Guest my great pleasure. Thank you so much. You can watch this and all of our what are you reading interviews booktv. Org. Use the search bar at the top of the page. Good afternoon everybody and welcome to politics and prose, live at lunch, where we bring you our politics and prose programming during your lunch time hour. My name is beth and imn Event Coordinator and we thank you so much for joining here to celebrate the release of a livewired by doctor david eaeman. At any time to the event you can click the link that will put in the chat to purchase a copy of tonights bo on pnps website. You can ask the author of questions by sabina to the button for which can be found at the bottom of your screen. Be sure to put your question in the q a and not in the chat to make sure that the author and i see it. On to our main event. This afternoon doctor David Eagleman is a neuroscientist in the New York Times best selling author and he has the nter for science and law a National Nonprofit institute and serves as an adjunct professor at stanford university. Hes best best known for his work on substitution, time perception, brain plasticity, neural law. Livewired, his new book, presents newindings from doctor eaglemans lab from streaming to tech devices that revolutionize how we think about the senses. He would discuss bio hackers, humans using echolocation and the present and future of ai. Im so excited to hear doctor eagleman talk today. Welcome, david. The floor is all yours and i will be back in a little bit to moderate some q and a. Thank you, beth. Its a great pleasure to be here. Ive been to politics and prose in person in the past and im sorry i cannot be there this year but im so pleased that you can join me this way online today. I want to tell you a little bit and will give brief overview about the main themes in the ideas in the book and then we will take questions. Lets start with this question but how man of you have ever seen a baby zebra get born . So, it can run in about 45 minutes, wobble to its pensively legs and runs around same as a baby giraffe, dolphins are born swimming and so on. How many of you has seen a homo sapiens get born and you may notice that its different the situation and they dont run around after 45 minutes and this is because instead of trying to hardwire everything in at birth Mother Nature found a simpler and more flexible strategy with humans which is allow neurons to self modify based on their experience in the world. In other words, we dropped into the world halfbaked and we let the world shape us and this is a you know, a completely new sort of strategy for Mother Nature but it has worked really well in the sense that we, homo sapiens, take over every corner of the planet and have been inventing the internet and cured smallpox and gotten to the moon and so on so it is really working for us and this is all do to this feature of brains which is that they are not really hard whered and theyre not really Software Running on top but its what i call live where. That is hence the title of the book livewired and in the field we talk about this as brain plasticity and a term some of you who may have heard but the fact is this was a term that was coined a century ago by William James because he was impressed by the way you could take and im looking for something plastic. You can take something plastic and mold it into a shape and it will hold that shape and that is what the word plastic means. He was impressed that when you learn something. For example, when you learn my name is david theres a change in the physical structure of your brain and it hold onto that. That is why i use the word plasticity but, in fact, what i argue is that it is so much more than that going on. You got 86 billion neurons into the cells of the brains that each has 10000 connections with its neighbors which means you have point to quadrillion connections going on in the brain and your entire life, every moment of your life these things are plugging and unplugging and seeking and finding new places and so on and its identity mac living electric fabric that is not just something you mold and hold to its shape but instead changing your whole life and that is why i prefer and ive coined in pushing the term livewired instead of plastic. This is an Incredible Technology and we dont know in Silicon Valley, we do not know how to build things like this yet but we have an existence proof of that analogy because we are all Walking Around with the pounds of it. What i want to do briefly is give you a sense of some of the principle that ive worked to distill from the field. There are about 30000 papers in literature on brain plasticity but what ive tried to do is figure out what is the main principles that we can point to hear. That is what i will try to tell you here. The first pnciple is that unlike computers brains are extraordinarily flexible and i will give you an example of that. There is a case a few years ago 44 yearold man normal iq, had mild leg pains we went to the doctor to try to figure out what was going on and they couldnt figure it out and the doctor said send him to get a brain scan. It turns out what a normal brain scan looks like is Something Like this. This is a section down the middle and the thing i want you to look at is number three which points to this area called the lateral ventricle which is a small space in your brain thats filled with cerebral spinal fluid. The point is this gentleman went in his brain looked like this. The section labed lv, lateral ventricle was cpletely filled with cerebral snal fluid with such pssure that it pushed his brain u against the side of his goal but the thing in the story illustrates is the remarkable flicks ability of this material because it didnt hamper his neurodevelopment or normal cognition and behavior and the thing is you cannot take your phone or laptop and, you know, smash it like that and hope it is still going to work. This is a whole different kind of peace that we are talking about with life where. Of course w have many very strange examples of this where when children get an epilepsy at affects one half of their brain and one hemisphere of the brain they can go in for what is called a hemisphere ectomy where you remove half of the brain. You take it out and originally surgeons would fill the empty spaces with sterile pingpong balls but turns out you dont need to do that because the cerebral spinal fluid provides enough pressure so they leave it empty and the child has half a brain. You might think all my gosh, that poor kid will have a real deficit but that is the weird part. They dont. As long as you do it under the age of seven the child is perfectly normal cognition and can speak, math problems, can learn history and so on but they tend to have a slight limp on the other side of their body because the side of the brain controls the other side of the body but they are a little weaker there but otherwise they are perfectly fine. The book is full of examples of this sort of thing to set the ball rolling that what we are talking about with liveware is a very different beast than what we are used to doing because i cant take my laptop and tear half the motherboard out and expect it to still function. So, that isrinciple number one to orient us. Principle number two is that brains are locked in the silence and darkness of the skull and have no idea what their body looks like and yet when we look in the brain but we find is that there is a map of the body so i wont go into details here except to say that you know, the parts of your brain that cares about the inputs coming from your body and there is a map of your body and same with your motor cortex putting information out to your body to move it around and so this was discovered in the 60s that there is this map and so the question is how is that it is map of the brain in the body and the obvious answer is that it must be genetically prespecified but it turns out thats not actually the correct answer. We know that for many reasons and one of them is lets say you lose an arm in an accident yr brains map will adjust so that it says i see, i am a body without an arm and thats cool and it tak over and changes its map so the map is alway changing predicated on what information is coming from the body. And so,ou know, this is a picture i talked about admiral lord nelson inhe book was the he of trafalgar and other british wars but most people dont kn hes missing his right arm because his right arm got shot off in one ofis battles and he, you know, described what it w like but now we understand what happens in h brain. It happened fast and just a quick analogy here which is how do the brain understand whats its map should look like and i use the analogy of colonization. Colonization, the key thing is it is a fulltime business so what happened with the french in the world is they had a lot of territory in the new world but eventually the french were sending over fewer ships than the british and spanish and so they ended up losing the territory and it is exactly the same thing with the brain if admiral nelsons right arm is sending fewer ships because it is now gone then the maps change and territory gets taken over. The key is nothing wise and shallow in the brain and having gets taken over in a very competitive system in there. Part of the way we can see that is with, for exam, people who are blind and people born by for example normally vision as it taken care of by the back of her head in the occipital lobe and one who is blind the or wait, sorry. I missed a slide but here it is. For someone who is blind the occipital lobe is taken over by sound and by touch and things like that. It is not like the visual syst system, let me put it this way. Even though we learn in neuroscience 101 that this part of the brain is a visual system is only the visual system if your eyes are working. If there are ships of data coming in and then it becomes the visual system but if there are no ships coming in then its thats cool, ill use this territory for the neighboring countries which in this case are sound and touch. And so, its a very fluid system. This is one of the things to understand about the brain even though we tend to look at it in a way a child my look at a globe of the earth and think that all those countries borders are somehow predestined or that is the way it has to come out but we know if you are into politics and World History you know that those country borders could have come out. If only if this king had died in his youth or this battle had tipped the other way and so on. Its the same thing in the brain. Despite the fact we learn about it as though its all diagrammed out is extremely fluid system and then the thing i want to emphasize here is that the takeover of territory is very rapid and this is something that is very new, a New Discovery for the last over years and neuroscience and what i mean by that is lets see you take someone, a sighted person and blindfold them and stick them in this scanner but what you find is that you start seeing activity in their visual cortex based on sound and touch and that happens within about one hour. Thisncroachment starts to happen. What this tells us is a very competitive system happening under the hood there and things are moving fast. The whole things sprung like a mouse trap so as soon as a system says wait one moment, im not getting vision back there it starts makinghanges and there is this annexations begins to happen. My student and i realized years ago that this leads to a very new interesting theory that we have now published on about why we dream and it is this. In the chronic competition for brain real estatehe visual brain, in particular, has a unique problem to deal with because of the rotation of the planet so 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, youre hearing, your taste, your small work fine but your vision is a thing that suddenly is deprived for it how does the visual system deal with this unfair disadvantage . We suggest it is by keeping the occipital cortex active at night and keeping it protected and we call this in the defensive activation theory and the idea is that what it is doing is dreams are the brain waves of taking over senses. Every 90 minutes you have this very specific circuitry in the brain the blast activity into the occipital cortex and that is all that circuitry does. Its extremely specific and it just goes to this part of the brain and that is what happens during the night. My understanding of whats going on with blaine plasticity we can open up this whole new set of theories and the framework about what the brain is a doing under hood and why. I want to tell you the next principle and im moving fast through highlights here but next principle is that the brain will rapid itself the brain wrapped itself around new data streams and you can to the audio here but this is a ted talk i gave and i built a vest with vibratory motors on it and its like the buzzers on your cell phone and the best is capturing sound and turning the sound into patterns of vibration on the skins whats happening is i was speaking and my skin is feeling that going on from low to high equency and this is a video, by the way. Thisoman on the left is saying the word of sound and on the ght shes saying the word touch. If you just look at the way the tors are mapped from low to High Frequency y can see its sound and if you look on her shoulders you can see thathere is a High Frequency there. The pnt is for people who are deaf what we can do is feed the information through an unusual channel which is the scheme so the inner ear which is this incredibly sophisticated biological machine that capture a sound on the eardrum from t frequencies and ships it to the brain in terms of spikes the little electrical spikes and we are capturing the sound of breaking the frequenes here and sending it to t brain up the spinal cordnto the brain and the brain can figure out what to do with the information. It doesnt know and again its trapped in silence and in darkness and the bul of your skull and all it sees ever are spikes coming in andt doesnt know the spikes rep of the transition of photonsr air compression waves or mtures of molecules but all it sees as spikes and with the brain is od at doing is putting together an understanding of what is correlated with what and figuring out how to understand that data. Heres an example of the very first participant we ever tested with this on the left, graduate student on the right to my graduate student says a word in this case says you and the gentleman who is completely deaf on the left writes down what hes understanding so my question says where and the gentleman writes down where and scott says touch. The gentleman is feeling this on his skin and able to translate the comp hit a by understanding of what is getting said. What weve done in the meantime is that they ended up being mean on Company Animal upholds bidding century and this is a wristband and vibratory motors in the ban and it captures a sound and theres a whole computer board here and what it is doing is translate that sound into patterns of vibration on the wrist and here is our very first participant here this is before what it was a clunky prototype but just to give you a sense of what it is like for him to be able to feel sound. [silence] so, as i said, we spun off this Company Called neo century called the buzz and we got this on wrists all over the world now. Its wonderfully satisfying to take a neuroscience idea and go all the way from theoretical concepts to a device that is changing peoples lives all over. I wl also mention im a scientific advisor for thehow westworld and so we had our best to make a cam appearance in westworld and now we call it vest world as a result and i dont know if you watched the show but this was season two episode seven and thats the best on the screen and the gentleman in the middle if you can see here the gentleman in the middle is wearing out fast and with happening here is he feels spatially where the robots and the hosts are located and what we are doing is translating locations of something into a spatial feeling here so suddenly they feel theres a host of the room and they werent expecting one there and okay, it wont save you if robots go bad but anyway, we taking this idea and uses with people who are blind. In this case this judgment feels everybody around and he could feel theres someone ahead and behind and if youre walking up to the left or to the right he can see where you art which actually makes it better than what it cited person has been able to understand everything going on around you in 360 and we can at navigation directions on top of that so hes never been here before we add navigation directions and he can go right where hes going. So, there is much more to say about this and if anyone is interested in the general type thing about creating nuisances then please check out ted talks that i gave on this but book goes deep into why this works and dozens of examples about this. Let me move on to the next principal now which is the brain, as i mentioned, you know its trapped in there and does not know what your body looks like but one example that i discussed in the book is about faith the dog born without front legs. What did she do . She figured out how to walk on her back like a hum. What this tells us is that dog brains do not arrive reprogrammed to drive dog bodies but instead like brains across the Animal Kingdom what they want to do is get to food and get to water and to their mother and get away from danger and stuff like that so they figure out how to control the body better and thats all there is to it and we see this in humans all the time and it turns out the worlds best archer is armless. He got interested in archery and holds the world record for the longest accurate shot and this is because his brain inside there could say okay, cool, i will use my legs and pull this thing back and do it like that. If anyone saw my series, the brain when the cases i cover is this woman jan who is completely paralyzed and got damage to her spinal cord and soak the signals can go from her brain out to her body so she got these brain implants and this allows her to control this robotic arm and its very beautiful sophisticated robotic arm and she controls us with the signals in her motor cortex. She imagines moving her real arm and that gets translated to moving this robotic arm and of course, she gets better and better at it because of brain plasticity and because ss figuring out when i think this it does this a little wrong so think about it a different