Good afternoon everybody and welcome to politics and prose live at lunch where we bring you our programming during the lunchtime hour. Celebrating the release of livewire if at any time click the link to purchase a chat of the book on the website. Women to submit to the q and a box which can be found at the bottom of your screen be sure to put your question in the q and a. On to the main event doctor David Eagleman is a New York Times bestselling author and neuroscientist work at the National Nonprofit institute an adjunct assert. Best known for his work on time perception, his new book livewire also misled from anastasia to dreaming that revolutionized how we think he will discuss bio hackers human using echolocation in the present and future of ai im so here one excited to hear him talk today. The floor is all yours and then i will be back to moderate q and a. Thank you its a great pleasure to be here i have been to politics and prose in person. Im sorry i cannot be there this year but you can join me this way online today. So lets start with this question have you ever seen a baby zebra get born . And wobbles and then a baby giraffe world often can be born swimming how many know that homo sapiens are born its different situation. They dont run around after 45 minutes because instead of hard wire at birth Mother Nature found a simpler and more flexible strategy with humans which is to allow neurons to self modify based on their experience in the world. In other worlds we come into the world halfbaked and let the world to shape us. And this is a new strategy for Mother Nature but it has worked really well in the sense homo sapiens taking over every corner of the planet with the internet, cured smallpox and up into the moon. It is working for us. It all comes to the future of brains is not software on top of the hardware instead it is what i call livewire and in the field we call it as plain on brain plasticity that this is a term that was coined a century ago by William James because he was impressed you could take something plastic and molded into shape and it will hold the shape. If you learn my name is david there is a change in the physical structure of your brain thats why he used the word plasticity but it is so much more than that 86 billion neurons were 10000 connections with its neighbors with 1 quadrillion connections go on in the brain and every moment it plugs and unplugs and finding new places and a Dynamic Living electric fabric not just something you more than hold on to shape and instead changing your whole life. Thats what i have coined the term livewire instead of plastic. This is Incredible Technology in Silicon Valley to build things that we have the existence of this technology because we all walk around. So very briefly is just to give you a sense of the principles ive worked to distill from the field now there are papers on brain plasticity but i tried to figure out what are the main principles we can point to . And unlike computers brains are extraordinarily flexible. There was a case the a few years ago normal iq mildly pain and went to figure out what was going on. He went to get a brain scan or the normal brain scan looks like Something Like this and then number three which points to this area of the lateral ventricle a little space in the brain for cerebral spinal fluid. This gentleman his brain looked like this. It was completely filled with cerebrospinal fluid was such pressure it push the brain up against the sides of this goal. But the story illustrates the remarkable flexibility of this material because it didnt hamper his neural development, cognition, behavior. So you cannot take your laptop and smash it like that and hope that it will still work. And we have many examples of this when children have epilepsy affects one hemisphere of their pain, they can go in for a hemisphere ectomy where you remove after the brain. You take it out. Originally they would fill the empty space with sterile pingpong balls now they realize you dont have to do that because the cerebral spinal fluid gives enough pressure and the child has half a brain. You think the poor kid will have a deficit. That is the weird. They dont. As long as it is under the age of seven and the child has been quickly normal cognition and can speak and math problems and learn history. They tend to have a slight limp on the other side of their bod body, and they are a little bit weaker but they are perfectly fine. The book is full of examples to set the ball rolling that what we talk about with livewired is a different beast than what we are used to. Because i cannot take my laptop and terrell half of the motherboard and expected to function. Brains are locked into the silence and the darkness of the school only look at the brain so the part of the brain that cares about that input and a map of her body and this was discovered in the sixties and then to be prespecified but thats not the correct answer. Your brains map and it will adjust to say i have a body without an arm now it takes over and changes the map so what is always changing from the information coming from the body and with admiral lord nelson who is the hero of the book and one arm was shot off in the battle and he strived now we understand and the quick analogy to understand what it should look like and to use the analogy of colonization and it is a fulltime business but eventually the french for sending over fewer ships than the british and the spanish they are losing the territory and exactly the same thing with the brain if admiral nelsons right arm is sending fewer ships because it is gone, then the maps change nothing lies follow in the brain everything is taken over its a very competitive system. And the way we can see that is people who are born blind for example, normally vision is taking care of by the back of your head but somebody who is blind it is taken over by sound and touch is not like the visual system even as we learned in neuroscience one oh one and this is the visual system only if your eyes are working. But if there are no ships coming in then it says thats cool i will use the territory for the neighboring countries which in this case is sound and touch what is a very fluid system even though we tend to look at the way the child look at a group of the earth and think the country borders are somehow are predestined or thats the way it has to come out. And with politics and World History you know this country borders could have come out very differently if a king had died or a battle went the other way. It is an extremely fluid system. And the takeover of territory is very rapid for what i mean by that and if you blindfold them and stick them in the scanner and then you see the visual cortex based on sound and touch and this encroachment starts to happen. It is a very competitive system and things are moving fast it is spun like a mouse trap. If its his weight of not getting vision it starts to make changes the annexation that begins to happen. This leads to a new theory about why the dream and it is this in the chronic competition for brain real estate has a unique problem to deal with so we are cast into darkness about 12 hours of recycle about not having electricity so in the dark you hear and smell but now your vision is to arrived so how does the visual system deal with the unfair disadvantage by keeping the occipital cortex active at night. This is the defensive activation theory and the idea is what it is doing dreams are the brains way from fighting take over from the other senses. Every 90 minutes you have specific circuitry that last activity into the occipital cortex. Thats all it does it is extremely specific and thats what happens during the night and so understanding what is going on with brain plasticity with the theories in the framework for what the brain is doing under the board and why. I am moving fast through highlights but the next principal is that the brain will map itself around new data streams. You probably cannot hear the audio but this is a ted talk from a few years ago. I built a vest with vibratory motors. And then to turn sound into patterns of vibration on the skin. I was speaking and my skin is feeling that going on. Here is a video by the way. The woman on the left says the word sound and on the right she says the word touch look at the way the motors are mapped between low and High Frequency it is sound and touch. The point is for people who are death death making give them information through the unusual channel instead of the inner ear a sophisticated biological machine and then to ship off to the brain with those little electrical spikes we have the frequencies here sending it to the brain of the spinal cord and then trapped in silence and darkness and these are spikes coming in they dont know if that is photons or air compression waves adjust see spikes. So the very first i ever tested so here he says the word you and the so to say where and touch and in the meantime there is a Company Called nielsens part one neurosensory to vibratory motors and translating the sound of vibration and here was a very first participant as it was a prototype. And then neo sensory it is wonderfully satisfying to take a neuroscience idea go from theoretical concept to a device changing peoples lives also i will mentioned so we had the best to make a cameo appearance season two episode seven thats a vest on the screen if you can see especially where they are located so we are translating location into a special feeling they werent expecting one there so in any case to take this idea with people who are blind and in this case everybody around him and to feel exactly where you are which is better than what a sighted person has and to add navigation direction and then go right where he is going. Theres much more to say about this so with new senses please check out the ted talk i gave on this but the book goes deep into why this works so let me move on to the next principal with the brain as i mentioned is trapped in their so one example about the dog was born without front legs so what does she do she forgot how to walk on her back legs like a human and this tells us that dogs brains to drive dog bodies instead so get to food and water and their mother is so they figure out how to control the body they are in and then we see this and humans all the time the worlds best archer is harmless he holds the record for the longest accurate shot because his brain can say cool i will use my legs if anyone saw my series the brain one who was completely paralyzed with damage to her spinal cord she got the brain implants that allows her to control this very beautiful sophisticated arm simply she imagines moving her real arm and that is translated into moving the robotic arm and of course she gets better and better because of the brain plasticity so think about it a different way so it turns out how can you make live wire devices . We are just starting this and one colleague of mine at columbia called the starfish robot is in the programmed but to figure out the body by trying different moves and seeing what happens to the body. It actually figures out the key is you can snap leg often figures how to walk again because it figures out the body by trial and error. So the next principal the last thing i will mention then moving to q a, part of the reason i think its so amazing to understand what is going on under the could come one the good because we have completely new principles how we think about things. One example if you look at the mars rover spirit, a multibilliondollar project, but what happened eventually stuck in the martian soil and could not get out if you compare that to a wealth caught in a trap it will chill its leg off and walk on three legs. They have a sense of relevance. They want to get to safety so the actions are undergirded by the demands of his stomach and the predators and the difference to its goal. So brings up information about the environment and the capabilities and what the limbs allow it to do. To translate those into the motor output the worst carries on because animals dont shut down with moderate damage and neither should our machine. So i talk about the next steps however the completely different type of machine and then it figures out how to operate. All of this is to say there is so much amazing stuff happening under the hood that we are just scratching the surface. Silicon valley is so impressed with Artificial Intelligence but that is baby stuff compared to what is actually here with us moving dynamic electric fabric under the third one the head one the hood now i will answer any question. So now the idea the brain remapping itself when senses are deprived so you hear about having feelings from the absent limb is that only happening until the brain recognizes it doesnt have the lamb quick. Thats a great question. The right way to think about the brain is have a different timescale of change some are really rapid others change is slow so it changes fast has to present enough evidence at the next level to say i will change also. If somebody loses a limb some parts of the brain change and were just one readjust right away. The deeper areas in the brain still think the information they are getting from the hand so they get confused if you touch the face they say it must be the hand and as the result of the interaction and between and this is a whole new framework and it explains so much of what happened the oldest role in neurology is that older memories are more stable than newer memories. Is somebody at the end of their life on their deathbed they dont remember the last month or year but they remember their childhood just fine. Other systems dont have the property appraised then it happens is because of the way the way they work down the system to become more stable with time this is why often on their deathbed people will refer to their childhood language like albert einsteins last words nobody knows what they were because he was speaking in german and the night nurse did not speak german. And with the same concep concept, what is happening in the brains of people that are put on ventilators . Not sensory input with the five senses but when a body part is replaced with an external machine does that happen . Thats an interesting question. One of the things that is fascinating report on replacing body parts in genera general, you are fine with artificial heart , respirator ventilator for your lungs you are still the same person but in contrast if you even lose a little chunk of brain tissue your risk aversion and capacity to name animals or see colors or understand music and this is how we know the brain is the densest representation of you and the whole body. People often ask what about the rest of the body . Like the greater metropolitan area and this is the urban center you can change and replace it. I have a question interested in the idea that dreams are meant the other senses dont take over as we sleep how do you test that in a lab . Had you make people not dream . Great question we just published the paper to do research on 25 different species of primates. It turns out primates that are close cousins but there is very Different Levels of plasticity. And then is pretty proper the walks pretty rapidly as opposed to homo sapiens so look at all these to figure out how plastic the brain is versus preprogrammed and then how much rem sleep which is dream sleep it correlates perfectly the less plastic the last dream sleep because the visual cortex is not in danger but the more plastic you are the more dream sleep you have to protect the brain because its an more danger. Thats how we study it and it turns out those that are on antidepressants have less dream sleep so now we look at that and do studies if Everything Else is approximately the same you just dont get the dream sleep at night because the vision gets poorly right now they say its because of dry eyes. May be right but maybe not thats what they are looking into. Thats awesome. There is also Different Levels of plasticity to human brains lose plasticity as we get older and what are the ramifications . Yes. The brain gets less plastic as it ages most people see it as a bad thing but the reason it happens is because the brain is to build an internal model of the world out there. What the brain is trying to do is figure how to optimize my behavior with how people react to me. What should i do . This is the way the brain tries to do this. And then you get better and better as you age the reason is less flexible you put together a good understanding of how to operate in the world. Thats why it becomes less plastic but the important part is to always make certain you are challenging yourself with novelties so you can build new roadways about a study going on for a long time over many decades where people donate their brains upon death and those who stay cognitively active their whole lives, when they die some had alzheimers but nobody knew it because it and have the cognitive deficits. Because they were cognitively active until the last moment they were challenging themselves with chores and responsibilities even if it was physically degenerating with alzheimers they were constantly building new roadways and bridges as opposed to people who retire and their lives shrink and they dont challenge themselves that is the worst thing you can do so one of the main lessons is to challenge your brain with novelty all the time that is something that you can do do something you are bad at. Thats great and with memory loss so what do you think is the evolutionary purpose of lucid dreaming and why can some people do it and others it takes practice and can ever do it . And then if youre in the dreaming can take control of the dream. It is very rare. Most people never have in their lives. There are ways to train up on it and get better. But i think it is a bug, not a feature. That you generate consciousness and sleep is always other functions i taking out the trash with this accidental interface between the two so to answer your question i think there is any evolutionary process its a bug that can be found sometimes. And how do we see our dreams is at the imagination or what is going on there quick. This is a very important fundamental concept and you dont even need your eyes to see as evidence every night with a full rich visual experience looking at the circuitry carefully only 5 percent of the data back here by percent comes through the eyes. The rest is all feedback loops. So vision is not at all like a camera but the internal model of what you expect to be seeing like visual illusions like a euros and a scientist but the issue that it demonstrates it doesnt even matter whats out there physically and colors dont even exist in the world you just have different wavelengths and the brain finds these and for speed