Public health and more. And professor and writer christopher rabbani discusses how she was denied reproductive choice andhealth care for her children. Find a complete Television Schedule booktv. Org or on your program guide. Good afternoon everybody and welcome to politics and prose live lunch where we bring you our politics and prose programming during the lunchtime hour. My name is beth long, im an Event Coordinator and we thank you so much for joining us to celebrate the release of my required by doctor David Eagleman. At any time you can click the link that will put you in the chat to purchase a copy of tonights book on p and ps website. Ask the author questions by submitting it to the q and a box, the button for which can be found at the bottom of your screen. Be sure to put your question in the q and a and not in the chat to make sure the author and i see it. On to our main event this afternoon. Doctor David Eagleman is a neuroscientist and New York Times bestselling author. He heads the center for science and law, a National Nonprofit institute andserves as a professor at stanford university. Hes known for his work on sensory substitution, time perspective and, blame brain plasticity. Livewired presents new findings from doctor eaglemans lab from synesthesia to dreaming two devices to that revolutionized how we think about the brain. Bio hackers, echolocation and the present and future ofai. Im so excited to heardoctor eagleman talk today. Welcome david. The floor is all yours and ill be back in a little bit for some q a. Thank you beth, its a great pleasure to be here. Ive been to politics and prose inperson in the past and im sorry i couldnt be there this year but im so pleased you could join me on this way online today. I want to tell you a little bit, a brief overview about some of the main schemes and the ideas of the book and then we will take questions. So lets start with this question, how many of you have ever seen a baby zebra gets born . So it can run about 45 minutes. It wobbles to its little legs and runs around, same thing with baby giraffes. Dolphins are born swimming and so on and how many of you have seen homo sapiens get born, you might notice its a differentsituation. 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 allowed 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 completely new sort of strategy for Mother Nature but it worked really well in the sense that we homo sapiens have taken over every corner of the planet. We invented the your internet, cured smallpox, going to the moon and so on so its really working for us. And this is all due to this feature of brains which is that theyre not really hardware, you cant think of them that way. Theyre not software, instead its what i call live where is the title of the book and in the field we talk about this as brain plasticity in terms you may have heard but the fact is this is a term that was coined centuries ago by william jane. He was impressed by the way you could take something plastic and mold it into a shape and it will hold that shape. Thats what the word plastic means and he wasimpressed that when you learn something , when you learnthat my name is david , theres a change in the structure of your brain andhold onto that. Thats why i use the word plasticity but in fact what i argue is that it is so much more than that going on. Youve got 86 billion neurons. Each one of these has about 10,000 connections with its neighbors which means you have. 2 quadrillion connections going on. And your entire life, every moment of your life these things are plugging and unplugging andseeking and finding new places and so on. Its a Dynamic Living electric fabric that is not just something that you mold and hold onto an shape but instead exchanging your whole lifeand thats why i prefer , i coined the term livewired instead ofplastic. This is incredible technology. We dont know how to build things like this yet but we have an existence proof of this technology because were all Walking Around with three pounds of so what i want to do very briefly is just give you a sense of some of the principles that ive worked to distill from the field. There are about 30,000 papers of literature now on brain plasticity and when i tried to do is figure out what are the main principles that we can point to hear . Thats what im going to try to tell you here. The first principle is that unlike computers, brains are extraordinarily flexible. Ill give you an example of that. There was a case a few years ago, a 44yearold man, normal iq, he went to the doctor to try to figure out what was going on and they couldntfigure it out and the doctor said to get a brain scan. So it turns out what a normal brain scan looks like is Something Like this. This is a section right down the middle and the thing i want you to look at is numbers three which points to this little area call the lateral ventricle which is a little space in your brain thats filled with cerebral spinal fluid. The point is this gentleman his brain look like this so the section labeled lv, thats the lateral ventricle was completely filled with cerebrospinal fluid with such pressure that it pushed his brain up against the side of his goal. But the thing the story illustrates is the remarkable flexibility of this material because it didnt hamper his normal development, formal cognition and behavior and the thing is you cannot take your phone or your laptop and smoke it like that and hope that its still going to work. This is a whole different kind of beast that were talking about with live where , with liveware and we have strange examples of this. When children get an epilepsy that affects one half of the rain, onehemisphere of their brain , they can go into whats called a hemispherectomy and originally surgeons would fill the space with pingpong balls but they realize that fluid provides enough pressure, they just leave it empty and as the child had half a brain, you might think my gosh that poor kid he can have a real deficit. As the weird part, they dont. As long as you do this under the age of seven the child has perfectly normal cognition and can speak and do math problems and can learn history and so on. They tend to have a slight limp on the other side of their body because this side of the brain controls the other side of the body and there a little weaker but otherwise they are perfectly fine and the book is full of examples of this sort of thing that sets theball rolling. What were talking about with liveware is a different beast. I cant take my laptop and tear half the motherboard out and expected to function. That principle number one just to orient us. Principle number two is that brains will, brains are locked in to the spiraling darkness of the skull. They have no idea what your body looks like and yet when we look in the brain what we find is there a map of the body so i wont go into detail here except to say that the part of your brain that cares about the inputs comingfrom your body , theres a map of your body and the same with your motor cortex which is putting information out to your body and moving it around. This was discovered in the 60s that theres this so the question is how is there a map of the brain to the body the obvious answer is that it must be genetically prespecialized but it turns out thats not actually the correct answer. We know that for many reasons, one of them is lets say you lose an arm in an accident. Your brains map will adjust so that it says i see, im a body without an arm now so thats cool and it takes over and changes its map so the math is always changing predicated on what information is coming from the body. So this is a picture, i talked about admiral lord nelson in the book with the hero of other british wars but most people dont notice hes missing his rightarm because his arm got shot off in one of his battles. He described what it was like for him but now he understands what happens to his brain and happenstance. Just a quick analogy here which is how does the brain understand what its map should look like . I use the analogy of colonization and colonization , the key thing 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 shifts than the british and the spanish and so they ended up losing territory. And it is exactly the same thing the brain. If admiral nelson rightarm is sending fewer ships because it now gone , then a map changes territory gets taken over. Thing live shallow in the brain and everything is taken over, its a very competitive system and part of the way we can see that is for example people who are blind, people born blind for example normally the vision is taken care of by the back of your head. And in somebody who is blind, the sorry. I miss the slide. Somebody who is blind, the occipital lobe is taken over by sound, by touch, my things like that so its not like the visual system, let me put it this way. Even though we learn in neuroscience that this part of the brain is the visual system, its only the visual system if your eyes work and if there are ships of data coming in, then it becomes a visual system but if there are no ships coming in and says thats cool, im going to use this territory for the neighboring country which is in this case sound or touch. So its a very fluid system and this is one of the things to understand about the brain even though we tend to look at it the way that a child might look at a global leader. It thinks all those country borders are somehow predestined or thats the way it happens from now. We know if youre into politics and world history, you know that those country borders come out very differently ifthis king had died or if thisbattle had went the other way or so on. Same thing in the brain. Its the fact that we learn aboutit as though its all diagrammed out. Its an extremely fluid system and the thing i want to emphasize here is that the takeover of territory is very rapid. We see something that is very new, a New Discovery for the last several years in neuroscience and what i mean by that is you take a sighted person as you blindfold them and you stick them in the scanner, what you find is that you start seeing activity in their visual cortex based on sound and touch and that happens within about an hour. This encroachment starts to happen. So what this tells us is very competitive system happening under the hood. Things are moving fast, the whole thing is sprung like a mousetrap so as soon as the system says im not getting vision coming back it starts making changes and theres this annexation that begins to happen so 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 its this. In the chronic competition for brain real estate the visual rain in particular has a unique problem to deal with because of the rotation of the planets so we are cast into darkness about 12 hours every cycle and of course im talkingabout evolutionary time, not having electricity. So what happens is in the dark your touch and your hearing and your smell and your taste work just fine but your vision is the thing thats suddenly deprived so how is the visual system dealing with this unfair advantage and we suggest its bykeeping the occipital cortex active at night. We call this the defensive activation theory. The idea is that what it is doing is dreams are the brains way of fighting takeover from the other senses so every 90 minutes you have this very specific circuitry in the brain that blasts activity into the occipital cortex and thats all that circuitry does by the way. And its extremely specific. It just goes to this part of the brain. Thats what happens during the night. So my understanding whats going on with brain plasticity we can open up this whole new set of theories and frameworks about what brain is doing under the hood and why. Okay, i want to tell you the next principal. Im just moving fast through some highlights here. The next principal is that the brain will wrap itself, the brain wraps itself around new data streams and you guys probably cant hear the audio here but this is a 10 talk i gave a few years ago. I built a vest with vibratory motors on it. So its like those little buzzers on your cell phone. The vest is capturing sound and turning sound into patterns of vibration on the skin so whats happening is i was speaking and my skin is feeling that going on from low to High Frequency. Heres a video of it by the way. This woman on the left is saying the word sound and on the right shes in the word touch and if you look at the way the motors are math from low to High Frequency you can see its sound and then touch. If you look on the shoulders you can see the highfrequency there so the point is for people who are deaf, what we can do is feed the information through an unusual channel which is the skin instead of the inner ear which is this incredibly sophisticated biological machine that captures sound on the eardrum and breaking frequencies and ships it off to the brain in terms of spikes, the little electrical spikes. We are capturing sound breaking frequencies here and sending it to the brain of the spinal cord and into the brain. Your brain can figure out what to do with the information. It doesnt know. Its trapped in silence and darkness in the vault of your skull and hes ever are spikes coming in. Dont it doesnt know if those are mixtures of molecules, all it seizes spikes and what the brain is really good at doing is putting together and understanding whats correlated and figuring out how to understand that data. Heres an example of the first one we ever tested with this. My graduate student sends a word and in this case he sends the word you and the gentleman who is completely deaf on the left writes down what hes understanding. So my grad student says where and this gentleman writes down the word where and then the guy says touch. And so the death gentleman is feeling this on his skin and hes able to translatethis complicated pattern of vibration into an understanding of what is getting said. What weve done in the meantime is i ended up finding a company out of my lab called neosensory and we shrunk this to the size of a wristband and the wristband has vibratory motors in the band and it captures sound and theres a whole computer board in here and what its doing is translating the sound into patterns of vibration on thewrist. Heres our very first, before this was a prototype. This gives you a sense ofwhat its like for him to be able to feel sound. So as i said, weve spun off this company neocentury, its called the buzz and we got this on wrists all over the world now and its satisfying to be able to take a neuroscience idea and go all the way from theoretical concepts to a device thats saving peoples lives. Ill also mention im a scientific advisor for the show westworld. So we had our vest make a cameo appearance in westworld, i now call it vest world as a result. I dont know if any of you watch the show but this was season two episode seven, thats the best on the screen. The gentleman in the middle is wearing the vest and whats happening here is he feels spatially where the robot hosts are located and he can touch them accordingly. So what were doing is translating location of something into a spatial feeling. They feel theres a host in the room and they werent expecting one there. The vest wont save you if the robots go bad but in any case weve taken this idea and used this with people who are blind. There is much more to say about this. If anyone is interested in this about creating nuisances, please check out a ted talk i gave on this. But the book goes deep into why this works in dozens of examples about this. Let me move on to the next principle now, which is the brain as i mentioned, its trapped in their pick a dozen of which a body looks like but it figures out how to control it. One example i i discussed in te book is about the dog who was born without front legs. What did she do . She figured out how to walk on her back legs like a human. What this tells us is that dogs brains do not arrive preprogrammed to drive dog bodies. Instead, like range across the animal kingdom, what they want to do is get to food, get to water, get to the mother, get away from danger. They think about how to control the body they are in. Thats all there is to it. We see this in humans all the time in terms of the worlds best archer is our most. You get interested in archery, holds the world record for the longest accurate shot because his brain inside can say cool, ill use my legs, pull this back and do it like that. If anyone saw my television series, when the case of a covered businesswoman was completely paralyzed. She got damage to her spinal cord. The signals get go from a brain at with body so she got these implants and this allows her to control this robotic arm, a very beautiful robotic arm. She controls of this with the signals in her motor cortex. She imagines moving a real arm and that gets translated into moving this robotic arm. She gets better and better at it because of brain plasticity, because she figure out when i think this it does this but all the wrong side think about it a different way and she figures out to use it. You can have things outside of your body. It turns out this whole idea about how could you actually make life wired devices if they got the body the way the brain does, were just starting this. One colleague of mine that columbia makes this little robot called starfish robot that is a preprogrammed to know its body. It figures out its body i try and get different moods and then seeing what happens to the body. It figures out how to get to somewhere, to get over to the right side of the table, to get to reward. It figures it out but the key is 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 just figures out its body by trial and error. The next principle, actually this is the last thing i will mention and then moved to q a. Part of the reason i think its so amazing to understand what is going on under the hood is because we can build a new devices. We can completely have new principles of our thinking about things. As one example i gave in the book, if you look at the mars rover spirit, it was a multibillion dollar project. We got it after up to the red t and it did great job. But what happened is a got its right front wheel stuck in the martian soil and couldnt get out and so it died there. Now its a multibillion dollars piece of space junk. If you compare that to a wolf that get its leg caught in in a trap. With the willful do is to its leg off and then forget how to walk in three legs. Thats