back to indexDavid Eagleman: Neuroplasticity and the Livewired Brain | Lex Fridman Podcast #119
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The following is a conversation with David Eagleman,
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a neuroscientist and one of the great science communicators
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of our time, exploring the beauty and mystery
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of the human brain.
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He's an author of a lot of amazing books
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about the human mind, and his new one called Livewired.
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Livewired is a work of 10 years on a topic
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that is fascinating to me, which is neuroplasticity
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or the malleability of the human brain.
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As a side note, let me say that the adaptability
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of the human mind at the biological, chemical,
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cognitive, psychological, and even sociological levels
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is the very thing that captivated me many years ago
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when I first began to wonder how would my engineer
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something like it in the machine.
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The open question today in the 21st century
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is what are the limits of this adaptability?
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As new, smarter and smarter devices and AI systems
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come to life, or as better and better brain computer
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interfaces are engineered, will our brain be able to adapt,
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to catch up, to excel?
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I personally believe yes, that we're far from reaching
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the limitation of the human mind and the human brain,
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just as we are far from reaching the limitations
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of our computational systems.
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If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube,
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and STEM education for young people around the world.
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And now here's my conversation with David Eagleman.
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You have a new book coming out on the changing brain.
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Can you give a high level overview of the book?
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It's called Livewired by the way.
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Yeah, the thing is we typically think about the brain
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in terms of the metaphors we already have,
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like hardware and software, that's how we build
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all our stuff, but what's happening in the brain
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is fundamentally so different.
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So I coined this new term liveware,
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which is a system that's constantly reconfiguring itself
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physically as it learns and adapts to the world around it.
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It's physically changing.
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So it's liveware meaning like hardware but changing.
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Well, the hardware and the software layers are blended
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and so typically engineers are praised for their efficiency
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and making something really clean and clear,
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like, okay, here's the hardware layer,
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then I'm gonna run software on top of it.
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And there's all sorts of universality that you get out
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of a piece of hardware like that that's useful.
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But what the brain is doing is completely different.
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And I am so excited about where this is all going
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because I feel like this is where our engineering will go.
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So currently we build all our devices a particular way,
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but I can't tear half the circuitry out of your cell phone
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and expect it to still function.
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But you can do that with the brain.
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So just as an example, kids who are under
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about seven years old can get one half of their brain
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removed, it's called a hemispherectomy, and they're fine.
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They have a slight limp on the other side of their body,
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but they can function just fine that way.
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And this is generally true.
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You know, sometimes children are born without a hemisphere
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and their visual system rewires so that everything is
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on the single remaining hemisphere.
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What thousands of cases like this teach us
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is that it's a very malleable system that is simply trying
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to accomplish the tasks in front of it by rewiring itself
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with the available real estate.
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How much of that is a quirk or a feature of evolution?
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Like, how hard is it to engineer?
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Because evolution took a lot of work.
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Trillions of organisms had to die for it to create
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this thing we have in our skull.
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Like, because you said you kind of look forward to the idea
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that we might be engineering our systems like this
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in the future, like creating liveware systems.
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How hard do you think is it to create systems like that?
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It has proven itself to be a difficult challenge.
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What I mean by that is even though it's taken evolution
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a really long time to get where it is now,
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all we have to do now is peek at the blueprints.
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It's just three pounds, this organ,
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and we just figure out how to do it.
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But that's the part that I mean is a difficult challenge
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because there are tens of thousands of neuroscientists,
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we're all poking and prodding and trying to figure this out,
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but it's an extremely complicated system.
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But it's only gonna be complicated until we figure out
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the general principles.
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Exactly like if you had a magic camera
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you could look inside the nucleus of a cell
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and you'd see hundreds of thousands of things
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moving around or whatever,
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and then it takes Crick and Watson to say,
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oh, you know what, you're just trying to maintain
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the order of the base pairs and all the rest is details.
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Then it simplifies it and we come to understand something.
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That was my goal in LiveWire,
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which I've written over 10 years, by the way,
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is to try to distill things down to the principles
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of what plastic systems are trying to accomplish.
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But to even just linger, you said,
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it's possible to be born with just one hemisphere
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and you still are able to function.
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First of all, just to pause on that,
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I mean, that's kind of, that's amazing.
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I don't know if people quite,
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I mean, you kind of hear things here and there.
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This is why I'm kind of, I'm really excited about your book
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is I don't know if there's definitive sort of popular sources
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to think about this stuff.
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I mean, there's a lot of, I think from my perspective,
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what I heard is there's like been debates over decades
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about how much neuroplasticity there is in the brain
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and so on, and people have learned a lot of things
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and now it's converging towards people
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that are understanding there's much more plastic
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than people realize.
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But just like linger on that topic,
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like how malleable is the hardware of the human brain?
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Maybe you said children at each stage of life.
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Yeah, so here's the whole thing.
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I think part of the confusion about plasticity
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has been that there are studies
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at all sorts of different ages,
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and then people might read that from a distance
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and they think, oh, well, Fred didn't recover
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when half his brain was taken out
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and so clearly you're not plastic,
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but then you do it with a child and they are plastic.
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And so part of my goal here was to pull together
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the tens of thousands of papers on this,
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both from clinical work and from all the way down
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to the molecular and understand
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what are the principles here?
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The principles are that plasticity diminishes,
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that's no surprise.
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By the way, maybe I should just define plasticity.
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It's the ability of a system to mold into a new shape
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and then hold that shape.
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That's why we make things that we call plastic
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because they are moldable and they can hold that new shape,
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like a plastic toy or something.
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And so maybe we'll use a lot of terms that are synonymous.
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So something is plastic, something is malleable,
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changing, live wire, the name of the book is like synonyms.
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So I'll tell you, exactly right,
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but I'll tell you why I chose live wire
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instead of plasticity.
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So I use the term plasticity in the book, but sparingly,
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because that was a term coined by William James
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over a hundred years ago and he was, of course,
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very impressed with plastic manufacturing
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that you could mold something into shape
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and then it holds that.
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But that's not what's actually happening in the brain.
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It's constantly rewiring your entire life.
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You never hit an end point.
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The whole point is for it to keep changing.
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So even in the few minutes of conversation
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that we've been having, your brain is changing,
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my brain is changing.
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Next time I see your face, I will remember,
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oh yeah, like that time Lex and I sat together
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and we did these things.
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I wonder if your brain will have like a Lex thing
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going on for the next few months.
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Like it'll stay there until you get rid of it
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because it was useful for now.
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Yeah, no, I'll probably never get rid of it.
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Let's say for some circumstance,
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you and I don't see each other for the next 35 years.
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When I run into you, I'll be like, oh yeah.
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That looks familiar.
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Yeah, yeah, we sat down for a podcast
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back when there were podcasts.
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Back when we lived outside virtual reality.
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So you chose live wire to mold a plastic.
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Exactly, because plastic implies,
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I mean, it's the term that's used in the field
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and so that's why we need to use it still for a while.
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But yeah, it implies something gets molded into shape
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and then holds that shape forever.
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But in fact, the whole system is completely changing.
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Then back to how malleable is the human brain
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at each stage of life.
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So what, just at a high level, is it malleable?
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So yes, and plasticity diminishes.
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But one of the things that I felt like
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I was able to put together for myself
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after reading thousands of papers on this issue
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is that different parts of the brain
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have different plasticity windows.
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So for example, with the visual cortex,
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that cements itself into place pretty quickly
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over the course of a few years.
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And I argue that's because of the stability of the data.
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In other words, what you're getting in from the world,
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you've got a certain number of angles, colors, shapes.
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It's essentially the world is visually stable.
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So that hardens around that data.
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As opposed to, let's say, the somatosensory cortex,
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which is the part that's taking information
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from your body, or the motor cortex right next to it,
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which is what drives your body.
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The fact is, bodies are always changing.
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You get taller over time, you get fatter, thinner,
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over time, you might break a leg
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and have to limp for a while, stuff like that.
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So because the data there is always changing,
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by the way, you might get on a bicycle,
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you might get on a surfboard, things like that.
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Because the data is always changing,
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that stays more malleable.
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And when you look through the brain,
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you find that it appears to be this,
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how stable the data is determines how fast
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something hardens into place.
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But the point is, different parts of the brain
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harden into place at different times.
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Do you think it's possible that,
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depending on how much data you get on different sensors,
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that it stays more malleable longer?
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So like, if you look at different cultures
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that experience, like if you keep your eyes closed,
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or maybe you're blind, I don't know,
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but let's say you keep your eyes closed
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for your entire life, then the visual cortex
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might be much less malleable.
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The reason I bring that up is like,
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well maybe we'll talk about brain computer interfaces
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a little bit down the line, but is this,
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is the malleability a genetic thing,
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or is it more about the data, like you said, that comes in?
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Ah, so the malleability itself is a genetic thing.
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The big trick that Mother Nature discovered with humans
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is make a system that's really flexible,
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as opposed to most other creatures to different degrees.
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So if you take an alligator, it's born,
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its brain does the same thing every generation.
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If you compare an alligator 100,000 years ago
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to an alligator now, they're essentially the same.
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We, on the other hand, as humans,
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drop into a world with a half baked brain,
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and what we require is to absorb the culture around us,
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and the language, and the beliefs, and the customs,
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and so on, that's what Mother Nature has done with us,
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and it's been a tremendously successful trick
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we've taken over the whole planet as a result of this.
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So that's an interesting point,
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I mean, just to link on it, that,
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I mean, this is a nice feature,
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like if you were to design a thing
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to survive in this world, do you put it at age zero
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already equipped to deal with the world
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in a hard coded way, or do you put it,
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do you make it malleable and just throw it in,
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take the risk that you're maybe going to die,
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but you're going to learn a lot in the process,
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and if you don't die, you'll learn a hell of a lot
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to be able to survive in the environment.
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So this is the experiment that Mother Nature ran,
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and it turns out that, for better or worse, we've won.
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I mean, yeah, we put other animals in the zoos,
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and we, yeah, that's right.
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AI might do better.
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Okay, fair enough, that's true.
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And maybe what the trick Mother Nature did
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is just the stepping stone to AI, but.
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So that's a beautiful feature of the human brain,
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that it's malleable, but let's,
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on the topic of Mother Nature, what do we start with?
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Like, how blank is the slate?
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Ah, so it's not actually a blank slate.
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What it's, it's terrific engineering that's set up in there,
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but much of that engineering has to do with,
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okay, just make sure that things get to the right place.
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For example, like the fibers from the eyes
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getting to the visual cortex,
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or all this very complicated machinery in the ear
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getting to the auditory cortex, and so on.
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So things, first of all, there's that.
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And then what we also come equipped with
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is the ability to absorb language
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and culture and beliefs, and so on.
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So you're already set up for that.
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So no matter what you're exposed to,
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you will absorb some sort of language.
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That's the trick, is how do you engineer something
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just enough that it's then a sponge
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that's ready to take in and fill in the blanks?
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How much of the malleability is hardware?
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How much is software?
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Is that useful at all in the brain?
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So what are we talking about?
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So there's neurons, there's synapses,
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and all kinds of different synapses,
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and there's chemical communication,
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like electrical signals,
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and there's chemical communication from the synapses.
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I would say the software would be the timing
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and the nature of the electrical signals, I guess,
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and the hardware would be the actual synapses.
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So here's the thing, this is why I really, if we can,
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I wanna get away from the hardware and software metaphor
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because what happens is,
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as activity passes through the system, it changes things.
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Now, the thing that computer engineers
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are really used to thinking about is synapses,
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where two neurons connect.
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Of course, each neuron connects with 10,000 of its neighbors,
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but at a point where they connect,
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what we're all used to thinking about
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is the changing of the strength of that connection,
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the synaptic weight.
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But in fact, everything is changing.
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The receptor distribution inside that neuron
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so that you're more or less sensitive
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to the neurotransmitter,
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then the structure of the neuron itself
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and what's happening there,
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all the way down to biochemical cascades inside the cell,
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all the way down to the nucleus,
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and for example, the epigenome,
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which is these little proteins that are attached to the DNA
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that cause conformational changes,
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that cause more genes to be expressed or repressed.
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All of these things are plastic.
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The reason that most people only talk
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about the synaptic weights
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is because that's really all we can measure well.
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And all this other stuff is really, really hard to see
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with our current technology.
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So essentially, that just gets ignored.
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But in fact, the system is plastic
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at all these different levels.
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And my way of thinking about this
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is an analogy to pace layers.
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So pace layers is a concept that Stewart Brand
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suggested about how to think about cities.
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So you have fashion, which changes rapidly in cities.
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You have governance, which changes more slowly.
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You have the structure, the buildings of a city,
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which changes more slowly, all the way down to nature.
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You've got all these different layers of things
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that are changing at different paces, at different speeds.
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I've taken that idea and mapped it onto the brain,
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which is to say you have some biochemical cascades
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that are just changing really rapidly
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when something happens, all the way down to things
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that are more and more cemented in there.
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And this actually allows us to understand a lot
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about particular kinds of things that happen.
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For example, one of the oldest,
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probably the oldest rule in neurology
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is called Ribot's Law, which is that older memories
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are more stable than newer memories.
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So when you get old and demented,
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you'll be able to remember things from your young life.
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Maybe you'll remember this podcast,
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but you won't remember what you did
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a month ago or a year ago.
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And this is a very weird structure, right?
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No other system works this way,
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where older memories are more stable than newer memories.
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But it's because through time,
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things get more and more cemented
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into deeper layers of the system.
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And so this is, I think, the way we have to think
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about the brain, not as, okay, you've got neurons,
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you've got synaptic weights, and that's it.
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So, yeah, so the idea of LiveWare and LiveWired
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is that it's like a, it's a gradual, yeah,
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it's a gradual spectrum between software and hardware.
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And so the metaphors completely doesn't make sense.
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Cause like when you talk about software and hardware,
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it's really hard lines.
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I mean, of course, software is unlike hard,
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but even hardware, but like, so there's two groups,
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but in the software world,
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there's levels of abstractions, right?
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There's the operating system, there's machine code,
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and then it gets higher and higher levels.
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But somehow that's actually fundamentally different
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than the layers of abstractions in the hardware.
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But in the brain, it's all like the same.
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And I love the city, the city metaphor.
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I mean, yeah, it's kind of mind blowing
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cause it's hard to know what to think about that.
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Like if I were to ask the question,
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this is an important question for machine learning is,
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how does the brain learn?
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So essentially you're saying that,
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I mean, it just learns on all of these different levels
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at all different paces.
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And as a result, what happens is
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as you practice something, you get good at something,
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you're physically changing the circuitry,
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you're adapting your brain around the thing
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that is relevant to you.
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So let's say you take up, do you know how to surf?
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So let's say you take up surfing now at this age.
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What happens is you'll be terrible at first,
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you don't know how to operate your body,
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you don't know how to read the waves, things like that.
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And through time you get better and better.
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What you're doing is you're burning that
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into the actual circuitry of your brain.
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You're of course conscious when you're first doing it,
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you're thinking about, okay, where am I doing?
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What's my body weight?
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But eventually when you become a pro at it,
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you are not conscious of it at all.
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In fact, you can't even unpack what it is that you did.
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Think about riding a bicycle.
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You can't describe how you're doing it,
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you're just doing it, you're changing your balance
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when you come, you know, you do this to go to a stop.
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So this is what we're constantly doing
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is actually shaping our own circuitry
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based on what is relevant for us.
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Survival, of course, being the top thing that's relevant.
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But interestingly, especially with humans,
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we have these particular goals in our lives,
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computer science, neuroscience, whatever.
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And so we actually shape our circuitry around that.
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I mean, you mentioned this gets slower and slower with age,
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but is there, like I think I've read and spoken offline,
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even on this podcast with a developmental neurobiologist,
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I guess would be the right terminology,
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is like looking at the very early,
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like from embryonic stem cells to the creation of the brain.
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And like, that's mind blowing how much stuff happens there.
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So it's very malleable at that stage.
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And then, but after that,
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at which point does it stop being malleable?
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So that's the interesting thing
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is that it remains malleable your whole life.
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So even when you're an old person,
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you'll be able to remember new faces and names,
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you'll be able to learn new sorts of tasks.
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And thank goodness,
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cause the world is changing rapidly
link |
in terms of technology and so on.
link |
I just sent my mother an Alexa
link |
and she figured out how to go on the settings
link |
And I was really impressed that she was able to do it.
link |
So there are parts of the brain
link |
that remain malleable their whole life.
link |
The interesting part is that really your goal
link |
is to make an internal model of the world.
link |
Your goal is to say, okay,
link |
the brain is trapped in silence and darkness,
link |
and it's trying to understand
link |
how the world works out there, right?
link |
I love that image.
link |
Yeah, I guess it is.
link |
You forget, it's like this lonely thing
link |
is sitting in its own container
link |
and trying to actually throw a few sensors,
link |
figure out what the hell's going on.
link |
You know what I sometimes think about
link |
is that movie, The Martian with Matt Damon,
link |
the, I mean, it was written in a book, of course,
link |
but the movie poster shows Matt Damon
link |
all alone on the red planet.
link |
And I think, God, that's actually what it's like
link |
to be inside your head and my head and anybody's head
link |
is that you're essentially on your own planet in there.
link |
And I'm essentially on my own planet.
link |
And everyone's got their own world
link |
where you've absorbed all of your experiences
link |
up to this moment in your life
link |
that have made you exactly who you are
link |
and same for me and everyone.
link |
And we've got this very thin bandwidth of communication.
link |
And I'll say something like,
link |
oh yeah, that tastes just like peaches.
link |
And you'll say, oh, I know what you mean.
link |
But the experience, of course,
link |
might be vastly different for us.
link |
So the brain is trapped in silence and darkness,
link |
each one of us, and what it's trying to do,
link |
this is the important part,
link |
it's trying to make an internal model
link |
of what's going on out there,
link |
as in how do I function in the world?
link |
How do I interact with other people?
link |
Do I say something nice and polite?
link |
Do I say something aggressive and mean?
link |
Do I, you know, all these things
link |
that it's putting together about the world.
link |
And I think what happens when people get older and older,
link |
it may not be that plasticity is diminishing.
link |
It may be that their internal model essentially
link |
has set itself up in a way where it says,
link |
okay, I've pretty much got
link |
a really good understanding of the world now,
link |
and I don't really need to change, right?
link |
So when much older people find themselves
link |
in a situation where they need to change,
link |
they can actually are able to do it.
link |
It's just that I think this notion
link |
that we all have that plasticity diminishes
link |
as we grow older is in part
link |
because the motivation isn't there.
link |
But if you were 80 and you get fired from your job
link |
and suddenly had to figure out
link |
how to program a WordPress site or something,
link |
you'd figure it out.
link |
So the capability, the possibility of change is there.
link |
But then that's the highest challenge,
link |
the interesting challenge to this plasticity,
link |
to this liveware system.
link |
If we could talk about brain computer interfaces
link |
and Neuralink, what are your thoughts
link |
about the efforts of Elon Musk, Neuralink, BCI in general
link |
in this regard, which is adding a machine,
link |
a computer, the capability of a computer
link |
to communicate with the brain
link |
and the brain to communicate with a computer
link |
at the very basic applications
link |
and then like the futuristic kind of thoughts.
link |
Yeah, first of all, it's terrific
link |
that people are jumping in and doing that
link |
because it's clearly the future.
link |
The interesting part is our brains have pretty good methods
link |
of interacting with technology.
link |
So maybe it's your fat thumbs on a cell phone or something,
link |
but, or maybe it's watching a YouTube video
link |
and getting into your eye that way.
link |
But we have pretty rapid ways of communicating
link |
with technology and getting data.
link |
So if you actually crack open the skull
link |
and go into the inner sanctum of the brain,
link |
you might be able to get a little bit faster,
link |
but I'll tell you, I'm not so sanguine
link |
on the future of that as a business.
link |
And I'll tell you why.
link |
It's because there are various ways
link |
of getting data in and out
link |
and an open head surgery is a big deal.
link |
Neurosurgeons don't wanna do it
link |
because there's always risk of death
link |
and infection on the table.
link |
And also it's not clear how many people would say,
link |
I'm gonna volunteer to get something in my head
link |
so that I can text faster, 20% faster.
link |
So I think it's, mother nature surrounds the brain
link |
with this armored bunker of the skull
link |
because it's a very delicate material.
link |
And there's an expression in neurosurgery
link |
about the brain is,
link |
the person is never the same after you open up their skull.
link |
Now, whether or not that's true or whatever, who cares?
link |
But it's a big deal to do an open head surgery.
link |
So what I'm interested in is how can we get information
link |
in and out of the brain
link |
without having to crack the skull open?
link |
Without messing with the biological part,
link |
directly connecting or messing
link |
with the intricate biological thing that we got going on
link |
and it seems to be working.
link |
And by the way, where Neuralink is going,
link |
which is wonderful, is going to be in patient cases.
link |
It really matters for all kinds of surgeries
link |
that a person needs,
link |
whether for Parkinson's or epilepsy or whatever.
link |
It's a terrific new technology
link |
for essentially sewing electrodes in there
link |
and getting more higher density of electrodes.
link |
I just don't think as far as the future of BCI goes,
link |
I don't suspect that people will go in and say,
link |
yeah, drill a hole in my head and do this.
link |
Well, it's interesting
link |
because I think there's a similar intuition
link |
but say in the world of autonomous vehicles
link |
that folks know how hard it is
link |
and it seems damn impossible.
link |
The similar intuition about,
link |
I'm sticking on the Elon Musk thing
link |
is just a good, easy example.
link |
Similar intuition about colonizing Mars,
link |
it like, if you really think about it,
link |
it seems extremely difficult.
link |
And almost, I mean, just technically difficult
link |
to a degree where you wanna ask,
link |
is it really worth doing, worth trying?
link |
And then the same is applied with BCI.
link |
But the thing about the future
link |
is it's hard to predict.
link |
So the exciting thing to me with,
link |
so once it does, once if successful,
link |
it's able to help patients,
link |
it may be able to discover something very surprising
link |
of our ability to directly communicate with the brain.
link |
So exactly what you're interested in is figuring out
link |
how to play with this malleable brain,
link |
but like help assist it somehow.
link |
I mean, it's such a compelling notion to me
link |
that we're now working on
link |
all these exciting machine learning systems
link |
that are able to learn from data.
link |
And then if we can have this other brain
link |
that's a learning system,
link |
that's live wired on the human side
link |
and them to be able to communicate,
link |
it's like a self play mechanism
link |
was able to beat the world champion at Go.
link |
So they can play with each other,
link |
the computer and the brain, like when you sleep.
link |
I mean, there's a lot of futuristic kind of things
link |
that it's just exciting possibilities,
link |
but I hear you, we understand so little
link |
about the actual intricacies of the communication
link |
of the brain that it's hard to find the common language.
link |
Well, interestingly, the technologies that have been built
link |
don't actually require the perfect common language.
link |
So for example, hundreds of thousands of people
link |
are walking around with artificial ears
link |
and artificial eyes,
link |
meaning cochlear implants or retinal implants.
link |
So this is, you take a essentially digital microphone,
link |
you slip an electrode strip into the inner ear
link |
and people can learn how to hear that way,
link |
or you take an electrode grid
link |
and you plug it into the retina at the back of the eye
link |
and people can learn how to see that way.
link |
The interesting part is those devices
link |
don't speak exactly the natural biological language,
link |
they speak the dialect of Silicon Valley.
link |
And it turns out that as recently as about 25 years ago,
link |
a lot of people thought this was never gonna work.
link |
They thought it wasn't gonna work for that reason,
link |
but the brain figures it out.
link |
It's really good at saying, okay, look,
link |
there's some correlation between what I can touch
link |
and feel and hear and so on,
link |
and the data that's coming in,
link |
or between I clap my hands and I have signals coming in there
link |
and it figures out how to speak any language.
link |
Oh, that's fascinating.
link |
So like no matter if it's Neuralink,
link |
so directly communicating with the brain,
link |
or it's a smartphone or Google Glass,
link |
or the brain figures out the efficient way of communication.
link |
Well, exactly, exactly.
link |
And what I propose is the potato head theory of evolution,
link |
which is that all our eyes and nose and mouth and ears
link |
and fingertips, all this stuff is just plug and play.
link |
And the brain can figure out
link |
what to do with the data that comes in.
link |
And part of the reason that I think this is right,
link |
and I care so deeply about this,
link |
is when you look across the animal kingdom,
link |
you find all kinds of weird peripheral devices plugged in,
link |
and the brain figures out what to do with the data.
link |
And I don't believe that Mother Nature
link |
has to reinvent the principles of brain operation each time
link |
to say, oh, now I'm gonna have heat pits
link |
to detect infrared.
link |
Now I'm gonna have something
link |
to detect electroreceptors on the body.
link |
Now I'm gonna detect something
link |
to pick up the magnetic field of the earth
link |
with cryptochromes in the eye.
link |
And so instead the brain says, oh, I got it.
link |
There's data coming in.
link |
Can I do something with it?
link |
Oh, great, I'm gonna mold myself
link |
around the data that's coming in.
link |
It's kind of fascinating to think that,
link |
we think of smartphones
link |
and all this new technology as novel.
link |
It's totally novel as outside of what evolution
link |
ever intended or like what nature ever intended.
link |
It's fascinating to think that like the entirety
link |
of the process of evolution is perfectly fine
link |
and ready for the smartphone and the internet.
link |
It's ready to be valuable to that.
link |
And whatever comes to cyborgs, to virtual reality,
link |
we kind of think like, this is, you know,
link |
there's all these like books written about what's natural
link |
and we're like destroying our natural cells
link |
by like embracing all this technology.
link |
It's kind of, you know,
link |
probably not giving the brain enough credit.
link |
Like this thing is just fine with new tech.
link |
Oh, exactly, it wraps itself around.
link |
And by the way, wait till you have kids.
link |
You'll see the ease with which they pick up on stuff.
link |
And as Kevin Kelly said,
link |
technology is what gets invented after you're born.
link |
But the stuff that already exists when you're born,
link |
that's not even tech, that's just background furniture.
link |
Like the fact that the iPad exists for my son and daughter,
link |
like that's just background furniture.
link |
So, yeah, it's because we have
link |
this incredibly malleable system,
link |
that just absorbs whatever is going on in the world
link |
and learns what to do with it.
link |
So do you think, just to linger for a little bit more,
link |
do you think it's possible to co adjust?
link |
Like we're kind of, you know,
link |
for the machine to adjust to the brain,
link |
for the brain to adjust to the machine.
link |
I guess that's what's already happening.
link |
Sure, that is what's happening.
link |
So for example, when you put electrodes
link |
in the motor cortex to control a robotic arm
link |
for somebody who's paralyzed,
link |
the engineers do a lot of work to figure out,
link |
okay, what can we do with the algorithm here
link |
so that we can detect what's going on from these cells
link |
and figure out how to best program the robotic arm to move
link |
given the data that we're measuring from these cells.
link |
But also the brain is learning too.
link |
So, you know, the paralyzed woman says,
link |
wait, I'm trying to grab this thing.
link |
And by the way, it's all about relevance.
link |
So if there's a piece of food there and she's hungry,
link |
she'll figure out how to get this food into her mouth
link |
with the robotic arm because that is what matters.
link |
Well, that's, okay, first of all,
link |
that paints a really promising and beautiful,
link |
for some reason, really optimistic picture
link |
that, you know, our brain is able to adjust to so much.
link |
You know, so many things happened this year, 2020,
link |
that you think like, how are we ever going to deal with it?
link |
And it's somehow encouraging
link |
and inspiring that like we're going to be okay.
link |
Well, that's right.
link |
I actually think, so 2020 has been an awful year
link |
for almost everybody in many ways,
link |
but the one silver lining has to do with brain plasticity,
link |
which is to say we've all been on our, you know,
link |
on our gerbil wheels, we've all been in our routines.
link |
And, you know, as I mentioned,
link |
our internal models are all about
link |
how do you maximally succeed?
link |
How do you optimize your operation
link |
in this circumstance where you are, right?
link |
And then all of a sudden, bang, 2020 comes,
link |
we're completely off our wheels.
link |
We're having to create new things all the time
link |
and figure out how to do it.
link |
And that is terrific for brain plasticity because,
link |
and we know this because there are very large studies
link |
on older people who stay cognitively active
link |
their whole lives.
link |
Some fraction of them have Alzheimer's disease
link |
physically, but nobody knows that when they're alive.
link |
Even though their brain is getting chewed up
link |
with the ravages of Alzheimer's,
link |
cognitively they're doing just fine.
link |
It's because they're challenged all the time.
link |
They've got all these new things going on,
link |
all this novelty, all these responsibilities,
link |
chores, social life, all these things happening.
link |
And as a result, they're constantly building new roadways,
link |
even as parts degrade.
link |
And that's the only good news is that
link |
we are in a situation where suddenly
link |
we can't just operate like automata anymore.
link |
We have to think of completely new ways to do things.
link |
And that's wonderful.
link |
I don't know why this question popped into my head.
link |
It's quite absurd, but are we gonna be okay?
link |
You said this is the promising silver lining
link |
just from your own,
link |
cause you've written about this and thought about this
link |
outside of maybe even the plasticity of the brain,
link |
but just this whole pandemic kind of changed the way
link |
it knocked us out of this hamster wheel like that of habit.
link |
A lot of people had to reinvent themselves.
link |
Unfortunately, and I have a lot of friends
link |
who either already or are going to lose their business,
link |
is basically it's taking the dreams that people have had
link |
and said this dream, this particular dream you've had
link |
will no longer be possible.
link |
So you have to find something new.
link |
What are your, are we gonna be okay?
link |
Yeah, we'll be okay in the sense that,
link |
I mean, it's gonna be a rough time
link |
for many or most people,
link |
but in the sense that it is sometimes useful
link |
to find that what you thought was your dream
link |
was not the thing that you're going to do.
link |
This is obviously the plot in lots of Hollywood movies
link |
that someone says, I'm gonna do this,
link |
and then that gets foiled
link |
and they end up doing something better.
link |
But this is true in life.
link |
I mean, in general, even though we plan our lives
link |
as best we can, it's predicated on our notion of,
link |
okay, given everything that's around me,
link |
this is what's possible for me next.
link |
But it takes 2020 to knock you off that
link |
where you think, oh, well, actually,
link |
maybe there's something I can be doing
link |
that's bigger, that's better.
link |
Yeah, you know, for me, one exciting thing,
link |
and I just talked to Grant Sanderson.
link |
I don't know if you know who he is.
link |
He's a 3Blue1Brown, it's a YouTube channel.
link |
He does, he's a, if you see it, you would recognize it.
link |
He's like a really famous math guy,
link |
and he's a math educator,
link |
and he does these incredible, beautiful videos.
link |
And now I see sort of at MIT,
link |
folks are struggling to try to figure out,
link |
you know, if we do teach remotely,
link |
how do we do it effectively?
link |
So you have these world class researchers
link |
and professors trying to figure out
link |
how to put content online that teaches people.
link |
And to me, a possible future of that is,
link |
you know, Nobel Prize winning faculty become YouTubers.
link |
Like that to me is so exciting, like what Grant said,
link |
which is like the possibility of creating canonical videos
link |
on the thing you're a world expert in.
link |
You know, there's so many topics.
link |
It just, the world doesn't, you know, there's faculty.
link |
I mentioned Russ Tedrick.
link |
There's all these people in robotics
link |
that are experts in a particular beautiful field
link |
on which there's only just papers.
link |
There's no popular book.
link |
There's no clean canonical video
link |
showing the beauty of a subject.
link |
And one possibility is they try to create that
link |
and share it with the world.
link |
This is the beautiful thing.
link |
This of course has been happening for a while already.
link |
I mean, for example, when I go and I give book talks,
link |
often what'll happen is some 13 year old
link |
will come up to me afterwards and say something,
link |
and I'll say, my God, that was so smart.
link |
Like, how did you know that?
link |
And they'll say, oh, I saw it on a Ted talk.
link |
Well, what an amazing opportunity.
link |
Here you got the best person in the world on subject X
link |
giving a 15 minute talk as beautifully as he or she can.
link |
And the 13 year old just grows up with that.
link |
That's just the mother's milk, right?
link |
As opposed to when we grew up,
link |
you know, I had whatever homeroom teacher I had
link |
and, you know, whatever classmates I had.
link |
And hopefully that person knew what he or she was teaching
link |
and often didn't and, you know, just made things up.
link |
So the opportunity that has become extraordinary
link |
to get the best of the world.
link |
And the reason this matters, of course,
link |
is because obviously, back to plasticity,
link |
the way that we, the way our brain gets molded
link |
is by absorbing everything from the world,
link |
all of the knowledge and the data and so on that it can get,
link |
and then springboarding off of that.
link |
And we're in a very lucky time now
link |
because we grew up with a lot of just in case learning.
link |
So, you know, just in case you ever need to know
link |
these dates in Mongolian history, here they are.
link |
But what kids are grown up with now, like my kids,
link |
is tons of just in time learning.
link |
So as soon as they're curious about something,
link |
they ask Alexa, they ask Google Home,
link |
they get the answer right there
link |
in the context of their curiosity.
link |
The reason this matters is because for plasticity to happen,
link |
you need to care, you need to be curious about something.
link |
And this is something, by the way,
link |
that the ancient Romans had noted.
link |
They had outlined seven different levels of learning
link |
and the highest level is when you're curious about a topic.
link |
But anyway, so kids now are getting tons
link |
of just in time learning, and as a result,
link |
they're gonna be so much smarter than we are.
link |
They're just, and we can already see that.
link |
I mean, my boy is eight years old, my girl is five.
link |
But I mean, the things that he knows are amazing
link |
because it's not just him having to do
link |
the rote memorization stuff that we did.
link |
Yeah, it's just fascinating what the brain,
link |
what young brains look like now
link |
because of all those TED Talks just loaded in there.
link |
And there's also, I mean, a lot of people, right,
link |
kind of, there's a sense that our attention span
link |
is growing shorter, but it's complicated
link |
because for example, most people, majority of people,
link |
it's the 80 plus percent of people listen
link |
to the entirety of these things,
link |
two, three hours for the podcast,
link |
long form podcasts are becoming more and more popular.
link |
So like that's, it's all really giant complicated mess.
link |
And the point is that the brain is able to adjust to it
link |
and somehow like form a worldview
link |
within this new medium of like information that we have.
link |
You have like these short tweets
link |
and you have these three, four hour podcasts
link |
and you have Netflix movie.
link |
I mean, it's just, it's adjusting to the entirety
link |
and just absorbing it and taking it all in
link |
and then pops up COVID that forces us all to be home
link |
and it all just adjusts and figures it out.
link |
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
link |
Been talking about the brain
link |
as if it's something separate from the human
link |
that carries it a little bit.
link |
Like whenever you talk about the brain,
link |
it's easy to forget that that's like, that's us.
link |
Like how much do you,
link |
how much is the whole thing like predetermined?
link |
Like how much is it already encoded in there?
link |
And how much is it the, what's the hit?
link |
The actions, the decisions, the judgments, the...
link |
You mean like who you are?
link |
Oh, yeah, yeah, okay, great question.
link |
Right, so there used to be a big debate
link |
about nature versus nurture.
link |
And we now know that it's always both.
link |
You can't even separate them
link |
because you come to the table with a certain amount of nature
link |
for example, your whole genome and so on.
link |
The experiences you have in the womb,
link |
like whether your mother is smoking or drinking,
link |
things like that, whether she's stressed, so on.
link |
Those all influence how you're gonna pop out of the womb.
link |
From there, everything is an interaction
link |
between all of your experiences and the nature.
link |
What I mean is, I think of it like a space time cone
link |
where you have, you drop into the world
link |
and depending on the experience that you have,
link |
you might go off in this direction
link |
or that direction or in that direction
link |
because there's interaction on the way.
link |
Your experiences determine what happens
link |
with the expression of your genes.
link |
So some genes get repressed, some get expressed and so on.
link |
And you actually become a different person
link |
based on your experiences.
link |
There's a whole field called epigenomics,
link |
which is, or epigenetics I should say,
link |
which is about the epigenome.
link |
And that is the layer that sits on top of the DNA
link |
and causes the genes to express differently.
link |
That is directly related to the experiences that you have.
link |
So if, just as an example, they take rat pups
link |
and one group is placed away from their parents
link |
and the other group is groomed and licked
link |
and taken good care of,
link |
that changes their gene expression
link |
for the rest of their life.
link |
They go off in different directions
link |
in this space time cone.
link |
So yeah, this is of course why it matters
link |
that we take care of children and pour money
link |
into things like education and good childcare
link |
and so on for children broadly,
link |
because these formative years matter so much.
link |
So is there a free will?
link |
This is a great question.
link |
I apologize for the absurd high level
link |
philosophical questions.
link |
No, no, these are my favorite kind of questions.
link |
Here's the thing, here's the thing.
link |
If you ask most neuroscientists,
link |
they'll say that we can't really think
link |
of how you would get free will in there
link |
because as far as we can tell, it's a machine.
link |
It's a very complicated machine.
link |
Enormously sophisticated, 86 billion neurons,
link |
about the same number of glial cells.
link |
Each of these things is as complicated
link |
as the city of San Francisco.
link |
Each neuron in your head has the entire human genome in it.
link |
It's expressing millions of gene products.
link |
These are incredibly complicated biochemical cascades.
link |
Each one is connected to 10,000 of its neighbors,
link |
which means you have like half a quadrillion connections
link |
So it's incredibly complicated thing,
link |
but it is fundamentally appears to just be a machine.
link |
And therefore, if there's nothing in it
link |
that's not being driven by something else,
link |
then it seems it's hard to understand
link |
where free will would come from.
link |
So that's the camp that pretty much all of us fall into,
link |
but I will say, our science is still quite young.
link |
And I'm a fan of the history of science,
link |
and the thing that always strikes me as interesting
link |
is when you look back at any moment in science,
link |
everybody believes something is true,
link |
and they simply didn't know about
link |
what Einstein revealed or whatever.
link |
And they all feel like that we've,
link |
at any moment in history,
link |
they all feel like we've converged to the final answer.
link |
Like all the pieces of the puzzle are there.
link |
And I think that's a funny illusion
link |
that's worth getting rid of.
link |
And in fact, this is what drives good science
link |
is recognizing that we don't have most of the puzzle pieces.
link |
So as far as the free will question goes, I don't know.
link |
At the moment, it seems, wow,
link |
it'd be really impossible to figure out
link |
how something else could fit in there,
link |
but 100 years from now,
link |
our textbooks might be very different than they are now.
link |
I mean, could I ask you to speculate
link |
where do you think free will could be squeezed into there?
link |
Like, what's that even,
link |
is it possible that our brain just creates
link |
kinds of illusions that are useful for us?
link |
Or like what, where could it possibly be squeezed in?
link |
Well, let me give a speculation answer
link |
to your very nice question,
link |
but don't, and the listeners of this podcast,
link |
don't quote me on this.
link |
I'm not saying this is what I believe to be true,
link |
but let me just give an example.
link |
I give this at the end of my book, Incognito.
link |
So the whole book of Incognito is about,
link |
all the what's happening in the brain.
link |
And essentially I'm saying, look,
link |
here's all the reasons to think
link |
that free will probably does not exist.
link |
But at the very end, I say, look,
link |
imagine that you are,
link |
imagine that you're a Kalahari Bushman
link |
and you find a radio in the sand
link |
and you've never seen anything like this.
link |
And you look at this radio and you realize
link |
that when you turn this knob, you hear voices coming from,
link |
there are voices coming from it.
link |
So being a radio materialist,
link |
you try to figure out like, how does this thing operate?
link |
So you take off the back cover
link |
and you realize there's all these wires.
link |
And when you take out some wires,
link |
the voices get garbled or stop or whatever.
link |
And so what you end up developing is a whole theory
link |
about how this connection, this pattern of wires
link |
gives rise to voices.
link |
But it would never strike you that in distant cities,
link |
there's a radio tower and there's invisible stuff beaming.
link |
And that's actually the origin of the voices.
link |
And this is just necessary for it.
link |
So I mentioned this just as a speculation,
link |
say, look, how would we know,
link |
what we know about the brain for absolutely certain
link |
is that when you damage pieces and parts of it,
link |
things get jumbled up.
link |
But how would you know if there's something else going on
link |
that we can't see like electromagnetic radiation
link |
that is what's actually generating this?
link |
Yeah, you paint a beautiful example
link |
because we don't know most of how our universe works,
link |
how totally off base we might be with our science until,
link |
I mean, yeah, I mean, that's inspiring, that's beautiful.
link |
It's kind of terrifying, it's humbling.
link |
It's all of the above.
link |
And the important part just to recognize
link |
is that of course we're in the position
link |
of having massive unknowns.
link |
And we have of course the known unknowns
link |
and that's all the things we're pursuing in our labs
link |
and trying to figure out that,
link |
but there's this whole space of unknown unknowns.
link |
Things we haven't even realized we haven't asked yet.
link |
Let me kind of ask a weird, maybe a difficult question,
link |
part that has to do with,
link |
I've been recently reading a lot about World War II.
link |
I'm currently reading a book I recommend for people,
link |
which as a Jew has been difficult to read,
link |
but the rise and fall of the Third Reich.
link |
So let me just ask about like the nature of genius,
link |
the nature of evil.
link |
If we look at somebody like Einstein,
link |
we look at Hitler, Stalin, modern day Jeffrey Epstein,
link |
just folks who through their life have done with Einstein
link |
and works of genius and with the others I mentioned
link |
have done evil on this world.
link |
What do we think about that in a livewired brain?
link |
Like how do we think about these extreme people?
link |
Here's what I'd say.
link |
This is a very big and difficult question,
link |
but what I would say briefly on it is,
link |
first of all, I saw a cover of Time Magazine some years ago
link |
and it was a big sagittal slice of the brain
link |
and it said something like, what makes us good and evil?
link |
And there was a little spot pointing to it
link |
and there was a picture of Gandhi
link |
and there was a little spot that was pointing to Hitler.
link |
And these Time Magazine covers always make me mad
link |
because it's so goofy to think that we're gonna find
link |
some spot in the brain or something.
link |
Instead, the interesting part is because we're livewired,
link |
we are all about the world and the culture around us.
link |
So somebody like Adolf Hitler got all this positive feedback
link |
about what was going on and the crazier and crazier
link |
the ideas he had and he's like, let's set up death camps
link |
and murder a bunch of people and so on.
link |
Somehow he was getting positive feedback from that
link |
and all these other people, they're all spun each other up.
link |
And you look at anything like, I mean, look at the cultural
link |
revolution in China or the Russian revolution
link |
or things like this where you look at these things,
link |
my God, how do people all behave like this?
link |
But it's easy to see groups of people spinning themselves up
link |
in particular ways where they all say,
link |
well, would I have thought this was right
link |
in a different circumstance?
link |
I don't know, but Fred thinks it's right
link |
and Steve thinks it's right,
link |
everyone around me seems to think it's right.
link |
And so part of the maybe downside of having a livewired brain
link |
is that you can get crowds of people doing things as a group.
link |
So it's interesting to, we would pinpoint Hitler
link |
as saying that's the evil guy.
link |
But in a sense, I think it was Tolstoy who said
link |
the king becomes slave to the people.
link |
In other words, Hitler was just a representation
link |
of whatever was going on with that huge crowd
link |
that he was surrounded with.
link |
So I only bring that up to say that it's very difficult
link |
to say what it is about this person's brain
link |
or that person's brain.
link |
He obviously got feedback for what he was doing.
link |
The other thing, by the way,
link |
about what we often think of as being evil in society
link |
is my lab recently published some work
link |
on in groups and out groups,
link |
which is a very important part of this puzzle.
link |
So it turns out that we are very engineered
link |
to care about in groups versus out groups.
link |
And this seems to be like a really fundamental thing.
link |
So we did this experiment in my lab
link |
where we brought people and we stick them in the scanner.
link |
And we, I don't know if you noticed,
link |
but we show them on the screen six hands
link |
and the computer goes around randomly picks a hand.
link |
And then you see that hand gets stabbed
link |
with a syringe needle.
link |
So you actually see a syringe needle enter the hand
link |
And it's really, what that does is that triggers
link |
parts of the pain matrix,
link |
this areas in your brain that are involved
link |
in feeling physical pain.
link |
Now, the interesting thing is it's not your hand
link |
So what you're seeing is empathy.
link |
This is you seeing someone else's hand gets stabbed.
link |
You feel like, oh God, this is awful, right?
link |
We contrast that by the way,
link |
with somebody's hand getting poked as a Q tip,
link |
which is, you know, looks visually the same,
link |
but you don't have that same level of response.
link |
Now what we do is we label each hand with a one word label,
link |
Christian, Jewish, Muslim, atheist, Scientologist, Hindu.
link |
And now the computer goes around, picks a hand,
link |
And the question is, how much does your brain care
link |
about all the people in your out group
link |
versus the one label that happens to match you?
link |
And it turns out for everybody across all religions,
link |
they care much more about their in group
link |
than their out group.
link |
And when I say they care, what I mean is
link |
you get a bigger response from their brain.
link |
Everything's the same.
link |
It's the same hands.
link |
It's just a one word label.
link |
You care much more about your in group than your out group.
link |
And I wish this weren't true, but this is how humans are.
link |
I wonder how fundamental that is,
link |
or if it's the emergent thing about culture.
link |
Like if we lived alone with like,
link |
if it's genetically built into the brain,
link |
like this longing for tribe.
link |
So I'll tell you, we addressed that.
link |
So here's what we did.
link |
There are two, actually there are two other things
link |
we did as part of this study
link |
that I think matter for this point.
link |
One is, so okay, so we show that you have
link |
a much bigger response.
link |
And by the way, this is not a cognitive thing.
link |
This is a very low level basic response
link |
to seeing pain in somebody, okay.
link |
Great study by the way.
link |
Thanks, thanks, thanks.
link |
What we did next is we next have it where we say,
link |
okay, the year is 2025 and these three religions
link |
are now in a war against these three religions.
link |
And it's all randomized, right?
link |
But what you see is your thing and you have two allies now
link |
against these others.
link |
And now it happens over the course of many trials,
link |
you see everybody gets stabbed at different times.
link |
And the question is, do you care more about your allies?
link |
And the answer is yes.
link |
Suddenly people who a moment ago,
link |
you didn't really care when they got stabbed.
link |
Now, simply with this one word thing
link |
that they're now your allies, you care more about them.
link |
But then what I wanted to do was look at
link |
how ingrained is this or how arbitrary is it?
link |
So we brought new participants in and we said,
link |
here's a coin, toss the coin.
link |
If it's heads, you're an Augustinian.
link |
If it's a tails, you're a Justinian.
link |
These are totally made up.
link |
Okay, so they toss it, they get whatever.
link |
We give them a band that says Augustinian on it,
link |
whatever tribe they're in now, and they get in the scanner
link |
and they see a thing on the screen that says
link |
the Augustinians and Justinians are two warring tribes.
link |
Then you see a bunch of hands,
link |
some are labeled Augustinians, some are Justinian.
link |
And now you care more about whichever team you're on
link |
than the other team, even though it's totally arbitrary
link |
and you know it's arbitrary
link |
because you're the one who tossed the coin.
link |
So it's a state that's very easy to find ourselves in.
link |
In other words, just before walking in the door,
link |
they'd never even heard of Augustinian versus Justinian
link |
and now their brain is representing it
link |
simply because they're told they're on this team.
link |
You know, now I did my own personal study of this.
link |
So once you're an Augustinian, that tends to be sticky
link |
because I've been a Packers fan,
link |
grew to be a Packers fan my whole life.
link |
Now when I'm in Boston with like the Patriots,
link |
it's been tough going for my livewired brain
link |
to switch to the Patriots.
link |
So once you become, it's as interesting,
link |
once the tribe is sticky.
link |
Yeah, I'll admit that's true.
link |
That's it, you know.
link |
You know, we never tried that about saying,
link |
okay, now you're a Justinian and you were an Augustinian.
link |
We never saw how sticky it is.
link |
But there are studies of this,
link |
of monkey troops on some island.
link |
And what happens is they look at the way monkeys behave
link |
when they're part of this tribe
link |
and how they treat members of the other tribe of monkeys.
link |
And then what they do, I've forgotten how they do that,
link |
exactly, but they end up switching a monkey
link |
so he ends up in the other troop.
link |
And very quickly they end up becoming a part
link |
of that other troop and hating and behaving badly
link |
towards the original troop.
link |
These are fascinating studies, by the way.
link |
This is beautiful.
link |
In your book, you have a good light bulb joke.
link |
How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb?
link |
Only one, but the light bulb has to want to change.
link |
I'm a sucker for a good light bulb joke.
link |
Okay, so given, you know, I've been interested
link |
in psychiatry my whole life, just maybe tangentially.
link |
I've kind of early on dreamed to be a psychiatrist
link |
until I understood what it entails.
link |
But, you know, is there hope for psychiatry
link |
for somebody else to help this live, wired brain to adjust?
link |
Oh yeah, I mean, in the sense that,
link |
and this has to do with this issue
link |
about us being trapped on our own planet.
link |
Forget psychiatrists, just think of like
link |
when you're talking with a friend
link |
and you say, oh, I'm so upset about this.
link |
And your friend says, hey, just look at it this way.
link |
You know, all we have access to under normal circumstances
link |
is just the way we're seeing something.
link |
And so it's super helpful to have friends and communities
link |
and psychiatrists and so on to help things change that way.
link |
So that's how psychiatrists sort of helped us.
link |
But more importantly, the role that psychiatrists have played
link |
is that there's this sort of naive assumption
link |
that we all come to the table with,
link |
which is that everyone is fundamentally just like us.
link |
And when you're a kid, you believe this entirely,
link |
but as you get older and you start realizing,
link |
okay, there's something called schizophrenia
link |
and that's a real thing.
link |
And to be inside that person's head is totally different
link |
than what it is to be inside my head or their psychopathy.
link |
And to be inside the psychopath's head,
link |
he doesn't care about other people.
link |
He doesn't care about hurting other people.
link |
He's just doing what he needs to do to get what he needs.
link |
That's a different head.
link |
There's a million different things going on
link |
and it is different to be inside those heads.
link |
This is where the field of psychiatry comes in.
link |
Now, I think it's an interesting question
link |
about the degree to which neuroscience is leaking into
link |
and taking over psychiatry
link |
and what the landscape will look like 50 years from now.
link |
It may be that psychiatry as a profession changes a lot
link |
or maybe goes away entirely,
link |
and neuroscience will essentially be able
link |
to take over some of these functions,
link |
but it has been extremely useful to understand
link |
the differences between how people behave and why
link |
and what you can tell about what's going on
link |
inside their brain just based on observation
link |
of their behavior.
link |
This might be years ago, but I'm not sure.
link |
There's an Atlantic article you've written
link |
about moving away from a distinction
link |
between neurological disorders,
link |
quote unquote, brain problems,
link |
and psychiatric disorders or quote unquote, mind problems.
link |
So on that topic, how do you think about this gray area?
link |
Yeah, this is exactly the evolution that things are going
link |
is there was psychiatry and then there were guys and gals
link |
in labs poking cells and so on.
link |
Those were the neuroscientists.
link |
But yeah, I think these are moving together
link |
for exactly the reason you just cited.
link |
And where this matters a lot,
link |
the Atlantic article that I wrote
link |
was called The Brain on Trial,
link |
where this matters a lot is the legal system
link |
because the way we run our legal system now,
link |
and this is true everywhere in the world,
link |
is someone shows up in front of the judge's bench,
link |
or let's say there's five people
link |
in front of the judge's bench,
link |
and they've all committed the same crime.
link |
What we do, because we feel like, hey, this is fair,
link |
is we say, all right, you're gonna get the same sentence.
link |
You'll all get three years in prison or whatever it is.
link |
But in fact, brains can be so different.
link |
This guy's got schizophrenia, this guy's a psychopath,
link |
this guy's tweaked down on drugs, and so on and so on,
link |
that it actually doesn't make sense to keep doing that.
link |
And what we do in this country more than anywhere
link |
in the world is we imagine that incarceration
link |
is a one size fits all solution.
link |
And you may know we have the,
link |
America has the highest incarceration rate
link |
in the whole world in terms of the percentage
link |
of our population we put behind bars.
link |
So there's a much more refined thing we can do
link |
as neuroscience comes in and changes,
link |
and has the opportunity to change the legal system.
link |
Which is to say, this doesn't let anybody off the hook.
link |
It doesn't say, oh, it's not your fault, and so on.
link |
But what it does is it changes the equation
link |
so it's not about, hey, how blameworthy are you?
link |
But instead is about, hey, what do we do from here?
link |
What's the best thing to do from here?
link |
So if you take somebody with schizophrenia
link |
and you have them break rocks in the hot summer sun
link |
in a chain gang, that doesn't help their schizophrenia.
link |
That doesn't fix the problem.
link |
If you take somebody with a drug addiction
link |
who's in jail for being caught with two ounces
link |
of some illegal substance, and you put them in prison,
link |
it doesn't actually fix the addiction.
link |
It doesn't help anything.
link |
Happily, what neuroscience and psychiatry
link |
bring to the table is lots of really useful things
link |
you can do with schizophrenia, with drug addiction,
link |
And that's why, so I don't know if you guys
link |
better run a national law and profit
link |
called the Center for Science and Law.
link |
And it's all about this intersection
link |
of neuroscience and psychiatry.
link |
It's the intersection of neuroscience and legal system.
link |
And we're trying to implement changes
link |
in every county, in every state.
link |
I'll just, without going down that rabbit hole,
link |
I'll just say one of the very simplest things to do
link |
is to set up specialized court systems
link |
where you have a mental health court
link |
that has judges and juries with expertise
link |
in mental illness.
link |
Because if you go, by the way, to a regular court
link |
and the person says, or the defense lawyer says,
link |
this person has schizophrenia, most of the jury will say,
link |
man, I call bullshit on that.
link |
Because they don't know about schizophrenia.
link |
They don't know what it's about.
link |
And it turns out people who know about schizophrenia
link |
feel very differently as a juror
link |
than someone who happens not to know anybody with
link |
schizophrenia, they think it's an excuse.
link |
So you have judges and juries with expertise
link |
in mental illness and they know the rehabilitative
link |
strategies that are available.
link |
Having a drug court where you have judges and juries
link |
with expertise in rehabilitative strategies
link |
and what can be done and so on.
link |
A specialized prostitution court and so on.
link |
All these different things.
link |
By the way, this is very easy for counties
link |
to implement this sort of thing.
link |
And this is, I think, where this matters
link |
to get neuroscience into public policy.
link |
What's the process of injecting expertise into this?
link |
Yeah, I'll tell you exactly what it is.
link |
A county needs to run out of money first.
link |
I've seen this happen over and over.
link |
So what happens is a county has a completely full jail
link |
and they say, you know what?
link |
We need to build another jail.
link |
And then they realize, God, we don't have any money.
link |
We can't afford this.
link |
We've got too many people in jail.
link |
And that's when they turn to,
link |
God, we need something smarter.
link |
And that's when they set up specialized court systems.
link |
We're all function best when our back is against the wall.
link |
And that's what COVID is good for.
link |
It's because we've all had our routines
link |
and we are optimized for the things we do.
link |
And suddenly our backs are against the wall, all of us.
link |
Yeah, it's really, I mean,
link |
one of the exciting things about COVID.
link |
I mean, I'm a big believer in the possibility
link |
of what government can do for the people.
link |
And when it becomes too big of a bureaucracy,
link |
it starts functioning poorly, it starts wasting money.
link |
It's nice to, I mean, COVID reveals that nicely.
link |
And lessons to be learned about who gets elected
link |
and who goes into government.
link |
Hopefully this, hopefully this inspires talented
link |
and young people to go into government
link |
to revolutionize different aspects of it.
link |
Yeah, so that's the positive silver lining of COVID.
link |
I mean, I thought it'd be fun to ask you,
link |
I don't know if you're paying attention
link |
to the machine learning world and GPT3.
link |
So the GPT3 is this language model,
link |
this neural network that's able to,
link |
it has 175 billion parameters.
link |
So it's very large and it's trained
link |
in an unsupervised way on the internet.
link |
It just reads a lot of unstructured texts
link |
and it's able to generate some pretty impressive things.
link |
The human brain compared to that has about,
link |
you know, a thousand times more synapses.
link |
People get so upset when machine learning people
link |
compare the brain and we know synapses are different.
link |
It was very different, very different.
link |
But like, do you, what do you think about GPT3?
link |
Here's what I think, here's what I think, a few things.
link |
What GPT3 is doing is extremely impressive,
link |
but it's very different from what the brain does.
link |
So it's a good impersonator, but just as one example,
link |
everybody takes a passage that GPT3 has written
link |
and they say, wow, look at this, and it's pretty good, right?
link |
But it's already gone through a filtering process
link |
of humans looking at it and saying,
link |
okay, well that's crap, that's crap, okay.
link |
Oh, here's a sentence that's pretty cool.
link |
Now here's the thing, human creativity
link |
is about absorbing everything around it
link |
and remixing that and coming up with stuff.
link |
So in that sense, we're sort of like GPT3,
link |
you know, we're remixing what we've gotten in before.
link |
But we also know, we also have very good models
link |
of what it is to be another human.
link |
And so, you know, I don't know if you speak French
link |
or something, but I'm not gonna start speaking in French
link |
because then you'll say, wait, what are you doing?
link |
I don't understand it.
link |
Instead, everything coming out of my mouth
link |
is meant for your ears.
link |
I know what you'll understand.
link |
I know the vocabulary that you know and don't know.
link |
I know what parts you care about.
link |
That's a huge part of it.
link |
And so of all the possible sentences I could say,
link |
I'm navigating this thin bandwidth
link |
so that it's something useful for our conversation.
link |
Yeah, in real time, but also throughout your life.
link |
I mean, we're co evolving together.
link |
We're learning how to communicate together.
link |
Exactly, but this is what GPT3 does not do.
link |
All it's doing is saying, okay,
link |
I'm gonna take all these senses and remix stuff
link |
and pop some stuff out.
link |
But it doesn't know how to make it
link |
so that you, Lex, will feel like,
link |
oh yeah, that's exactly what I needed to hear.
link |
That's the next sentence that I needed to know about
link |
Well, of course, it could be,
link |
all the impressive results we see.
link |
The question is, if you raise the number of parameters,
link |
whether it's going to be after some...
link |
Raising more parameters won't...
link |
It's not that I don't think neural networks
link |
can't be like the human brain,
link |
because I suspect they will be at some point, 50 years.
link |
But what we are missing in artificial neural networks
link |
is we've got this basic structure where you've got units
link |
and you've got synapses that are connected.
link |
And it's done incredibly mind blowing, impressive things,
link |
but it's not doing the same algorithms as the human brain.
link |
So when I look at my children, as little kids,
link |
as infants, they can do things that no GPT3 can do.
link |
They can navigate a complex room.
link |
They can navigate social conversation with an adult.
link |
They can do a million things.
link |
They are active thinkers in our world and doing things.
link |
And this, of course, I mean, look,
link |
we totally agree on how incredibly awesome
link |
artificial neural networks are right now,
link |
but we also know the things that they can't do well,
link |
like be generally intelligent,
link |
do all these different things.
link |
The reason about the world,
link |
efficiently learn, efficiently adapt.
link |
But it's still the rate of improvement.
link |
It's, to me, it's possible that we'll be surprised.
link |
I agree, possible we'll be surprised.
link |
But what I would assert,
link |
and I'm glad I'm getting to say this on your podcast,
link |
we can look back at this in two years and 10 years,
link |
is that we've got to be much more sophisticated
link |
than units and synapses between them.
link |
Let me give you an example,
link |
and this is something I talk about in LiveWired,
link |
is despite the amazing impressiveness,
link |
mind blowing impressiveness,
link |
computers don't have some basic things,
link |
artificial neural networks don't have some basic things
link |
that we like caring about relevance, for example.
link |
So as humans, we are confronted
link |
with tons of data all the time,
link |
and we only encode particular things
link |
that are relevant to us.
link |
We have this very deep sense of relevance
link |
that I mentioned earlier is based on survival
link |
at the most basic level,
link |
but then all the things about my life and your life,
link |
what's relevant to you, that we encode.
link |
This is very useful.
link |
Computers at the moment don't have that.
link |
They don't even have a yen to survive
link |
and things like that.
link |
So we filled out a bunch of the junk we don't need.
link |
We're really good at efficiently
link |
zooming in on things we need.
link |
Again, could be argued, you know,
link |
let me put on my Freud hat.
link |
Maybe it's, I mean, that's our conscious mind.
link |
There's no reason that neural networks
link |
aren't doing the same kind of filtration.
link |
I mean, in the sense with GPT3 is doing,
link |
so there's a priming step.
link |
It's doing an essential kind of filtration
link |
when you ask it to generate tweets from,
link |
I don't know, from an Elon Musk or something like that.
link |
It's doing a filtration of it's throwing away
link |
all the parameters it doesn't need for this task.
link |
And it's figuring out how to do that successfully.
link |
And then ultimately it's not doing a very good job
link |
right now, but it's doing a lot better job
link |
But it won't ever do a really good job.
link |
And I'll tell you why.
link |
I mean, so let's say we say,
link |
hey, produce an Elon Musk tweet.
link |
And we see like, oh, wow, it produced these three.
link |
But again, we're not seeing the 3000 produced
link |
that didn't really make any sense.
link |
It's because it has no idea what it is like to be a human.
link |
And all the things that you might want to say
link |
and all the reasons you wouldn't,
link |
like when you go to write a tweet,
link |
you might write something you think,
link |
ah, it's not gonna come off quite right
link |
in this modern political climate or whatever.
link |
Like, you know, you can change things.
link |
And it somehow boils down to fear of mortality
link |
and all of these human things at the end of the day,
link |
all contained with that tweeting experience.
link |
Well, interestingly, the fear of mortality
link |
is at the bottom of this,
link |
but you've got all these more things like,
link |
you know, oh, I want to,
link |
just in case the chairman of my department reads this,
link |
I want it to come off well there.
link |
Just in case my mom looks at this tweet,
link |
I want to make sure she, you know, and so on.
link |
So those are all the things that humans are able
link |
to sort of throw into the calculation.
link |
What it required, what it requires though,
link |
is having a model of your chairman,
link |
having a model of your mother,
link |
having a model of, you know,
link |
the person you want to go on a date with
link |
who might look at your tweet and so on.
link |
All these things are,
link |
you're running models of what it is like to be them.
link |
So in terms of the structure of the brain,
link |
again, this may be going into speculation land.
link |
I hope you go along with me.
link |
Is, okay, so the brain seems to be intelligent
link |
and our AI systems aren't very currently.
link |
So where do you think intelligence arises in the brain?
link |
Like what is it about the brain?
link |
So if you mean where location wise,
link |
it's no single spot.
link |
It would be equivalent to asking,
link |
I'm looking at New York city,
link |
where is the economy?
link |
The answer is you can't point to anywhere.
link |
The economy is all about the interaction
link |
of all of the pieces and parts of the city.
link |
And that's what, you know, intelligence,
link |
whatever we mean by that in the brain
link |
is interacting from everything going on at once.
link |
In terms of a structure.
link |
So we look humans are much smarter than fish,
link |
maybe not dolphins, but dolphins are mammals, right?
link |
I assert that what we mean by smarter
link |
has to do with live wiring.
link |
So what we mean when we say, oh, we're smart
link |
is, oh, we can figure out a new thing
link |
and figure out a new pathway to get where we need to go.
link |
And that's because fish are essentially coming to the table
link |
with, you know, okay, here's the hardware, go swim, mate.
link |
But we have the capacity to say,
link |
okay, look, I'm gonna absorb, oh, oh,
link |
but you know, I saw someone else do this thing
link |
and I read once that you could do this other thing
link |
So do you think there's, is there something,
link |
I know these are mysteries,
link |
but like architecturally speaking,
link |
what feature of the brain of the live wire aspect of it
link |
that is really useful for intelligence?
link |
So like, is it the ability of neurons to reconnect?
link |
Like, is there something,
link |
is there any lessons about the human brain
link |
you think might be inspiring for us
link |
to take into the artificial, into the machine learning world?
link |
Yeah, I'm actually just trying to write some up on this now
link |
called, you know, if you wanna build a robot,
link |
start with the stomach.
link |
And what I mean by that, what I mean by that is
link |
a robot has to care, it has to have hunger,
link |
it has to care about surviving, that kind of thing.
link |
Here's an example.
link |
So the penultimate chapter of my book,
link |
I titled The Wolf and the Mars Rover.
link |
And I just look at this simple comparison
link |
of you look at a wolf, it gets its leg caught in a trap.
link |
It gnaws its leg off,
link |
and then it figures out how to walk on three legs.
link |
Now, the Mars Rover Curiosity got its front wheel stuck
link |
in some Martian soil, and it died.
link |
This project that cost billions of dollars died
link |
because it got its wheels.
link |
Wouldn't it be terrific if we could build a robot
link |
that chewed off its front wheel and figured out
link |
how to operate with a slightly different body plan?
link |
That's the kind of thing that we wanna be able to build.
link |
And to get there, what we need,
link |
the whole reason the wolf is able to do that
link |
is because its motor and somatosensory systems
link |
So it says, oh, you know what?
link |
Turns out we've got a body plan that's different
link |
than what I thought a few minutes ago,
link |
but I have a yen to survive and I care about relevance,
link |
which in this case is getting to food,
link |
getting back to my pack and so on.
link |
So I'm just gonna figure out how to operate with this.
link |
Oh, whoops, that didn't work.
link |
Oh, okay, I'm kind of getting it to work.
link |
But the Mars Rover doesn't do that.
link |
It just says, oh geez, I was pre programmed.
link |
Four wheels, now I have three, I'm screwed.
link |
Yeah, you know, I don't know if you're familiar
link |
with a philosopher named Ernest Becker.
link |
He wrote a book called Denial of Death.
link |
And there's a few psychologists, Sheldon Solomon,
link |
I think I just spoke with him on his podcast
link |
who developed terror management theory,
link |
which is like Ernest Becker is a philosopher
link |
that basically said that fear of mortality
link |
is at the core of it.
link |
And so I don't know if it sounds compelling as an idea
link |
that all of the civilization we've constructed
link |
is based on this, but it's.
link |
I'm familiar with his work.
link |
Here's what I think.
link |
I think that yes, fundamentally this desire to survive
link |
is at the core of it, I would agree with that.
link |
But how that expresses itself in your life
link |
ends up being very different.
link |
The reason you do what you do is, I mean,
link |
you could list the 100 reasons why you chose
link |
to write your tweet this way and that way.
link |
And it really has nothing to do with the survival part.
link |
It has to do with, you know, trying to impress fellow humans
link |
and surprise them and say something.
link |
Yeah, so many things built on top of each other,
link |
but it's fascinating to think
link |
that in artificial intelligence systems,
link |
we wanna be able to somehow engineer this drive
link |
for survival, for immortality.
link |
I mean, because as humans, we're not just about survival,
link |
we're aware of the fact that we're going to die,
link |
which is a very kind of, we're aware of like space time.
link |
Most people aren't, by the way.
link |
Confucius said, he said, each person has two lives.
link |
The second one begins when you realize
link |
that you have just one.
link |
But most people, it takes a long time
link |
for most people to get there.
link |
I mean, you could argue this kind of Freudian thing,
link |
which Erzbecker argues is they actually figured it out
link |
early on and the terror they felt
link |
was like the reason it's been suppressed.
link |
And the reason most people, when I ask them
link |
about whether they're afraid of death,
link |
they basically say no.
link |
They basically say like, I'm afraid I won't get,
link |
like submit the paper before I die.
link |
Like they kind of see, they see death
link |
as a kind of a inconvenient deadline
link |
for a particular set of, like a book you're writing.
link |
As opposed to like, what the hell?
link |
This thing ends at any moment.
link |
Like most people, as I've encountered,
link |
do not meditate on the idea that like right now
link |
Like right now, like in the next five minutes,
link |
it could be all over and, you know, meditate on that idea.
link |
I think that somehow brings you closer
link |
to like the core of the motivations
link |
and the core of the human cognition condition.
link |
I think it might be the core, but like I said,
link |
it is not what drives us day to day.
link |
Yeah, there's so many things on top of it,
link |
but it is interesting.
link |
I mean, as the ancient poet said,
link |
death whispers at my ear, live for I come.
link |
So it's, it is certainly motivating
link |
when we think about that.
link |
Okay, I've got some deadline.
link |
I don't know exactly when it is,
link |
but I better make stuff happen.
link |
It is motivating, but I don't think,
link |
I mean, I know for just speaking for me personally,
link |
that's not what motivates me day to day.
link |
It's instead, oh, I want to get this, you know,
link |
program up and running before this,
link |
or I want to make sure my coauthor isn't mad at me
link |
because I haven't gotten this in,
link |
or I don't want to miss this grant deadline,
link |
or, you know, whatever the thing is.
link |
Yeah, it's too distant in a sense.
link |
Nevertheless, it is good to reconnect.
link |
But for the AI systems, none of that is there.
link |
Like a neural network does not fear its mortality.
link |
And that seems to be somehow
link |
fundamentally missing the point.
link |
I think that's missing the point,
link |
but I wonder, it's an interesting speculation
link |
about whether you can build an AI system
link |
that is much closer to being a human
link |
without the mortality and survival piece,
link |
but just the thing of relevance,
link |
just I care about this versus that.
link |
Right now, if you have a robot roll into the room,
link |
it's going to be frozen
link |
because it doesn't have any reason to go there versus there.
link |
It doesn't have any particular set of things
link |
about this is how I should navigate my next move
link |
because I want something.
link |
Yeah, the thing about humans
link |
is they seem to generate goals.
link |
They're like, you said livewired.
link |
I mean, it's very flexible in terms of the goals
link |
and creative in terms of the goals we generate
link |
when we enter a room.
link |
You show up to a party without a goal,
link |
usually, and then you figure it out along the way.
link |
Yes, but this goes back to the question about free will,
link |
which is when I walk into the party,
link |
if you rewound it 10,000 times,
link |
would I go and talk to that couple over there
link |
versus that person?
link |
Like, I might do this exact same thing every time
link |
because I've got some goal stack and I think,
link |
okay, well, at this party,
link |
I really want to meet these kind of people
link |
or I feel awkward or whatever my goals are.
link |
By the way, so there was something
link |
that I meant to mention earlier.
link |
If you don't mind going back,
link |
which is this, when we were talking about BCI.
link |
So I don't know if you know this,
link |
but what I'm spending 90% of my time doing now
link |
is running a company.
link |
Do you know about this?
link |
Yes, I wasn't sure what the company is involved in.
link |
Right, so. Can you talk about it?
link |
So when it comes to the future of BCI,
link |
you can put stuff into the brain invasively,
link |
but my interest has been how you can get data streams
link |
into the brain noninvasively.
link |
So I run a company called Neosensory
link |
and what we build is this little wristband.
link |
We've built this in many different form factors.
link |
Oh, wow, that's it?
link |
And it's got these vibratory motors in it.
link |
So these things, as I'm speaking, for example,
link |
it's capturing my voice and running algorithms
link |
and then turning that into patterns of vibration here.
link |
So people who are deaf, for example,
link |
learn to hear through their skin.
link |
So the information is getting up to their brain this way
link |
and they learn how to hear.
link |
So it turns out on day one, people are pretty good,
link |
like better than you'd expect at being able to say,
link |
oh, that's weird, was that a dog barking?
link |
Was that a baby crying?
link |
Was that a door knock, a doorbell?
link |
Like people are pretty good at it,
link |
but with time they get better and better
link |
and what it becomes is a new qualia.
link |
In other words, a new subjective internal experience.
link |
So on day one, they say, whoa, what was that?
link |
Oh, oh, that was the dog barking.
link |
But by three months later, they say,
link |
oh, there's a dog barking somewhere.
link |
Oh, there's the dog.
link |
That's fascinating.
link |
And by the way, that's exactly how you learn
link |
how to use your ears.
link |
So of course you don't remember this,
link |
but when you were an infant, all you have are
link |
your eardrum vibrating causes spikes to go down,
link |
your auditory nerves and impinging your auditory cortex.
link |
Your brain doesn't know what those mean automatically,
link |
but what happens is you learn how to hear
link |
by looking for correlations.
link |
You clap your hands as a baby,
link |
you look at your mother's mouth moving
link |
and that correlates with what's going on there.
link |
And eventually your brain says, all right,
link |
I'm just gonna summarize this as an internal experience,
link |
as a conscious experience.
link |
And that's exactly what happens here.
link |
The weird part is that you can feed data into the brain,
link |
not through the ears, but through any channel
link |
As long as the information gets there,
link |
your brain figures out what to do with it.
link |
That's fascinating.
link |
Like expanding the set of sensors,
link |
it could be arbitrarily, yeah,
link |
it could expand arbitrarily, which is fascinating.
link |
And by the way, the reason I use this skin,
link |
there's all kinds of cool stuff going on
link |
in the AR world with glasses.
link |
But the fact is your eyes are overtaxed
link |
and your ears are overtaxed
link |
and you need to be able to see and hear other stuff.
link |
But you're covered with the skin,
link |
which is this incredible computational material
link |
with which you can feed information.
link |
And we don't use our skin for much of anything nowadays.
link |
My joke in the lab is that I say,
link |
we don't call this the waste for nothing.
link |
Because originally we built this as the vest
link |
and you're passing in all this information that way.
link |
And what I'm doing here with the deaf community
link |
is what's called sensory substitution,
link |
where I'm capturing sound and I'm just replacing the ears
link |
with the skin and that works.
link |
One of the things I talk about LiveWire
link |
is sensory expansion.
link |
So what if you took something like your visual system,
link |
which picks up on a very thin slice
link |
of the electromagnetic spectrum,
link |
and you could see infrared or ultraviolet.
link |
So we've hooked that up, infrared and ultraviolet detectors,
link |
and I can feel what's going on.
link |
So just as an example, the first night I built the infrared,
link |
one of my engineers built it, the infrared detector,
link |
I was walking in the dark between two houses
link |
and suddenly I felt all this infrared radiation.
link |
I was like, where's that come from?
link |
And I just followed my wrist and I found an infrared camera,
link |
a night vision camera that was,
link |
but I immediately, oh, there's that thing there.
link |
Of course, I would have never seen it,
link |
but now it's just part of my reality.
link |
That's fascinating.
link |
Yeah, and then of course,
link |
what I'm really interested in is sensory addition.
link |
What if you could pick up on stuff
link |
that isn't even part of what we normally pick up on,
link |
like the magnetic field of the earth
link |
or Twitter or stock market or things like that.
link |
Or the, I don't know, some weird stuff
link |
like the moods of other people or something like that.
link |
Sure, now what you need is a way to measure this.
link |
So as long as there's a machine that can measure it,
link |
it's easy, it's trivial to feed this in here
link |
and you come to be, it comes to be part of your reality.
link |
It's like you have another sensor.
link |
And that kind of thing is without doing like,
link |
if you look in Neuralink,
link |
I forgot how you put it, but it was eloquent,
link |
without getting, cutting into the brain, basically.
link |
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
link |
So this costs, at the moment, $399.
link |
That's not gonna kill you.
link |
Yeah, it's not gonna kill you.
link |
You just put it on and when you're done, you take it off.
link |
Yeah, and so, and the name of the company, by the way,
link |
is Neosensory for new senses, because the whole idea is.
link |
Beautiful, that's.
link |
You can, as I said, you come to the table
link |
with certain plug and play devices and then that's it.
link |
Like I can pick up on this little bit
link |
of the electromagnetic radiation,
link |
you can pick up on this little frequency band
link |
for hearing and so on, but I'm stuck there
link |
and there's no reason we have to be stuck there.
link |
We can expand our umwelt by adding new senses, yeah.
link |
Oh, I'm sorry, the umwelt is the slice of reality
link |
that you pick up on.
link |
So each animal has its own umwelt.
link |
I'm sorry, I forgot to define it before.
link |
It's such an important concept, which is to say,
link |
for example, if you are a tick,
link |
you pick up on butyric gas, you pick up on odor
link |
and you pick up on temperature, that's it.
link |
That's how you construct your reality
link |
is with those two sensors.
link |
If you are a blind echolocating bat,
link |
you're picking up on air compression waves coming back,
link |
you know, echolocation.
link |
If you are the black ghost knife fish,
link |
you're picking up on changes in the electrical field
link |
around you with electroreception.
link |
That's how they swim around
link |
and tell there's a rock there and so on.
link |
But that's all they pick up on.
link |
That's their umwelt.
link |
That's the signals they get from the world
link |
from which to construct their reality.
link |
And they can be totally different umwelts.
link |
And so our human umwelt is, you know,
link |
we've got little bits that we can pick up on.
link |
One of the things I like to do with my students
link |
is talk about, imagine that you are a bloodhound dog, right?
link |
You are a bloodhound dog with a huge snout
link |
with 200 million scent receptors in it.
link |
And your whole world is about smelling.
link |
You know, you've got slits in your nostrils,
link |
like big nose fulls of air and so on.
link |
Do you have a dog?
link |
Used to, okay, right.
link |
So you know, you walk your dog around
link |
and your dog is smelling everything.
link |
The whole world is full of signals
link |
that you do not pick up on.
link |
And so imagine if you were that dog
link |
and you looked at your human master and thought,
link |
my God, what is it like to have
link |
the pitiful little nose of a human?
link |
How could you not know that there's a cat 100 yards away
link |
or that your friend was here six hours ago?
link |
And so the idea is because we're stuck in our own belt,
link |
because we have this little pitiful noses,
link |
we think, okay, well, yeah, we're seeing reality,
link |
but you can have very different sorts of realities
link |
depending on the peripheral plug and play devices
link |
you're equipped with.
link |
It's fascinating to think that like,
link |
if we're being honest, probably our own belt
link |
is, you know, some infinitely tiny percent
link |
of the possibilities of how you can sense,
link |
quote unquote, reality, even if you could,
link |
I mean, there's a guy named Donald Hoffman, yeah,
link |
who basically says we're really far away from reality
link |
in terms of our ability to sense anything.
link |
Like we're very, we're almost like we're floating out there
link |
that's almost like completely attached
link |
to the actual physical reality.
link |
It's fascinating that we can have extra senses
link |
that could help us get a little bit closer.
link |
Exactly, and by the way, this has been the fruits
link |
of science is realizing, like, for example,
link |
you know, you open your eyes
link |
and there's the world around you, right?
link |
But of course, depending on how you calculate it,
link |
it's less than a 10 trillionth of the electromagnetic
link |
spectrum that we call visible light.
link |
The reason I say it depends,
link |
because, you know, it's actually infinite
link |
in all directions presumably.
link |
Yeah, and so that's exactly that.
link |
And then science allows you to actually look
link |
into the rest of it.
link |
Exactly, so understanding how big the world is out there.
link |
And the same with the world of really small
link |
and the world of really large.
link |
That's beyond our ability to sense.
link |
Exactly, and so the reason I think this kind of thing
link |
matters is because we now have an opportunity
link |
for the first time in human history to say,
link |
okay, well, I'm just gonna include other things
link |
So I'm gonna include infrared radiation
link |
and have a direct perceptual experience of that.
link |
And so I'm very, you know, I mean,
link |
so, you know, I've given up my lab
link |
and I run this company 90% of my time now.
link |
That's what I'm doing.
link |
I still teach at Stanford and I'm, you know,
link |
teaching courses and stuff like that.
link |
But this is like, this is your passion.
link |
The fire is on this.
link |
Yeah, I feel like this is the most important thing
link |
that's happening right now.
link |
I mean, obviously I think that,
link |
because that's what I'm devoting my time in my life to.
link |
But I mean, it's a brilliant set of ideas.
link |
It certainly is like, it's a step in a very vibrant future,
link |
Like the possibilities there are endless.
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So if you ask what I think about Neuralink,
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I think it's amazing what those guys are doing
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but I think it's not practical for almost everybody.
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For example, for people who are deaf, they buy this
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and, you know, every day we're getting tons of emails
link |
and tweets and whatever from people saying, wow,
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I picked up on this and then I had no idea that was a,
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I didn't even know that was happening out there.
link |
And they're coming to hear, by the way,
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this is, you know, less than a 10 year old,
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by the way, this is less than a 10th of the price
link |
of a hearing aid and like 250 times less
link |
than a cochlear implant.
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People love hearing about what, you know,
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brilliant folks like yourself could recommend
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in terms of books.
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Of course, you're an author of many books.
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So I'll, in the introduction,
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mention all the books you've written.
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People should definitely read LiveWired.
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I've gotten a chance to read some of it and it's amazing.
link |
But is there three books, technical, fiction,
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philosophical that had an impact on you
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when you were younger or today and books,
link |
perhaps some of which you would want to recommend
link |
You know, as an undergraduate,
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I majored in British and American literature.
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That was my major because I love literature.
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I grew up with literature.
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My father had these extensive bookshelves.
link |
And so I grew up in the mountains in New Mexico.
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And so that was mostly why I spent my time was reading books.
link |
But, you know, I love, you know, Faulkner, Hemingway.
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I love many South American authors,
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Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Italo Calvino.
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I would actually recommend Invisible Cities.
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I just, I loved that book by Italo Calvino.
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Sorry, it's a book of fiction.
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Anthony Dorr wrote a book called
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All the Light We Cannot See,
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which actually was inspired by incognito,
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by exactly what we were talking about earlier
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about how you can only see a little bit of the,
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what we call visible light in the electromagnetic radiation.
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I wrote about this in incognito,
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and then he reviewed incognito for the Washington Post.
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Oh no, that's awesome.
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And then he wrote this book called,
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the book has nothing to do with that,
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but that's where the title comes from.
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All the Light We Cannot See
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is about the rest of the spectrum.
link |
But the, that's an absolutely gorgeous book.
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That's a book of fiction.
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Yeah, it's a book of fiction.
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It takes place during World War II
link |
about these two young people,
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one of whom is blind and yeah.
link |
So what, any, so you mentioned Hemingway?
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Old Man and the Sea, what's your favorite?
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Snow's a Kilimanjaro.
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It's a collection of short stories that I love.
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As far as nonfiction goes,
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I grew up with Cosmos,
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both watching the PBS series and then reading the book,
link |
and that influenced me a huge amount in terms of what I do.
link |
I, from the time I was a kid,
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I felt like I want to be Carl Sagan.
link |
Like, I just, that's what I loved.
link |
And in the end, I just, you know,
link |
I studied space physics for a while as an undergrad,
link |
but then I, in my last semester,
link |
discovered neuroscience last semester,
link |
and I just thought, wow, I'm hooked on that.
link |
So the Carl Sagan of the brain.
link |
That was my aspiration.
link |
Is the aspiration.
link |
I mean, you're doing an incredible job of it.
link |
So you open the book live wide with a quote by Heidegger.
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Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one.
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Well, what do you mean, or what?
link |
I'll tell you what I meant by it.
link |
So he had his own reason why he was writing that,
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but I meant this in terms of brain plasticity,
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in terms of the library,
link |
which is this issue that I mentioned before
link |
about this, you know, this cone,
link |
the space time cone that we are in,
link |
which is that when you dropped into the world,
link |
you, Lex, had all this different potential.
link |
You could have been a great surfer
link |
or a great chess player or a,
link |
you could have been thousands of different men
link |
but what you did is things that were not your choice
link |
and your choice along the way.
link |
You know, you ended up navigating a particular path
link |
and now you're exactly who you are.
link |
You used to have lots of potential,
link |
but the day you die, you will be exactly Lex.
link |
You will be that one person, yeah.
link |
So on that, in that context,
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I mean, first of all, it's just a beautiful,
link |
it's a humbling picture, but it's a beautiful one
link |
because it's all the possible trajectories
link |
and you pick one and you walk down that road
link |
and it's the Robert Frost poem.
link |
But on that topic, let me ask the biggest
link |
and the most ridiculous question.
link |
So in this live, wide brain,
link |
when we choose all these different trajectories
link |
and end up with one, what's the meaning of it all?
link |
What's, is there a why here?
link |
What's the meaning of life?
link |
I mean, this is the question that everyone has attacked
link |
from their own life or point of view,
link |
by which I mean, culturally,
link |
if you grew up in a religious society,
link |
you have one way of attacking that question.
link |
So if you grew up in a secular or scientific society,
link |
you have a different way of attacking that question.
link |
Obviously, I don't know, I abstain on that question.
link |
I mean, I think one of the fundamental things,
link |
I guess, in that, in all those possible trajectories
link |
is you're always asking.
link |
I mean, that's the act of asking
link |
what the heck is this thing for,
link |
is equivalent to, or at least runs in parallel
link |
to all the choices that you're making.
link |
Cause it's kind of, that's the underlying question.
link |
Well, that's right.
link |
And by the way, you know,
link |
this is the interesting thing about human psychology.
link |
You know, we've got all these layers of things
link |
at which we can ask questions.
link |
And so if you keep asking yourself the question about,
link |
what is the optimal way for me to be spending my time?
link |
What should I be doing?
link |
What charity should I get involved with and so on?
link |
If you're asking those big questions
link |
that steers you appropriately,
link |
if you're the type of person who never asks,
link |
hey, is there something better I can be doing with my time,
link |
then presumably you won't optimize
link |
whatever it is that is important to you.
link |
So you've, I think just in your eyes, in your work,
link |
there's a passion that just is obvious and it's inspiring.
link |
What, if you were to give advice to us,
link |
a young person today,
link |
in the crazy chaos that we live today about life,
link |
about how to discover their passion,
link |
is there some words that you could give?
link |
First of all, I would say the main thing
link |
for a young person is stay adaptable.
link |
And this is back to this issue of why COVID
link |
is useful for us because it forces us off our tracks.
link |
The fact is the jobs that will exist 20 years from now,
link |
we don't even have names for it.
link |
We can't even imagine the jobs that are gonna exist.
link |
And so when young people that I know go into college
link |
and they say, hey, what should I major in and so on,
link |
college is and should be less and less vocational,
link |
as in, oh, I'm gonna learn how to do this
link |
and then I'm gonna do that the rest of my career.
link |
The world just isn't that way anymore
link |
with the exponential speed of things.
link |
So the important thing is learning how to learn,
link |
learning how to be livewired and adaptable.
link |
That's really key.
link |
And what I advise young people when I talk to them is,
link |
what you digest, that's what gives you the raw storehouse
link |
of things that you can remix and be creative with.
link |
And so eat broadly and widely.
link |
And obviously this is the wonderful thing
link |
about the internet world we live in now
link |
is you kind of can't help it.
link |
You're constantly, whoa.
link |
You go down some mole hole of Wikipedia
link |
and you think, oh, I didn't even realize that was a thing.
link |
I didn't know that existed.
link |
Embrace that, yeah, exactly.
link |
And what I tell people is just always do a gut check
link |
about, okay, I'm reading this paper
link |
and yeah, I think that, but this paper, wow,
link |
that really, I really cared about that in some way.
link |
I tell them just to keep a real sniff out for that.
link |
And when you find those things, keep going down those paths.
link |
Yeah, don't be afraid.
link |
I mean, that's one of the challenges and the downsides
link |
of having so many beautiful options
link |
is that sometimes people are a little bit afraid
link |
to really commit, but that's very true.
link |
If there's something that just sparks your interest
link |
and passion, just run with it.
link |
I mean, that's, it goes back to the Haider quote.
link |
I mean, we only get this one life
link |
and that trajectory, it doesn't last forever.
link |
So just if something sparks your imagination,
link |
your passion is run with it.
link |
I don't think there's a more beautiful way to end it.
link |
David, it's a huge honor to finally meet you.
link |
Your work is inspiring so many people.
link |
I've talked to so many people who are passionate
link |
about neuroscience, about the brain, even outside
link |
that read your book.
link |
So I hope you keep doing so.
link |
I think you're already there with Carl Sagan.
link |
I hope you continue growing.
link |
Yeah, it was an honor talking with you today.
link |
Great, you too, Lex, wonderful.
link |
Thanks for listening to this conversation
link |
with David Eagleman, and thank you to our sponsors,
link |
Athletic Greens, BetterHelp, and Cash App.
link |
Click the sponsor links in the description
link |
to get a discount and to support this podcast.
link |
If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube,
link |
review it with Five Stars on Apple Podcast,
link |
follow on Spotify, support on Patreon,
link |
or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman.
link |
And now let me leave you with some words
link |
from David Eagleman in his book,
link |
Some Forty Tales from the Afterlives.
link |
Imagine for a moment there were nothing but
link |
the product of billions of years of molecules
link |
coming together and ratcheting up through natural selection.
link |
There were composed only of highways of fluids
link |
and chemicals sliding along roadways
link |
within billions of dancing cells.
link |
The trillions of synaptic connections hum in parallel
link |
that this vast egg like fabric of micro thin circuitry
link |
runs algorithms undreamt of in modern science,
link |
and that these neural programs give rise to
link |
our decision making, loves, desires, fears, and aspirations.
link |
To me, understanding this would be a numinous experience,
link |
better than anything ever proposed in any holy text.
link |
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.