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 think about that in a live
wired brain
like how do how do we think about these
extreme
people here's here's what i'd say this
is a very big and difficult question but
what i would say briefly on it
is um you know first of all
i saw a cover of time magazines some
years ago
uh and it was a big you know sagittal
slice of the brain and it said something
like
um what makes us good and evil and there
was a little spot pointing to it there's
a picture of gandhi and there's a little
spot that was pointing to hitler
and these time magazine covers always
make me mad because
it's so goofy to think that we're going
to find some spot in the brain or
something
instead the interesting part is
because we're live-wired we are
all about the world and the culture
around us
so somebody like adolf hitler got
all this positive feedback about what
was going on
and the crazier and crazier the ideas he
had he's like let's set up
death camps and murder a bunch of people
and so on
somehow he was getting positive feedback
from that
and all these other people they're all
you know spun each other up and you look
at anything like
i mean look at the you know um the the
cultural uh revolution in china or the
um you know the russian revolution or
things like this where you look at these
things
my god how do people all behave like
this but it's easy to see
groups of people spinning themselves up
in particular ways where they all say
well
would i have thought this was right in a
different circumstance i don't know but
fred thinks it's right and steve thinks
everyone around you seems to think it's
right and so um
part of the maybe downside of having a
live wired brain is that you can get
crowds of people doing things
um as a group so it's interesting to you
know we would pinpoint hitler
saying that's the evil guy but in a
sense
i think it was tolstoy you said the the
king becomes um slave
to the to the people in other words
you know hitler was just a
representation of whatever was going on
with that
huge crowd that he was surrounded with
so
um so i only bring that up to say that
it's you know it's
very difficult to say what it is about
this person's brain or that person's
brain he obviously got
feedback for what he was doing the other
thing by the way
about what we often think of as being
evil in society
is um my lab recently published
some work on in groups and out groups
which is a very important
part of this puzzle so it turns out that
we are very
we are very you know engineered
to care about in-groups versus
out-groups and this seems to be like a
really fundamental thing
so we did this experiment lab where we
brought people in we stick them in the
scanner
and we i don't know it's something if
you know this but uh we show them on the
hand
sorry we showed them on the screen six
hands and uh the computer boop
goes around randomly picks a hand and
then you see that hand gets stabbed with
a syringe needle so you actually see a
syringe needle enter the hand
and come out and it's really uh what
that does is that triggers
uh parts of the pain matrix this areas
in your brain that involved in feeling
physical pain now the interesting thing
is it's not your hand that was stabbed
so what you're seeing is is empathy this
is you seeing someone else's hand get
stabbed you feel like oh god this is
awful right okay um we contrast that by
the way with somebody's hand getting
poked as a
q-tip which is you know looks visually
the same but it's um
you don't have that same level of
response now what we do is we label each
hand with a
with a one word label christian jewish
muslim atheist scientologist hindu and
now
the computer goes around picks a hand
stabs the hand and the question is
how much does your brain care about all
the people in your out group versus the
one label that happens to match
you and it turns out for everybody
across all religions
they care much more about their in group
than their accurate and when i say they
care what i mean is
you get a bigger response from their
brain everything's the same it's the
same
hands it's just a one-word label
you care much more about your in-group
than your outgroup and i wish this
weren't true but this is how humans are
i wonder how fundamental that is or if
it's a
it's the emergent thing about culture
like if we lived alone with like if it's
genetically built into the brain like
this
this longing for tribe so i'll so i'll
tell you we addressed that so here's
what we did there are two
[Music]
actually there are two other things we
did as part of this study that i think
matter for this point
one is so okay so we show that you have
a much bigger response by the way this
is not a cognitive thing it's a very low
level
basic response to seeing pain in
somebody okay great study by the way
thanks thanks what we did next is
we we next have it where we say okay the
year is 2025
and these three religions are now in a
war against these three religions and
it's all randomized right but what you
see is your thing
and you have two allies now against
these others
and now it happens over the course of
many trials you see everybody gets
stabbed at different times
and the question is do you care more
about your allies and the answer is yes
suddenly
people who a moment ago you didn't
really care when they got stabbed now
simply with this one word thing that
you're they're now your allies you care
more about them
but then what i wanted to do was look at
how ingrained is this or how arbitrary
is it so we brought
new participants in and we said here's a
coin toss the coin if it's heads you're
an augustinian if it's a tails you're a
justinian
these are totally made up okay so they
toss it
they get whatever we give them a a ban
that says you know augustinian on it
whatever tribe they're in now
um and they get in the scanner and they
see a thing on the screen that says the
augustinians and justinians are two
warring tribes then you see a bunch of
hands some are labeled augustine some
are justinian
and now you care more about whichever
team you're on than the other team even
though it's totally after and you know
is arbitrary because you're the one to
toss the coin
yeah so it's it it's a state that's very
easy to find ourselves in in other words
just before walking in the door they'd
never even heard of augustinian versus
justinian and now
their brain is representing it simply
because they're told they're on this
team
you know uh now i did my own personal
study of this
uh it's uh
so once you're an augustinian that tends
to be sticky because i've been a packers
fan uh going back pakistan my whole life
now when i'm in boston with like the the
patriots
it's been tough going for my livewire
brain to switch to the patriots
to be so once you become it's it's
interesting once
the tribe is sticky yeah oh but that's
true
that's that's it you know you know we
never tried that about saying okay now
you're
adjusting the enemy we're in august how
sticky it is but there are studies of
this
of monkey troops uh on some
island um and
what happens is they look at the way
monkeys behave when they're part of this
tribe and how they treat members of the
other tribe of monkeys
and then what they do i forgotten how
they do that exactly but they end up
switching a monkey so he ends up in the
other troop and very quickly they end up
becoming a part of that other troop and
and hating and behaving badly towards
their original troop
these are fascinating studies by the way
yeah this is this is
beautiful uh in your in your book you
have uh
you have a good light bulb joke uh how
many psychiatrists does it take to
change a light bulb
only one but the light bulb has to want
to change
i'm sorry i'm a sucker for a good light
bulb
okay so given uh you know i've been
interested in psychiatry
uh my whole life just maybe tangentially
i've kind of
early on dream to be a psychiatrist
until i understood what it entails
uh but you know what um
you know is there hope for psychiatry
for somebody else to help
this live wired brain to adjust
oh yeah i mean in the sense that and
this has to do with this issue about us
being trapped on our own planet
forget psychiatrists just think of like
when you're talking with a friend and
you say oh i'm so upset about this
and your friend says hey just look at it
this way
uh you know all we have access to under
normal circumstances is just the way
we're seeing something and so
it's super helpful to have friends and
communities and psychiatrists and so on
to
help things change that way so that's
just like interesting of help to us but
but more importantly the role that
psychiatrists have played is that
there's this sort of naive assumption
that we all come to the table with which
is that everyone is fundamentally just
like us and when you're a kid you you
believe this entirely but as you get
older and you start realizing okay
there's something called schizophrenia
and that's a real thing and to be inside
that person's head
is totally different than what it is to
be inside my head or their psychopathy
and and to be inside
this psychopath's head he doesn't care
about other people he doesn't care about
hurting other people he's just doing
what he needs to do to get what he needs
um that's a different head there's a
million different things going on
and it is different to be inside those
heads
that this is where the field of
psychiatry comes in now
i think it's an interesting question
about the degree to which
is leaking into and taking over
psychiatry
and what the landscape will look like 50
years from now it may be that
psychiatry as a profession
you know changes a lot or maybe goes
away entirely and neuroscience will
essentially
be able to take over some of these
functions but it has been extremely
useful
to understand the differences between
how people behave and why and what you
can tell about what's going on inside
their brain
just based on observation of their
behavior
you uh this this might be years ago
but i'm not sure there's an atlantic
article you've written
about moving away from a distinction
between neurological disorders
unquote brain problems and psychiatric
disorders
or quote unquote mind problems so
so on that topic how do you think about
this gray area yeah this is exactly this
is exactly the evolution that things are
going is you know there was psychiatry
and then there were guys
and gals in labs poking cells and so on
those are the neurosciences
but yeah i think these are moving
together for exactly the reason you
decided
and where this matters a lot the
atlantic article
uh that i wrote was called the brain on
trial
where this matters a lot is it's the
legal system because
the way we run our legal system now and
this is true everywhere in the world is
you know someone shows up in front of
the judge's bench or let's say there's
five people in front of the judge's
bench and they've all committed the same
crime what we do
because we feel like hey this is fair is
alright you're gonna get the same
sentence you'll all get three years in
prison or whatever it is
but in fact brains can be so different
this guy's got schizophrenia this guy's
a psychopath this guy's tweaked down on
drugs and so on so
that um it actually doesn't make sense
to keep doing that and what we what we
do
in this country more than anywhere in
the world is we
imagine that incarceration is a
one-size-fits-all solution and you may
know we have the
america has the highest incarceration
rate in the whole world in terms of the
percentage of our population we put
behind bars
so um there's a much more refined thing
we can do
as neuroscience comes in and changes and
has the opportunity to change the legal
system
which is to say this doesn't let anybody
off the hook it doesn't say oh it's not
your fault and so on
but what it does is it changes the
equation so it's not about
hey how blameworthy are you but instead
is about
hey what do we do from here what's the
best thing to do from here so if you
take somebody with schizophrenia and you
have them
break rocks in the hot summer sun in a
chain gang all
yeah that that doesn't help the
schizophrenia that doesn't fix the
problem
um if you take somebody with a drug
addiction who's in jail for you know
being caught two ounces of some illegal
substance
and you put him in prison it doesn't
actually fix the addiction it doesn't
help anything
happily what neuroscience and psychiatry
bring to the table
is lots of really useful things you can
do with schizophrenia with drug
addiction things like this
um and that's why so i i don't know if
he knows but i run a national non-profit
called the center for science and law
and it's all about this intersection of
neuroscience and legal system
and we're trying to implement changes in
every county and every state
um i'll just without going down that
rabbit hole i'll just say one of the
very simplest things to do is to set up
specialized court systems where you have
a
mental health court that has judges and
juries with
expertise in mental illness because if
you go by the way to a regular court and
the person says
um or the the defense lawyer says this
person is schizophrenia
most of the jury will say man i call
bullshit on that why
because they don't know about because
they don't they don't
know what it's about and it turns out
people who
who know about schizophrenia feel very
differently as a juror than someone who
happens not to know anybody
schizophrenia they think it's an excuse
so
um you have judge injuries with
expertise in mental illness and they
know the rehabilitative strategies that
are available
that's one thing having a drug court
where you have judges and jurors with
expertise and rehabilitative strategies
and what can be done and so on a
specialized prostitution core
and so on all these different uh things
by the way this is very easy for
counties to implement this sort of thing
and this is this is i think where this
matters to get
neuroscience into public policy what's
the process of
injecting expertise into this so yeah
i'll tell you exactly what it is
a county needs to run out of money first
i've seen this happen over and over
so what happens is a county has a
completely full jail and they say you
know what
we need to build another jail and then
they realize god we don't have any money
we can't afford
this we've got too many people in jail
and that's when they turn to
god we need something smarter and that's
when they set up specialized court
systems
oh we all function best when when our
back is against the wall
and that's what kovit is good for yeah
it's because we we've all had our
routines and we are
optimized for the things we do and
suddenly our backs are against the wall
all of us
yeah it's really i mean one of the
exciting things about
uh kovet i mean i'm a big believer in
the the possibility of what government
can do for the people and uh
when it becomes too big of a bureaucracy
it starts functioning poorly starts
wasting money
it's nice to uh i mean covers and
reveals that nicely and lessons to be
learned
about who gets elected and who goes into
government
hopefully this hopefully this inspires
talented and young people to go into
government to revolutionize different
aspects of it
yeah so it's uh this that's the positive
silver lining of
of covid i mean i thought it'd be fun to
ask you
i don't know if you're paying attention
to machine learning world and gpt3
so the gpt3 is this language model this
neural network that's able to uh
it has 175 billion parameters
so it's very large and it's trained in
an unsupervised
way on the internet it just reads a lot
of
unstructured text and it's able to
generate some pretty impressive things
the human brain compared to that has
about you know
a thousand times more synapses
people get so upset when machine
learning people
compare the brain and we know
synapses are different it was very
different very different
right but like do you um what do you
think about gpt3
here's what i think here's what i think
a few things what gpt 3 is doing is
extremely impressive but it's very
different from what the brain does so
um it's a good impersonator but just as
one example
everybody takes a passage that gpt
three has has written and they say wow
look at this and it's pretty good right
but it's already gone through a
filtering process of humans looking at
it and saying okay well that's crap
that's correct okay oh here's
here's a sentence that's pretty cool now
here's the thing
human creativity is about absorbing
everything around it and remixing that
and coming up with stuff so in that
sense we're sort of like gpt3 you know
we're
we're remixing what we've gotten in
before
but we also know we also have very good
models of what it is to be another human
and so um you know i don't know if you
speak uh french or something but i'm not
gonna start speaking in french because
then you'll say
wait what are you doing i don't
understand it instead everything coming
out of my mouth is meant for your ears i
know
what you'll understand i know the
vocabulary that you know and don't know
i know what parts you care about
that's a huge part of it and so of all
the possible sentences i could say
i'm navigating this thin bandwidth so
that it's something useful for our
conversation yeah in real time but also
throughout your life i mean you're
you're coval we're co-evolving together
we're learning exactly how to uh
communicate together exactly but this is
this is what gpt
does not do all it's doing is saying
okay i'm gonna take all these senses
and remix stuff and pop some stuff out
but it doesn't know how
to make it so that you lex will feel
like oh yeah that's exactly what i
needed to hear
um that's the next sentence that i
needed to know about for something
well of course it could be all the
impressive results we'll see the
question is when if you raise the number
of parameters
whether it's going to be after something
it will not be
it will not be no raising more
parameters won't
here's the thing it's not that i don't
think neural networks can't be like the
human brain as i suspect they will be at
some point 50 years you know who knows
but what we are missing
in artificial neural networks is we've
got this basic structure
where you've got units and you've got
synapses they're connected
and and that's great and it's done
incredibly mind-blowing impressive
things but
it's not doing the same algorithms as a
human brain
so when i look at my children as little
kids
as infants they can do things that no
gpt3 can do
they can navigate a complex room they
can
navigate social conversation with an
adult
um they can lie they can do a million
things
they they are active thinkers in our
world and doing things
and this of course i mean look we
totally agree on in how incredibly
awesome artificial neural networks are
right now but we also know the things
that they can't
do well like you know like be generally
intelligent do all these different
reasons reason about the world
efficiently learn efficiently adapt
exactly but it's still the rate of
improvement
it's uh to me it's it's possible they'll
be surprised
like that but what i would
what i would assert and then and i'm
glad i'm going to say this on your
podcast so we can look back at this in
two years and 10 years
is that we've got to be much more
sophisticated than
units and synapses between them let me
give you an example and this is
something i talk about in livewire
is despite the amazing impressiveness
mind-blowing impressiveness
um computers don't have some basic
things artificial
neural networks don't have some basic
things that we like caring about
relevance for example so
as humans we are confronted with tons of
data all the time and we only encode
particular things
that are relevant to us we have this
very
deep sense of relevance that i mentioned
earlier is based on survival at the most
basic level but then
all the things about my life and your
life
what's relevant to you that we encode um
this is very useful computers at the
moment don't have that they don't have a
yen to survive and things like that so
we filter out a bunch of the junk we
don't need
we're really good at efficiently zooming
into the things we need
again could be argued you know let me
put on my freud hat
maybe it's uh i mean that's our
conscious mind uh
you know we're not you know there's no
reason that neural networks aren't doing
the same kind of filtration
i mean in the sense what gpt3 is doing
so there's a priming
step it's doing an essential kind of
filtration when you
ask it to generate tweets from
from i don't know from from an elon musk
or something like that it's doing
a filtration of it's throwing away all
the parameters it doesn't need for this
task
and it's figuring out how to do that
successfully and then
ultimately it's not doing a very good
job right now but it's doing a lot
better job than we expected
but it won't ever do a really good job
and i'll tell you why i mean so so
let's say we say hey produce an elon
musk tweet and we see like oh wow it
produced these three that's great but
again
it's not we're not seeing the three
thousand that produce that didn't really
make any sense
it's because it has no idea what it is
like to be a human
and all the things that you might want
to say and all the reasons you wouldn't
like when you go to write a tweet
you might write something yeah it's not
going to come off quite right in this
modern political climate or whatever
like you know you can change things
so and it somehow boils down to fear and
mortality and
all of these human things at the end of
the day all contained with that tweeting
experience
well interestingly the fear of mortality
is at the bottom of this but you've got
all these more things like you know
oh i want to just in case the chairman
of my department reads this i wanted to
come off there
just in case my mom looks at this tweet
i want to make sure she you know
and so on so that those are all the
things that humans are able to
sort of throw into the calculation but i
mean
uh what it required what it requires
though is having a model
of your chairman having a model of your
mother having a model of the
you know the person you want to go on a
date with who might look at your tweet
and so on
all these things are uh you're running
the reason about what it is like to be
them
so in terms of the structure of the
brain
again this may be going into speculation
land i hope you
go along with me is uh
okay so the brain seems to be
intelligent
and our ai systems aren't very currently
so where do you think intelligence
arises in the brain
like what what is it about the brain so
if you mean where location wise it's no
single spot it would be equivalent to
asking
i'm looking at new york city where
is the economy the answer is you can't
point to anywhere the economy is all
about the interaction of
all of the pieces and parts of the city
and that's what you know intelligence
whatever we mean by that in the brain is
interacting from
everything going on at once in terms of
a structure so we look humans are much
smarter than
fish maybe not dolphins but
dolphins are mammals right but i assert
that what we mean by smarter has to do
with live wiring
so so what we mean when we say oh we're
smarter is oh you can figure out a new
thing and figure out a new pathway to
get where we need to go
and that's because fish are essentially
coming to the table with you know okay
here's the hardware
go swim mate eat but we
have the capacity to say okay look i'm
gonna absorb oh oh but you know i saw
someone else do this thing and
and i read once that you could do this
other thing and so on so do you think
there's
is there something i know the these are
mysteries but
like architecturally speaking what
feature of the brain
of uh of the live wire aspect of it
that is really useful for intelligence
so like is it the ability of
neurons to reconnect
like is there something is there any
lessons about the human brain you
think might be inspiring for us and
to take into the artificial into the
machine learning
world yeah i'm actually just trying to
write some up on this now called you
know if you want to build a robot
start with the stomach and what i mean
by that what i mean by that is
a robot has to care it has to have
hunger it has to care about surviving
that kind of thing here's an example so
the penultimate chapter in my book
um i titled the the wolf in the mars
rover and i
just look at this simple comparison of
you look at a wolf
it gets its leg caught in a trap what
does it do it gnaws
its leg off and then it figures out how
to walk on three legs
no problem now the mars rover curiosity
got its front wheel stuck in some
martian soil
and it died this project that cost
billions of dollars died because guys
wheels so wouldn't it be
terrific if we could build a robot that
chewed off its front wheel
and figured out how to operate with a
slightly different body plan
that's the kind of thing that we want to
be able to build and to get there
what we need the whole reason the wolf
is able to do that is because
its motor and somatosensory systems are
live wired so it says oh you know what
turns out i've got a body plan that's
different than what i thought a few
minutes ago
but i i have a yen to survive
and i care about relevance which in this
case is getting to food getting back to
my pack and so on
so i'm just gonna figure out how to
operate with this oh oops that didn't
work
oh okay i'm kind of getting it to work
but the mars rover doesn't do that it
just says oh geez i was pre-programmed
to have four wheels and i have three i'm
screwed
yeah you know i i don't know if you're
familiar with a philosopher named
ernest becker he wrote a book called
denial of death
and there's a few psychologists sheldon
solomon i think he i just
spoke with him on his podcast who
developed
terror management theory which is uh
like ernest becker is a philosopher that
basically said that
uh mortality fear of mortality is at the
core of it yeah
and so i i don't know if it sounds
compelling as an idea
that we're all i mean that all of the
civilization we've constructed
is based on this but it's i'm familiar
with his work
here's what i think i think that yes
fundamentally
this desire to survive is at the core of
it i would agree with that
but but how that expresses itself in
your life
it ends up being very different the
reason you do what you do
is i mean you could list the 100 reasons
why you chose to write your tweet this
way and that way
and it really has nothing to do with the
survival part it has to do with you know
trying to impress fellow humans and
surprise them and say something
yeah so many things built on top of each
other but it's it's fascinating to think
that
in artificial intelligence systems we
want to be able to somehow
engineer this drive for survival for
immortality i mean because as humans
we're not just
about survival we're aware of the fact
that we're going to die
which is a very kind of where we're like
space-time
by the way aren't all right confucius
said
uh he said each person
has two lives the second one begins when
you realize that you have just one
yeah but but most people it takes a long
time for most people to get there
i mean you could argue this kind of
freudian thing which ernest becker
uh argues is they it's they
they actually figured it out early on
and the terror they felt was like the
reason
it's been suppressed and the reason most
people when i ask them about whether
they're afraid of death they basically
say no
they basically say like um i'm afraid i
won't get
like submit the paper before i die like
they kind of see they see death as a
kind of uh
inconvenient deadline for a particular
set of
like a book you're writing yeah it's as
opposed to like
what the hell this thing ends this
at any moment like most people as if i
have encountered do not meditate on the
idea that like
right now you could die like right now
like it it's like it in in the next five
minutes it could be all over
and you know meditate on that idea
i think that somehow brings you closer
to like
the core of the motivations and
the core of the human cognition
condition
but like i said it is not
yeah there's so many things on top of it
but it is interesting i mean
as the ancient poet said uh death
whispers at my ear
live for i come so it's
it is certainly motivating when we think
about that
okay i've got some deadline i don't know
exactly what it is but i better make
stuff
happen it is motivating but i don't
think uh i mean i know for just
speaking for me personally that's not
what motivates me day to day it's
instead
oh i want to get this you know
program up and running before this or i
want to make sure my co-author isn't mad
at me because i haven't gotten this in
there i don't want to miss this grant
deadline or
you know whatever the thing is yeah it's
too it's too distant in a sense
nevertheless it is good to reconnect but
for the ai systems
none of that is there uh like a neural
network does not fear it's mortality
uh and that that seems to be somehow
fundamentally missing the point
i think that's missing the point but i
wonder it's an interesting speculation
about whether you can build an ai system
that is much closer to being a human
without the mortality and survival piece
but just the thing of
relevance just i care about this versus
that right now if you have a robot roll
into the room
it's going to be frozen because it
doesn't have any reason to go there
versus there it doesn't have any
particular
set of things about
this is how i should navigate my next
move because i want
something yeah there's a that's the
thing about humans
is they seem to generate goals they're
like
you said live wired i mean it it's very
flexible in terms of the goals and
creative in terms of the goals you
generate when we enter a room
you show up to a party without a goal
usually
and then you figure it out alone yes but
this goes back to the question about
free will which is when i walk into the
party
if you rewound it 10 000 times would i
go and talk to that couple over there
versus that person like
i might do this exact same thing every
time because i've got some goal stack
and i think okay well at this party i
really want to meet
these kind of people or i feel awkward
or i whatever you know whatever my goals
are
by the way so there was something that i
meant to mention earlier
if you don't mind going back which is
this when we were talking about bci
um so i don't know if you know this but
what i'm spending ninety percent of my
time doing now is running a company
do you know about this yes i wasn't sure
what the company
is involved in right so talk about it
yeah yeah
so when it comes to the future of bci um
you know you can put stuff into the
brain
invasively but my interest has been
how you can get data streams into the
brain non-invasively so i run a company
called neosensory
and what we build is this little um
wristband we've built this in many
different oh wow
that's it yeah this is it and it's got
these vibratory motors in it
so these things as i'm speaking for
example it's
you know capturing my voice and running
algorithms and then turning that into
patterns of vibration here
so people who are deaf for example
learn to hear through their skin so the
information is getting up to their brain
this way
and they learn how to hear so it turns
out on day one people are pretty good
like better than you would expect at
being able to say
oh that's weird it was that was that a
dog barking was that a baby crying was
that a door knock a doorbell
like people are pretty good at it but
with time they get better and better
and what it becomes is a new qualia in
other words a new subjective internal
experience
so on day one they they say whoa what
was that
oh oh that was the dog barking but by
you know
three months later they say oh there's
dog barking somewhere oh there's the dog
that's fascinating and by the way that's
exactly how you learn how to use your
ears
so what you of course need to remember
this but when you're an infant all you
have are you know your eardrum vibrating
causes spikes to go down your auditory
nerves and impinging your
you know auditory cortex your brain
doesn't know what those mean
automatically but what happens is you
learn how to hear by looking for
correlations you know you clap your
hands as a baby
you know you look at your mother's mouth
moving and and that correlates with
what's going on there
and eventually your brain says i'm just
going to summarize this as
an internal experience as a conscious
experience and that's exactly what
happens here
the weird part is that you can feed data
into the brain
not through the ears but through any
channel that gets there as long as the
information gets there your brain
figures out what to do with it that's
fascinating
like expanding the set of sensors
it could be could be arbitrarily uh
could could it could yeah it could
expand arbitrarily which is fascinating
well exactly and by the way
the reason i use this skin you know
there's all kinds of cool stuff going on
in the ar world
class but the fact is your eyes are
overtaxed and your ears are overtaxed
and you need to be able to see and hear
other stuff
but you're covered with the skin which
is this incredible computational
material
with which you can feed information and
we don't use our skin for much of
anything nowadays
um my joke in the lab is that i say we
don't call this the waste for nothing
because originally we built as the vest
and you know you're passing in all this
information
um that way and um
what i'm doing here with with the deaf
community
is is what's called sensory substitution
where i'm capturing sound and scent you
know i'm just replacing the ears with
the skin
and that works um one of the things i
talk about in livewire is sensory
expansion so what if you took something
like your your visual
system which picks up on a very thin
slice of the electromagnetic spectrum
and you could see infrared or
ultraviolet so we've hooked that up
infrared and ultraviolet detectors
and you know i can feel what's going on
so just as an example the first night i
built the infrared
one of my engineers built at the
infrared detector i was walking in the
dark between two houses and suddenly i
felt
all this infrared radiation i was like
where does that come from and i just
followed my wrist and i found a
um an infrared camera a night vision
camera that was
but like you know i immediately oh there
there's that thing there but
of course i would have never seen it but
now it's just part of my
reality that's fascinating yeah and then
of course what i'm really interested in
is sensory
addition what if you could pick up on
stuff that
isn't even part of what we normally pick
up on like you know like the magnetic
field of the earth or
twitter or stock market or things like
that or the i don't know some weird
stuff like the moods of other people or
something like that sure
now what you need is a way to measure
that so as long as there's a machine
that can measure it it's easy it's
trivial to feed this in here and you
come to be
it comes to be part of your reality it's
like you have another sensor
and that that kind of thing is without
doing like if you look in your link
without
i forgot how you put it but it was
eloquent you know without getting
cutting into the brain basically yeah
exactly exactly so this this
costs at the moment 399 dollars that's
not going to kill you
and yeah it's not going to kill you it's
you just put it on and when you're done
you take it off yeah
um yeah and so uh and the name of the
company by the way is neo sensory for
new
senses because the whole idea is
beautiful you can
as i said you know you come to the table
with certain plug and play devices and
then that's it like i can pick up on
this little bit of the electromagnetic
radiation you can pick up on
on this little frequency band for
hearing and so on
but but but i'm stuck there and there's
no reason we have to be stuck there we
can expand our oom velt
by adding new senses yeah what's um oh
i'm sorry the umvelt
is the slice of reality that you pick up
on so each animal has its own
hell of a word umvelt yeah exactly
so i'm sorry i forgot to define it
before it's it's it's such an important
concept which is to say
um for example if you are a a tick
you pick up on uh butyric acid you pick
up on odor and you pick up on
temperature that's it
that's how you construct your reality is
with those two sensors if you are a
blind echolocating bat you're picking up
on
air compression waves coming back you
know echolocation if you are
the black ghost knife fish you're
picking up on changes in the electrical
field around you
with electro reception that's how they
swim around and tell there's a rock
there and so on
but but that's that's all they pick up
on that's their umvelt
it's that's their the signals they get
from the world from which to construct
their reality and they can be totally
different ooh belts
and so our human umvelt is
you know we've got little bits that we
can pick up on one of the things i like
to do with my students is talk about
um imagine that you are a bloodhound dog
right you are a blendhead dog with a
huge snout with 200 million scent
receptors in it
and your whole world is about smelling
you know you've got slits in your
nostrils like big nose fulls of air and
so on
do you have a dog do you nope you used
to used to okay so you know you walk
your dog around and your dog is smelling
everything
the whole world is full of signals that
you do not pick up on it so imagine if
you were that dog and you looked at your
human master and thought my god what is
it like to have the pitiful little nose
of a human yeah
how could you not know that there's a
cat 100 yards away or that your friend
was here six hours ago
and so the idea is because we're stuck
in our own belt because we have this
little pitiful noses we think
okay well yeah we're seeing reality but
but you can have very different sorts of
realities depending on the
peripheral plug-and-play devices you're
equipped with it's fascinating to think
that like
if we're being honest probably our own
belt is
uh you know some infinitely tiny
percent of the possibilities of how you
can sense
quote unquote reality even if you could
i mean there's a guy named don
uh donald uh hoffman yeah
who based basically says uh we're really
far away from reality
in terms of our ability to sense
anything like we
we're very we're almost like we're
floating out there
that's almost like completely attached
to the actual physical reality
it's fascinating that we could have
extra senses that
could help us get a little bit a little
bit closer exactly and by the way this
has been the
the fruits of science is realizing like
for example you know you open your eyes
and there's the world around you right
but
of course depending on how you calculate
it it's less than a 10 trillion
of the electromagnetic spectrum that we
call visible light
uh the reason i say it depends because
you know it's actually infinite in all
directions
yeah and so that's exactly that and then
science allows you to
actually look into the rest of it
exactly start understanding how big the
world is out there and the same with the
the world of really small and the world
of really large exactly
that's beyond our ability to sense
exactly and so the reason i think this
kind of thing matters is because
we now have an opportunity for that
first time in human history
to say okay well i'm just going to
include other things in my umvelt so i'm
going to include infrared radiation
and and have a direct perceptual
experience of that
and so i'm very you know i mean so you
know i've given up my lab and i run this
company 90
of my time now that's what i'm doing i
still teach at stanford and i'm you know
teaching courses
and stuff like that but this is like
this is your your passion
the fire is as on this yeah i feel like
this is
the most important thing that's
happening right now i mean
obviously i think that because that's
what i'm devoting my time and my life to
but
i mean it's a brilliant set of ideas it
certainly is like it
uh it's a step in uh in a very
vibrant future i would say like that the
possibilities there
are are endless exactly so if you ask
what i think about neural link
i think it's amazing what those guys are
doing and working on but i think it's
not practical for almost everybody for
example for people who are deaf they buy
this
and you know every day we're getting
tons of emails and tweets or whatever
from people saying wow i picked up on
this and then i had no idea that was a
i didn't even know that was happening
out there yeah they're coming to here
dude by the way this is you know less
than a tenth of the price of a hearing
aid and
like 250 times less than a cochlear
implant
that's amazing uh people love hearing
about
uh what you know brilliant folks like
yourself
uh could recommend in terms of books of
course you're an author of many books
so i'll in the introduction mention all
the books you've written
people should definitely read live wired
i've gotten a chance to read some of it
it's amazing
but is there three books technical
fiction
philosophical that had an impact on you
when you were younger or today and
books perhaps some of which you would uh
want to recommend that others read
ah you know as an undergraduate i
majored in british american literature
that was my
major because i loved literature i grew
up with
literature my father had these extensive
bookshelves and so
i grew up in the mountains in new mexico
and so that was mostly where i spent my
time was reading books but
um you know i love uh
you know faulkner hemingway i love many
south american authors
gabriel garcia marquez and italo calvina
i would actually recommend invisible
cities i just i
loved that book by italo calvino sorry
it's a book of fiction um uh
anthony door wrote a book called all the
light we cannot see
which actually uh was inspired by
incognito by
exactly what we were talking about
earlier about how you can only see a
little bit of
the what we call visible light in the
electromagnetic radiation
i wrote about this in incognito and then
he reviewed incognito for the washington
oh no
that's awesome and then he wrote this
book the book has nothing to do with
that but that's where the title comes
from
yeah all the light we cannot see is
about the rest of the spectrum but
um the that's a absolutely gorgeous book
jesus
that's the book of fiction yeah it's a
book of fiction
what's it about it takes place during
world war ii uh about these two young
people one of whom is blind
and yeah anything else so
any so you mentioned hemingway i mean uh
old man the sea
what uh what's your favorite uh um snows
of kilimanjaro
uh oh wow short stories that i love um
as far as not as far as nonfiction goes
i grew up uh with cosmos both watching
the pbs
series and then reading the book and
that influenced me a huge amount in
terms of what i do
i as from the time i was a kid i felt
like i want to be
carl sagan like i just that's what i
loved and in the end i
just you know i studied space physics
for a while as an undergrad
but then i in my last semester
discovered neuroscience
last semester and i just thought well
i'm hooked on that so
the carl sagan of the brain is the
aspiration
yeah i mean uh you're doing you're doing
um
an incredible job of it so you open the
book livewire with a quote by
heidegger every man is born as many men
and dies as a single one
well what do you mean or what i'll tell
you what i meant by it yeah i'll tell
you so he
he had his own reason why he was writing
that but i meant this in terms of brain
plasticity in terms of the library
which is this issue that i mentioned
before about this yeah this cone the
space time cone that we
are in which is that when you dropped
into the world
you lex had all this different potential
you could have been a great
surfer or a great chess player or you
could have been
thousands of different men when you grew
up but what you did is
things that were not your choice and
your choice along the way you know you
ended up navigating a particular path
and now you're exactly who you are you
still have lots of potential but the day
you die
you will be exactly lex you will be
one person yeah so on that in that
context i mean
first of all it's just a beautiful it's
a humbling picture
but it's a beautiful one because that's
uh all the possible trajectories and you
pick one you walk down
that road it's the robert frost poem but
on that topic let me ask the
the biggest and the most ridiculous
question
so in this live wide brain when we
choose all these different trajectories
and end up with one what's the meaning
of it all what's uh
is there is there a why here what's the
meaning of life
yeah david engelman that's it
i mean this is the question that
everyone has attacked from their own
lifewire point of view by which i mean
culturally if you grow up in a religious
society
you have one way of attacking that
questions on if you grow up in a secular
scientific society you have a different
way of attacking that question
obviously i i don't know i abstain on
that question
i mean i think one of the fundamental
things i guess in that
in all those possible trajectories is uh
you're always asking
i mean that's the act of asking what the
heck is this thing
for is equivalent to
or at least runs in parallel to all the
choices that you're making
because it's kind of that's the
underlying question well that's right
and by the way
you know this is the interesting thing
about human psychology we've got all
these
layers of things at which we can ask
questions and so if you keep asking
yourself the question about
what is the optimal way for me to be
spending my time what should i be doing
what charity should i get involved with
and so on
if you're asking those big questions
that that steers you appropriately if
you're the type person who never
asks hey is there something better i
could be doing with my time then
presumably you won't optimize
whatever it is that is important to you
so you've
uh i think just in your eyes
in your work there's a passion uh
that just is obvious and it's inspiring
it's contagious
what um if you were to give advice
to us a young person today in the crazy
chaos that we live today
about life about how to
how to uh how to discover their passion
is there some words that you could give
first of all i would say the main thing
for a young person is
stay adaptable and and this is back to
this issue of why
covet is useful for us because it forces
us off our tracks
the the fact is the jobs that will exist
20 years from now we don't even have
names for we can't even imagine the jobs
that
exist and so when young people that i
know go into college and they say hey
what should i major in and so on college
is and should be less and less
vocational as in oh i'm going to learn
how to do this and then i'm going to do
that the rest of my career
the world just isn't that way anymore
with the the exponential speed of things
so the important thing is learning how
to learn learning how to be
live wired and adaptable that's really
key and what i tell what i advise young
people when i talk to them
is you know what you digest
that that's what gives you the raw
storehouse of
things that you can remix and and be
creative with
and so eat broadly and widely
and and obviously this is the wonderful
thing about the internet world we live
in now is you kind of can't help it
you're constantly whoa
you know you go down some mole hole of
wikipedia and you think oh i didn't even
realize that it was a thing i didn't
know that existed
and so embrace that embrace that yeah
exactly
and what i tell people is just always do
a gut check about okay i'm reading this
paper and yeah i think that
but this paper wow that really i
really cared about that in some way i
tell them just keep a real
sniff out for that and when you find
those things keep going down those paths
yeah don't be afraid i mean that that's
one of the the challenges and the
downsides of having so many beautiful
options
is that uh sometimes people are a little
bit afraid to really commit
but that that's very true if if there's
something that just sparks
yeah your interest and passion just run
with it i mean that's
it goes back to the hydera quote um
i mean we only get this one life and
that trajectory
it does it doesn't last forever so just
if something sparks your imagination
your passion is wrong with it yeah
exactly i don't think there's a more
uh beautiful way to end it david it's a
huge honor to finally
meet you your work is inspiring so many
people i've talked to so many people who
are passionate about
neuroscience about the brain even
outside that uh
read your book so i hope uh i hope you
keep doing so i
i think you're already there with carl
sagan i hope you continue growing um
yeah it was honor talking today thanks
so much great you too lex
wonderful thanks for listening to this
conversation with david eagleman
and thank you to our sponsors athletic
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at lex friedman and now let me leave you
with some words from david eagleman
in his book some for details from the
afterlife
imagine for a moment there were nothing
but the product of billions of years of
molecules coming together
and ratcheting up to natural selection
that were composed only of highways of
fluids and chemicals sliding along
roadways
within billions of dancing cells the
trillions of synaptic connections
hum in parallel that this vast egg-like
fabric
of micro thin circuitry runs algorithms
undreamt of
in modern science that these neural
programs give rise to
our decision making loves desires
fears and aspirations to me
understanding this would be a numinous
experience
better than anything ever proposed in
any holy text
thank you for listening and hope to see
you next time
you