And law, National Nonprofit exits an adjunct professor at stanford. Hes best known for his work on sensory substitution, time perception, brain plasticity, and neural law. Livewired his new book presents new standings in his lab, from dreaming to wearing devices that revolutionize how we think about the senses. He will discuss by packers, humans using echolocation and the present and future of ai. I am so excited to hear dr. Eagleman talk today. Welcome, david. The floor is all yours and i will be back in a bit to modera some q a. Great, thank you, beth. Its a great pleasure to be here. I have been to politics and prose in the past and so i couldnt be there this year but im pleased you can join me this way online today. I want to tell you a little bit give a brief oveiew about some of the main themes and ideas in the book and then we are going to take questions. Lets start with this question. How many of you have ever seen a baby zebra get born . So it can run in about 45 nutes. It wobbles and it runs around, same with baby giraffes. Dolphins aborts when insulin. How many of you have received a homo sapiens get born . You might notice its different, the situation. Theyont run around after 455 minutes and this is because it is trying too hard wire everything at, Mother Nature found a simple and more flexible strategy wh humans which is allow neurons toelf modify based on theirxperience in the world. In other words, we drop into the world halfbaked, and will let the world shape us. This is a completely new sort of strategy for Mother Nature but it has worked really well in the sens that we homo sapiens had ken over every corner of the planet we invented the internet. The church smallpox, have gotten tohe and so on. Its really working for us, and this is all due to this feature of brains, which is they are not really hardware. You can think of them that way. They are not software. Instead its is what i call lie and hence the title of the book livewired and in the field we talk about this as brain elasticity, a term you may have heard. The fact is this was a term that was quite a century ago by william james, because he was impressed by the way that you could take something plastic and molded into shape and it will hold that shape thats what the word plastic means. He was impressed when you learn something, when you log want me is david, then theres a change in the physical structure of your brain and his hold on to that. Thats when used the word elasticity. But, in fact, what i argue is it is so much more than that going on. You have 86 billion neurons, and each one of these has about 10,000 connections with its neighbors. Which means we have. 2 quadrillion connections going on in the brain. Your entire life Company Moment of your life, these things are plugging and unplugging and seeking and finding new places and so on. Its a Dynamic Living electric fabric that is not just something you mold and hold on shape but instead it is changing your whole life and thats why i have coined pushing the term livewired instead of plastic. This is incredible technology. We dont know in Silicon Valley we dont know how to build things like this yet but we have an existence of this technology because were Walking Around with three pounds of it. What i want to be very briefly is just keep a sense of some of the principles that i have worked to distill from the field. There are about 30,000 papers in the literature now on brain plasticity of what i try to do is to drought what is, what are the main principles that we can point to hear. Thats what im going to try to tell you. The first principle is that unlike Computers Come brains are extraordinarily flexible. I will give an example of that. There was a case a few years ago, a 44yearold man, normal iq have mild like ainslie went to the doctor to try to figure out what was going on. They couldnt figure out the doctor soon to get a brain scan just in case. This is a normal brain scan. Look at number three which points to this little area called the latter calendrical which is the most base in your brain that is filled with cerebral spinal fluid. The point is this gentleman who went in his brain look like this. The section labeled lv, it was completely filled with cerebral spinal fluid with such pressure that pushed his bring up against the sides of his skull. The remarkable flexibility of this material because it didnt hamper his neurodevelopment, his normal cognition and behavior. The thing is you cannot take your phone or laptop and smoosh it like that and hope it is still going to work. This is a whole different kind of the beast that were talking about with liveware. We have strange examples of this. When children get an epilepsy that affects one half of the brain, one hemisphere of the brain, they can go into for what is called a hemispherectomy where you remove half of the brain. You take it out. Originally surgeons would fill the empty space with sterile pingpong balls but it turns out you dont need to do that they realize because the cerebral spinal fluid provides enough pressure so they just leave it empty and the child has half a brain pick you might think oh, my gosh that poor kid come hes going to real deficits. Thats the weird part. They dont. As long as you do the under users under the age of about seven the kid can speak into math problems and can learn history and so on. They tend to have a slight limp on the other side of the body because this side of the brain and trolls the other side of the body. They are a little bit weaker there, otherwise they are perfectly fine. The book is full of examples of this sort of thing to sort of set the ball rolling of what we are talking about with liveware is a different beast than what were used to doing because i cant take my laptop answer half the motherboard out and expected to still function. Thats principle number one, just two or yet us. Principle number two ishat brains are locked in the silence and darkness of thekull. They have no idea what your body looks like and yet when you look at the brain what we find is there is a map of the body. I wont go into details except to say that the part of your brain that cares about inputs coming from your body, theres a map of your body and sang with your motor cortex which is putting information out to your body, to move it around. This was discovered in the 60s that there is this map and so the question is how is there this map of the brain in the body . The answer is it must be genetically prespecified but it turns out thats not actually the correct answer. We know that for many reasons. One of them know is that say you lose an arm in an accident. So that it says i see, i am a body without an arm so changes its maps of the map is always changing dedicated on what information is coming from the body. Predicated. This is a picture i talk about admiral lord nelson in the book was a hero of trafalgar and other british wars but most people dont notice he hes mig his right arm because it got shot off in one of his battles and he described what it was like. But now he understands what happens in his brain. It happens fast. Just a quick analogy, which is how does the brain understand what the map should look like . I use the analogy of colonization. Colonization, the key thing it is a fulltime business. What happened with the french in the new world is they had a lot of territory in the new world but eventually the french were sending over fewer ships than a british and the spanish, and so it ended up losing the territory, and it is exactly the same thing with the brain if admiral nelson said right arm is sending fewer ships because it is now gone, then the maps change in territory gets taken over. The key is nothing lies fallow in the brain. Its a competitive system. Part of the reason we can see that is with people who are blind, people who are born bld normalizations taken care of by the back of your head, the occipital lobe. Somebody who is blind, wait, sorry. I missed a. Here it is. For somebody who is bnd, the occipital lobe is taken over by sound, touch, things like that. Its not like the visual system l me put it this week. Even thoug we learn and neuroscience 101 class as part of the brain is the visual system, it only the visual system if your eyes are working and if there are shifts of data coming in. If there are no ships coming in, and h says thats cool, i would us this territory for the neighboring couries, which in this case are sound and touch. We tend to look at the witch hunt might look at a globe of the earth and think all those country borders are somehow predestined or thats the way it had to have come out. We know if you are into politics and world history, you know those country borders could have, very differently if this king had died or is this battl had died the other way. The same way in the brain. Its a extremely fluid system. The thing i want to emphasize is that the takeover of territory is very rapid. This is something that is new, a New Discovery just within the last several years in neuroscience. What i mean by that is lets say you take someone come a sighted Person Injured blindfold them and stick them in this scanner. What you find is you start seeing activity in their visual cortexbased on sound and touch, as it happens within about an hour. This encroachment starts to happen. What this tells us its a very competitive system happening under the hood. Things are moving fast. The whole thing is sprung like a mouse trap. As soon as assistances im not getting vision back there, it starts making changes and theres this annexation that begins to happen. What my student and i realized some years ago is this leads to a very new, interesting theory that we have now published on about why we dream. Its this. In the chronic comtition for brain real estate, the vual brain in particular has a unique problem to do with because of the rotation of the planet. We are cast into darkness about 12 hours every cycle. And, of course, im talking about evolutionary time, not having electricity. What happens is in the dark your touch and are hearing under spell and your case can work just fine but your vision is the thing that segment is deprived. How does the visual system deal with this unfair disadvantage for we suggested by keeping the occipital cortex active at night, keeping it protected y if we call this the defensive acvation theory, and the idea is that what it is doing is, dreams are the brains weight of fighting takeover from the other senses. Every 90 minutes you have this very spefic circuitry in the brain that last activitynto the occipital cortex and thats all that circuitry doe its extremely specific. It just goes to this part of the brain. Thats what hpens during the night. I understand whats going on with bra plasticity we can real open up why understanding we can open up this whole new set of theories and framework about what the brain is doing under the hood and why. I want to tell you the next principle. I am moving fast to some highlights. The next principle is the brain will wrap ielf the brain wrap itself around new data streams and actually you probly can hear the audio but this i a ted talk i gave aew years ago. I built a vest with vibratory tor on it and so its like little buzzers on your cell phone. The vest is capturing sound and turning sound into pattes of vibration on the ski what was happening was i was speaking and my skin is feeling that going on from low to High Frequency. Heres the video. This woman on the left is saying the word sound and on the right she sang the word touch. If you just look at the way to motors are mapped from low to High Frequency you can see sound and then touch. If you look on her shoulder and you can see theres a highfrequency there. So the point is for people who are deaf come what we can do is feed information to an unusual channel which is the scan. Instead of the interview which is this sophisticated biological machine that capture sound on the instrument breaks into frequencies and schiff set off to the brain in terms of spikes, electrical spikes, we are capturing sound breaking into frequencies here and send it to the brain of the spinal cord into the brain. The brain can figure what to do with information. It doesnt know, again it is trapped in silence and darkness in the fall of your skull and policies ever are spikes coming in. It doesnt know if those spikes are photons or her compression waves or mixtures of molecules. What the brain is good at doing is putting together an understanding of what is correlate with what and figure out how to understand that did it. Heres an example of the very first participant we have tested with us. He is on the left. My graduate students on the right. My graduate students as a word, in this case he says the word you and the general mythos completely deaf on the left writes down what hes understanding. My graduate students as where. And this german writes down the word where and then scott says touc gentleman. So the hes doing this on his skin and is able to translate this complicated pattern of vibrations in an understanding of what is getting said. What its doing is the patterns of vibration onto the wrist and ts is our very first paicipant, this is before, when it was a clunky prototype, but just to give you a sense of what its like for him to be able to feel sound. So as i said, we spun off this company, neo sentry, its called the buzz and its on wrists all over the world. Taking a neuroscience idea to a device thats changing. And im a scientific advisor for the show west world, and our vest made an appearance. I dont know if any of you watch the show about you this was season two, episo seven. Thats the vest on the screen there. The gentleman in the middle is wearing the vest and whats happening here is he feels spacially where the robot, the hosts are located and he can fashion accordingly. What were doing is translating location of something into a spacial feeling here. So suddenly they feel theres a host in the room and they werent expecting one there. Okay, so my vests wont save you if the robots go bad, but taking this idea and using this with people who are blind. In this case, this gentleman feels everybody around him and feels theres somebody ahead of him, behind him, left and right, he can feel exactly where you are and which makes it better than what a sighted person has. Being able to understand everything going around you 360 and navigation directions. Hes never been here before and we have navigation directions and he can go right where hes going. So theres much more to say about this. If anyone is interested in this general type of thing, creating new senses, please check out the ted talks that i gave on this, but the book goes deep into why this works and dozens of examples about this. So, let me move on to the next principl now, which is the brain, as i mentioned, is, you know, its trapped in there. It doesnt know what your body looks like, but it figures out how to control it. So one example i discussed in the book is about faith the dog who was born without front legs and so what did she do . Well, she figured out how to walk on her back legs like a human. What this tells us, dogsrains do not arrive preprogramed to drive dog bodies. Instead like brains across the animal kingdom, what they want to do, get to food, get to water, get to Player Mother and away from danger and they figure out the body theyre in. Thats all there is to it and we see this in humans all the time. It turns out the worldsest archer is armless. He got this archery holds t record for the long eest accurae shotment and his brain says, okay ill pull this thing back. If anybody saw my television series, the woman her she had a spinal cord injury and this controls the robotic arm with the signals in her motor cortex. And she imagines using her real arm and she gets better and better at it it because of brain plasticity and figuring out. When i think this, it does this, a little bit wrong and im think about it a different way and figures out how to use it and you can have things outside of your body. And it turns out the whole idea how can you like livewired things to at that big out what the brain does. And a colleague of mine has the starfish that doesnt know its body and then it figures out trying different moves and seeing what happens to the body. So it actually figures out how to get where its trying to get to the right side of the table here, to get to reward. And so it figures it out, but the key is then, you can snap a leg off of this and it figures out how to walk again, just like humans and other animals do because it figures out its body by trial and error. Okay. So the next principle, actually this is the last thing i will mention and then i want to get to q a. Part of the reason that i think its so amazing to understand what is going on under the hood is because we can actually build new devices this way, with completely new principles, how were thinking about things. One example i give in the book, you know, if you look at the mars rover spirit, it was a multibillion dollar project, we got it up to the red planet and it did a great job there. But what happened eventually, it got i. T. Right front wheel stuck in the martian soil and couldnt get out and died there and now its a multibillion dollar piece ofpace junk sitting there. If you compare that to a wolf, the leg caught in the trap. What the wolf will do, chew his leg off and figure out how to walk on three legs. Thats what all animals do. They have relevae, they want to get to safety, seek water, escape danger and get food. And its aions are undergirded by its stomach and its predators and the wolf tracks ineference to gome. The brain drinks up information about the environment and its capabilities inhat environment. In otherords, what its limbs allow it to do and its brain translates capabilities into e most useful mot output. So the wolf carries o with the li because animals dont shut down with moderate damage and neithe should our machines. And so, in the last part of the book, i talk about the next steps, how we can actually bud a completely different kind of machine that in the case of the mars rover got its wheel stuck. So it chews its wheel off and operates in a different way with a differentody plan. All ofhis is to say that theres so much amazing stuff happening under the hood there that were just scratching the surface, everyone especially out here in Silicon Valley is so impressed with Artificial Intelligence and so on, you know what . Thats baby stuff going on compared to what is actually here, this strange material, this living dynamic electric fabric that we have under the hood. What id like to do is answer questions about anything. Thank you so much for that. That was so cool and we have a bump much of a bunch of Great Questions. And a broader topic that people have questions about, this idea of the brain remapping i