determines how fast something
hardens into place but the point is
different parts of the brain harden into
place at different times
do you think it's possible that uh
depending on how much data you get on
different sensors
that it stays more malleable longer so
like
you know if you look at different
cultures of experience like
if you keep your eyes closed or maybe
you're blind i don't know but
let's say you keep your eyes closed for
your entire life
uh it that then the visual cortex might
be much
less malleable the reason i bring that
up
is like you know well maybe we'll talk
about brain computer interfaces a little
bit and
down the line but you know like is this
uh is the malleability a genetic thing
or is it more about the data like i said
that comes in
ah so the malleability itself is a
genetic thing
the big trick that mother nature
discovered with humans is
make a system that's really flexible
as opposed to most other creatures to
different degrees so if you take a
an alligator it's born its brain does
the same thing every generation
if you compare an alligator a hundred
thousand years ago to an alligator now
they're essentially the same
um we on the other hand as humans drop
into a world with a
half-baked brain and what we require is
to absorb the culture
around us and the language and the
beliefs and the customs and so on that's
what
mother nature has done with us and it's
been a tremendously successful trick
we've taken over the whole planet as a
result of this
so that's an interesting point i mean
just to lingard that i mean this is a
nice feature like if you were to design
a thing to survive in this world
do you put it at age zero already
equipped
to deal with the world in a like
hard-coded way
or do you put it do you make it
malleable and just throw it in take the
risk
that you're maybe going to die but
you're going to learn a lot in the
process
and if you don't die you'll learn a hell
of a lot to be able to survive in the
environment so this is the experiment
that mother nature ran
and and it turns out that for better
worse we've won
i mean yeah we put other animals into
the zoos and we
yeah that's right yeah i might do better
okay fair enough that's true
and and maybe what the trick mother
nature did is just the stepping stone to
uh to ai but
so it's that's that's a beautiful
feature of the human brain
that it's malleable but let's on the
topic of mother nature
what do we start with like how blank is
the slate
ah so it's not actually a blank slate
what it's
it's terrific engineering that's set up
in there
but much of that engineering has to do
with okay just make sure that
things get to the right place for
example like the fibers from the eyes
getting to the visual cortex or all this
very complicated machinery in the ear
getting
to the auditory cortex and so on so
things first of all there's that
and then what we also come equipped with
is the ability to absorb
language and culture and beliefs and so
on
so you're already set up for that so no
matter what you're exposed to you will
you will absorb some sort of language
that's the trick
is how do you engineer something just
enough that it's then a sponge that's
ready to take in and fill in the blanks
how much of the malleability is hardware
how much software is that useful at all
in the brain
so like what what are we talking about
so there's like
there's neurons there's uh synapses
and the all kinds of different synapses
and there's chemical communication like
electrical signals and there's
chemical communication from this in the
synapses
uh what i would say
the software would be the timing and the
nature of the electrical signals i guess
and the hardware would be the actual
synapses so here's the thing this is why
i really
if we can i want to get away from the
hardware and software metaphor because
what happens is as activity passes
through the system
it changes things now the thing that
computer engineers are really used to
thinking about is
is synapses where two neurons connect of
course each neuron connects with ten
thousands of its neighbors but
at a point where they connect um what
we're all used to thinking about is the
changing of the strength of that
connection
the the synaptic weight but in fact
everything is changing the receptor
distribution inside that
neuron so that you're more or less
sensitive to the neurotransmitter
than the structure of the neuron itself
and and what's happening there
all the way down to biochemical cascades
inside the cell all the way down to the
nucleus
and for example the epigenome which is
the
um you know these little proteins that
are attached to the dna that
cause conformational changes that cause
more genes to be
expressed or repressed all of these
things are plastic
the reason that most people only talk
about the synaptic weights
is because that's really all we can
measure well
and all this other stuff is really
really hard to see with our current
technology so essentially that just gets
ignored
but but in fact the system is plastic at
all these different levels
and my
my way of thinking about this is
an analogy to paste layers so paste
layers is a concept that stewart brand
suggested about how to think about
cities so you have
fashion which changes rapidly in cities
you have
um governance which changes more slowly
you have
the structure the buildings of a city
which changes more slowly all the way
down to
to nature you've got all these different
layers of things that are changing at
different paces at different speeds
i've taken that idea and and mapped it
onto the brain which is to say you have
some
biochemical cascades are just changing
really rapidly when something happens
all the way down to things that are more
and more cemented in there
and this is actually uh this actually
allows us to understand a lot about
particular kinds of things that happen
for example one of the oldest
probably the oldest rule in neurology is
called ribose law
which is that older memories are more
stable than newer memories
so when you get old and demented
you'll be able to remember things from
your your young life maybe you'll
remember this podcast but you won't
remember what you did
a month ago or a year ago and this is a
very weird structure right
no other system works this way where
older memories are more stable than
newer members
but it's because through
time things get more and more cemented
into deeper layers of the system
and um and so this is i think the way we
have to think about the brain
not as okay you've got neurons you've
got synaptic weights and that's it
so yeah so the idea of live where and
live wired
is it is that it's it's like a it's a
gradual
yeah it's a gradual spectrum between
software and hardware
and so the metaphors completely doesn't
make sense
because like when you talk about
software and hardware it's really hard
lines
i mean of course software
is unlike card but even hardware but
like
so there's two groups but in the
software world there's levels of
abstractions right there's the
operating system there's machine code
and then it gets higher higher levels
but somehow that's actually
fundamentally different than
the layers of abstractions in the
hardware but in the brain
it's all like the same i love the city
the city metaphor i mean yeah it's kind
of mind-blowing because it
it's hard to know what to uh think about
that like if i were to ask the question
uh this is important question for
machine learning is
how does the brain learn so
essentially you're saying that
i mean it just learns on all of these
different levels at all different
paces exactly right and as a result what
happens is
as you practice something you get good
at something
you're physically changing the circuitry
you're you're adapting your brain
around the thing that is relevant to you
so let's say you take up
um do you know how to surf no okay great
so let's say you take up surfing
yeah now at this age um what happens is
you know you'll be terrible at first you
know how to operate your body you know
how to read the waves things like that
and
through time you get better and better
what you're doing is you're burning that
into the actual circuitry of your brain
you're of course
conscious when you're first doing it
you're thinking about okay where am i
doing what's my body weight
um but eventually when you become a pro
at it you are not conscious of it at all
in fact you can't even
unpack what it is that you did think
about riding a bicycle you
you can't describe how you're doing
you're just doing you're changing your
balance when you come you know you do
this to go to a stop and so
so um this is what we're constantly
doing is
actually shaping our own circuitry based
on what is relevant for us
survival of course being the the top
thing that's relevant but interestingly
especially with humans we have these
particular goals in our lives computer
science neuroscience whatever
and so we actually shape our circuitry
around that
i mean you mentioned this gets slower
and slower with age but is there
like i've i think i've uh read and
spoken
offline even on this podcast
developmental neurobiologist i guess
would be the right terminology
is like looking at the very early like
from from embryonic stem cells to like
to the to the creation of the brain and
like that's like
what that's mind-blowing how much stuff
happens there
so it's very malleable at that stage uh
it's
and then but after that at which point
does it stop being malleable
so so that's the interesting thing is
that it remains valuable your whole life
so even
when you're an old person you'll be able
to remember new faces and names you'll
be able to learn new sorts of tasks
and thank goodness because the world is
changing rapidly in terms of technology
and so on
i just sent my mother and alexa and she
you know figured out how to go on the
settings and do the thing and i was
really yeah i was really impressed by
that she was able to do it so there are
parts of the brain that remain malleable
their whole life
the interesting part is that really your
goal
is to make an internal model of the
world your goal is to say
okay the brain uh is trapped in silence
and darkness and it's trying to
understand
how the world works out there right i
love that image
yeah i guess it is yeah you forget you
forget
it's like this this lonely thing is
sitting in its own container and uh
trying to actually
throw a few sensors figure out what the
what the hell's going on you know what i
sometimes think about is um
the that movie the martian with matt
damon the um
it was written in a book of course but
the the movie poster shows matt damon
all alone on the red planet and i think
god that's actually what it's like
to be inside your head and my head and
anybody's head is that
you're essentially on your own planet in
there and i'm essentially on my own
planet everyone's got their own
world where you've absorbed all of your
experiences
up to this moment in your life that made
you exactly who you are and
same for me and everyone and um
and we've got this very thin bandwidth
of communication
and i'll say something like oh yeah that
tastes
just like peaches and you'll say oh i
know what you mean
but the experience of course might be
might be vastly different for
us um but anyway yes so the brain is
trapped in silence and darkness each one
of us
and what it's trying to do this is the
important part is trying to make an
internal model of what's going on out
there as in how do i function in the
world
how do i how do i interact with other
people do i say something
nice and polite or do i say something
aggressive and mean do i you know all
these things that it's putting together
about the world
and i think what happens when people get
older and older
it may not be that plasticity is
diminishing it may be that their
internal model essentially
has set itself up in a way where it says
okay i've pretty much got a really good
understanding of the world now and i
don't really need to change
right so when old when when much older
people find themselves in a situation
where they need to change
they can actually are able to do it it's
just that i think this notion that we
all have that
plasticity diminishes as we grow older
is in part because the motivation isn't
there
um but if you were 80 and you got fired
from your job and suddenly had to
figure out how to program a wordpress
site or something you'd figure it out
got it so the the capability the
possibility of changes is there
but let me ask the the highest challenge
the interesting challenge to this uh
plasticity
to this uh livewear system uh if we
could talk about
brain computer interfaces and neurolink
what are your thoughts about the efforts
of elon musk
neuralink bci in general in this
regard which is adding a machine
a computer the capability of a computer
to communicate with the brain and the
brain to communicate with the computer
at the very basic applications and then
like the futuristic kind of thoughts
yeah first of all it's terrific that
people are jumping and doing that
because it's clearly the
the future the interesting part is our
brains have pretty good methods of
interacting with technology
so maybe it's your fat thumbs on a cell
phone or something but
um or maybe it's watching a youtube
video getting into your eye that way
but we have pretty rapid ways of
communicating with technology and
getting data
so if you actually crack open the skull
and go into the inner sanctum of the
brain
um you might be able to get a little bit
faster but i'll tell you
i i'm i'm not so sanguine on the
future of that as a business and i'll
tell you why it's because
there are various ways of getting data
in and out and
an open head surgery is a big deal
neurosurgeons don't want to do it
because there's always risk of death and
infection on the table
and also it's not clear how many people
would say i'm going to volunteer to get
something in my head
so that i can text faster you know 20
faster
so i think it's you know mother nature
surrounds the brain with this
armored you know bunker of the skull
because it's a very delicate material
and there's an expression in
neurosurgery
um about
the brain is you know the person is
never the same after you open up their
skull now whether or not that's true or
whatever
who cares but it's a big deal to do in
open head surgery so
what i'm interested in is how can we get
information in and out of the brain
without having to crack the skull open
got it without messing with the
biologicals the part like
directly uh connecting or messing with
the with the
intricate biological thing that we got
going on it seems to be working
yeah exactly and by the way where neural
link is going which is wonderful is
going to be
in patient cases it really matters for
all kinds of surgeries that a person
needs whether for parkinson's or
epilepsy or whatever
it's a terrific new technology for
essentially sowing electrodes in there
and getting more
higher density of electrodes so that's
great i just don't think as far as the
future of bci goes
i don't suspect that people will go in
and say yeah drill a hole in my head and
do that
well it's interesting because uh i think
there's a similar intuition but
say in the world of autonomous vehicles
that folks
know how hard it is and it seems damn
impossible
the similar intuition about i'm sticking
on the elon musk thing is just a good
easy example uh similar intuition about
colonizing mars
it like if you really think about it it
seems extremely
difficult and uh and almost
i mean just technically difficult to the
to a degree
where you want to ask is it really worth
doing
worth trying and then the same the same
is applied with bci
but the thing about the future
is it's hard to predict uh the the
exciting thing to me
with uh so once it does once
if successful it's able to help patients
it may be
able to discover something uh
very surprising about our ability to
directly communicate with the brain so
exactly what you're interested in is
figuring out how to
uh play with this malleable brain but
like help assist it somehow i mean it's
such a compelling notion to me
that we're now working on all these
exciting machine learning systems
that are able to learn you know
from data and then if we can
have this other brain that's a learning
system
that's live wired in when on the human
side and
them to be able to communicate it's like
a
self playing mechanism was able to beat
the game the world champion
go so they can play with each other the
computer and the brain
like when you sleep i mean there's a lot
of futuristic kind of things that
it's just um exciting possibilities but
i hear you
we understand so little about the actual
intricacies of the communication of the
brain that it's hard to
find the common language well
interestingly the
technologies that have been built don't
actually require the perfect common
language so for example hundreds of
thousands of people are walking around
with artificial ears and artificial eyes
meaning cochlear implants or retinal
implants so this is
you know you take uh essentially digital
microphone you slip an electrode strip
into the inner ear
and people can learn how to hear that
way or you take an electrode grid and
you plug it into the retina at the back
of the eye
and people can learn how to see that way
the interesting part is
those devices don't speak exactly the
natural biological language they speak
the dialect
of silicon valley and and it turns out
that as as recently as about 25 years
ago a lot of people thought this was
never going to work
they thought it was it wasn't going to
work for that reason but the brain
figures it out it's really good at
saying okay look there's some
correlation between what i can touch and
feel and hearing
and so on and the data that's coming in
or between you know
i clap my hands and i and i have signals
coming in there and it figures out how
to speak any language
oh that's fascinating so like uh no
matter you're
no matter if it's neural link uh so
directly communicating with the brain or
it's a smartphone
or google glass or the brain
figures out the efficient way of
communication well exactly exactly
and what i propose is the potato head
theory of evolution which is which is
um that all you know our eyes and nose
and mouth and ears and fingertips all
this stuff is just plug and play
and the brain can figure out what to do
with the day that comes in and part of
the reason that i
think this is right and i care so deeply
about this is when you look across the
animal kingdom you find all kinds of
weird peripheral devices plugged in
and the brain figures out what to do
with the data and i don't believe that
mother nature has to reinvent
the principles of brain operation each
time
to say oh now i'm going to have heat
pits to detect infrared now i'm going to
have
something to detect uh you know electro
receptors on the body now i'm going to
test something to pick up the magnetic
field of the earth
with cryptochromes in the eye and so on
instead the brain says oh i got it
there's data coming in
is that useful can do something with it
oh great i'm gonna mold myself
around the data that's coming in it's
kind of
fascinating to think that we think of
smartphones and all this new technology
is novel
as totally novel as outside of
what evolution ever intended or like
what nature ever intended
it's fascinating to think that like the
entirety of the process of evolution is
perfectly fine
and ready for the smartphone oh yeah and
the internet
like it's ready it's ready to be
valuable to that and whatever comes
to cyborgs to virtual reality we kind of
think like
this is you know there's all these like
books written about natural what's
natural
and we're like destroying our natural
cells by
like embracing all this technology it's
kind of
it's you know we're not probably not
giving the brain enough credit like
this this thing this thing is just fine
with new tech oh
exactly it wraps itself around by the
way wait till you have kids you'll see
the ease with which they pick up on
stuff and
yeah as kevin kelly said um technology
is what gets invented after you're born
but the stuff that already exists when
you're born that's not even tech that's
just background furniture like the fact
that the ipad exists for my son and
daughter like that's just background
furniture so
um yeah it's um because we have this
incredibly
malleable system it just absorbs
whatever is going on in the world and
learns what to do with it
so do you think just to linger for for a
little bit more
do you think it's possible to
co-adjust like
we're kind of uh you know for the
machine
to adjust to the brain for the brain to
adjust the machine i guess that's what's
already happening
sure that is what's happening so for
example when when you put electrodes in
the motor cortex to control a robotic
arm for somebody who's paralyzed
the engineers do a lot of work to figure
out okay what can we do with the
algorithm here so that we can detect
what's going on from these cells
and figure out how to best program the
robotic arm to move given the data that
we're measuring from these cells
but also the brain is learning too so
you know the paralyzed woman says
wait i'm trying to grab this thing and
by the way it's all about relevance so
if there's a piece of food there and
she's hungry
she'll figure out how to get this food
into her mouth with the robotic arm
because
that is what matters
well that's uh okay first of all that
pain's
really promising and beautiful for some
reason really optimistic picture
that you know our brain is able to
to adjust to so much um
you know so many things happen this year
that you think like how we're ever going
to deal with it
and it's somehow encouraging and
inspiring that like we're going to be
okay
well that's right i actually think so
2020 has been an
awful year for almost everybody in many
ways but
the one silver lining has to do with
brain plasticity which is to say
we've all been on our you know on our
gerbil wheels we've all been in our
routines and
and you know as i mentioned our internal
models are all about
how do you maximally succeed how do you
optimize your operation
in this circumstance where you are right
and then all of a sudden bang 2020 comes
we're completely off our wheels
where having to create new things all
the time and figure out how to do it
and that is terrific for brain
plasticity because and we know this
because
um there are very large studies
on older people who stay cognitively
active their whole lives
some some fraction of them have
alzheimer's disease
physically but nobody knows that when
they're alive even though their brain is
getting chewed up with the ravages of
alzheimer's cognitively they're doing
just fine why
it's because they're they're they're
challenged all the time
they've got all these new things going
on all this novelty all these
responsibilities chores social life all
these things happening
and as a result they're constantly
building new roadways even as parts
degrade
and and and that's the only good news is
that
we are in a situation where suddenly we
can't just operate like automaton
anymore we have to
think of completely new ways to do
things and that's wonderful i don't know
why this question popped into my head
it's quite absurd but
uh are we going to be okay
yeah you say this is the promising
silver lining just from your own because
you've written about
this and thought about this outside of
maybe even the plasticity of the brain
but
just this uh this whole pandemic kind of
changed the way
it knocked us out of this uh hamster
wheel
like that of habit a lot of people had
had to reinvent themselves
unfortunately and i have a lot of
friends who
either already or or are going to lose
their business
you know is basically it it's taking the
dreams that people have had
and said like said this this dream this
particular dream you've had
will no longer be possible you have to
find something new
what are your are we gonna be okay
yeah we'll be okay in the sense that i
mean it's gonna be a rough time for
many or most people but in the sense
that it is
sometimes useful to find that
what you thought was your dream was was
not the thing that you're going to do
um this is obviously the plot in lots of
hollywood movies that someone says i'm
going to do this and then that gets
foiled and they end up doing something
better
but this is true in life i mean um
in general even though we plan
our lives as best we can it's predicated
on
our notion of okay given everything
that's around me this is what's possible
for me next
but it takes 2020 to knock you off that
where you think oh well actually maybe
there's
something i could be doing that's bigger
that's better yeah you know for me one
exciting thing and i just talked to
grant sanderson i don't know if you know
who he is it's a three blue one brown
it's a youtube channel he does he's a
if you see it you would recognize it
he's like a really famous
math guy and he's a math educator and he
does he's incredible beautiful
videos and now i see sort of at mit
folks are struggling to try to figure
out
you know if we do teach remotely how do
we do it effectively
so you have these um world-class
researchers and professors trying to
figure out
how to put content online that teaches
people
and to me a possible future of that is
you know nobel prize winning
faculty become youtubers
like like that that to me is so exciting
uh
like what grant said uh which is like
the possibility of creating canonical
videos on the thing you're a world
expert in
uh you know there's so many topics that
just
the world doesn't you know there's
faculty i mentioned russ
cedric there's all these people in
robotics that
are experts in a particular beautiful
field on which there's only just
papers there's there's no popular book
there's no there's no clean canonical
video
showing the beauty of a subject and one
possibility is uh
they they try to create that and
and share it with the world this is this
is the beautiful thing this of course
has been happening for a while already
i mean for example when i go and i give
book talks often what'll happen is some
13 year old will come up to me
afterwards and say something and i'll
say
my god that was so small like how how
did you know that yeah and they'll say
oh i saw it on a ted talk well
what an amazing opportunity here you got
the the
best person in the world on subject x
giving a 15-minute talk
as as beautifully as he or she can and
the 13 year old just grows up with that
that's just the mother's milk right
yeah as opposed to when we grew up you
know i had whatever homeroom teacher i
had
and uh you know whatever classmates i
had and
and hopefully that person knew what what
he or she was teaching and
often didn't and you know just made
things up so the the
opportunity now has become extraordinary
to get
the best of the world and the reason
this matters of course is because
obviously
back to plasticity the way that we
the way our brain gets molded is by
absorbing everything from the world
all of the all of the knowledge and the
data and so on that it can get
and then um and then springboarding off
of that
and we're in a very lucky time now
because
we grew up with a lot of just in case
learning so you know just in case you
ever need to know these dates in
mongolian history here there
um but what kids are growing up with now
like my kids is tons of just in time
learning so as soon as they're curious
about something they ask alex or they
ask google home
they get the answer right there in the
context of the curiosity the reason this
matters is because
for plasticity to happen you need to
care you need to be curious about
something
and this is something by the way that
the ancient romans had had noted
they had outlined seven different levels
of learning and the highest level is
when you're curious about a topic
but anyway so kids now are getting tons
of just in time learning
and as a result they're going to be so
much smarter than we are
they're just and we can already see that
i mean my boy is eight years old my girl
is five
but i mean the things that he knows are
amazing because it's not just
him having to do the rote memorization
stuff that we did yeah that's
it's just fascinating what the brain
what young brains look like now because
of all those ted talks just
just loaded in there and there's there's
also i mean a lot of people
write kind of there's a sense that our
attention span is growing shorter
but you know it's complicated because um
you know for example
you know most people majority of people
it's the 80 plus percent of people
listen to the entirety of this thing
it's just
two three hours forward podcast long
long-form podcasts
or are becoming more and more popular so
like that's that's
it's all really giant complicated mess
and the point is
that the brain is able to adjust to it
and somehow like
form a world view within this
new medium of like information that we
have
you have like these short tweets and you
have these three four hour podcasts
and you have netflix movie i mean it's
just it's adjusting to the entirety
and just absorbing it and taking it all
in and then
pops up kovid that forces us all to be
home
and it all just adjusts and and uh and
figures it out yeah yeah it's
fascinating
you know been talking about the brain as
if it's
something separate from the human
that carries it a little bit like
whenever you talk about the brain
it's easy to forget that that that's
like that's us
um like how much do you
how much is the whole thing like
predetermined
like how much is it already encoded in
there
and how much is it the
what's the uh
the the actions
the decisions the judgments
this you mean like who you are who you
are oh yeah yeah okay great question
right so there used to be a big debate
about nature versus nurture and we now
know that it's
always both you can't even separate them
because
you come to the table with a certain
amount nature for example your whole
genome
and so on the experiences you have in
the womb like whether your mother is
smoking or drinking
things like that whether she's stressed
so on those all influence
how you're going to pop out of the womb
from there
everything is an interaction between all
of your experiences
and the and the nature what i mean is
i think of it like a space time cone
where you have
you drop in the world depending on the
experience that you have you might go
off in this direction or that direction
in that direction
because there's interaction all the way
your experiences determine
what happens with the expression of your
genes so some genes get repressed
some get expressed and so on and you
actually become a different person based
on your experiences
there's a whole field called uh
epigenomics which is or epi
epigenetics i should say which is about
the epigenome
and that is the you know sort of the
layer that sits on top of the dna and
causes the genes to express differently
that is directly related to the
experiences that you have so if
you know just as an example they take
rat pups and you know one group is sort
of placed away from their parents and
the other group is
groomed and licked and taken good care
of that changes their gene expression
for the rest of their life they go off
in different directions in this
in the space time cone um so
yeah this is this is of course why it
matters that we
take care of children and pour money
into things like education and good
child care and so on for children
broadly
um because these formative years matter
so
much so is there a free will
this is this is a great apologize for
the
for the absurd high-level philosophical
questions no these are my favorite kind
of questions
here's the thing here's the thing we
don't know if you ask most
neuroscientists they'll say
that we can't really think of how you
would get free will in there because as
far as we can tell it's a machine it's a
very complicated machine enormously
sophisticated 86 billion neurons about
the same number of glial cells
each of these things is as complicated
as the city of san francisco each neuron
in your head has the entire human genome
in it it's expressing
millions of gene products these are
incredibly complicated biochemical
cascades each one is connected to 10 000
of its neighbors which means you have
you know
like half a quadrillion connections in
the brain so it's it's incredibly
complicated
but it is fundamentally appears to just
be a machine
and therefore if there's nothing in it
that's not being driven by
something else then it seems it's hard
to
understand where free will would come
from so that's the camp that
pretty much all of us fall into but i
will say our science is still quite
young
and you know i'm a fan of the history of
science and what
the thing that always strikes me is
interesting is when you look back at any
moment in science
everybody believes something is true and
they just they simply didn't know about
you know what einstein revealed or
whatever and so
who knows and they all feel like that
we've at any moment in
history they all feel like we've
converted to the final answer exactly
exactly like all the pieces of the
puzzle are there
and i think that's a funny illusion
that's worth getting rid of
and and in fact this is what drives good
science is recognizing that we don't
have most of the puzzle pieces
so as far as the free will question goes
i don't know
at the moment it seems wow it would be
really impossible to figure out how
something else could fit in there but
you know 100 years from now
our textbooks might be very different
than they are now i mean
could i ask you to speculate where do
you think free will
could be squeezed into there like what's
that even
um is it is it possible that our brain
just creates kinds of
illusions that are useful for us or like
what
where where could it possibly be
squeezed in well
let me let me give a speculation and
answer to your very nice
question but but you know don't and the
listeners podcast don't quote me on this
i'm not saying this is what i believe to
be true but let me just give an example
i gave this
the end of my book incognito so the
whole book of incognito is about you
know all the what's happening in the
brain and essentially i'm saying look
here's all the
reasons to think that free will probably
does not exist but at the very end i say
look imagine that you are
um you know imagine that you're a
kalahari bushman
and you find a radio in the sand and
you've never seen anything like this
and you you look at this radio and and
you realize that when you turn this knob
you hear voices coming from their voices
coming from it
so being a you know a radio materialist
you
try to figure out like how does this
thing operate so you take off the back
cover
and you realize there's all these wires
and when you take out some wires
the voices get garbled or stop or
whatever and so what you end up
developing is a whole theory about
how this connections pattern of wires
gives rise to voices
but it would never strike you that in
distant cities there's a radio tower and
there's invisible stuff beaming
and that's actually the origin of the
voices and this is just necessary for it
so i mentioned this just as a
speculation saying look
how would we know what we know about the
brain for absolutely certain is that if
when you damage pieces and parts of it
things get jumbled up but how would you
know if there's something else going on
that we can't see like electromagnetic
radiation
that is what's actually generating this
yeah
you paint a beautiful example of uh
of how totally because we don't know
most of how our universe works how
totally off-base we might be with our
science yeah
until i mean we i mean um yeah i mean
that's
inspiring that's beautiful it's kind of
terrifying
it's humbling it's all all of the above
and the important and the important part
just to recognize is that of course
we're in the position of having
massive unknowns and you know
we have of course the known unknowns and
that's all the things we're pursuing in
our labs and trying to figure out that
but there's this whole
space of unknown unknowns things we
haven't even realized we haven't asked
yet
let me kind of ask a weird maybe a
difficult question
part of the it has to do with i've been
recently reading a lot about world war
ii i'm currently reading a book i
recommend for people which is
uh uh as a jew it's been difficult to
read but uh
the horizon follows the third reich
so let me just ask about like the nature
of genius
the nature of evil if we look at
somebody like
uh einstein we look at hitler
stalin modern day jeffrey epstein
just folks who through their life have
done with einstein done works of genius
and
with the others i mentioned have done
evil on this world
what do we t