Interest in this, a neurosurgeon, neuroscience, expert, genius at barnes jewish right up the street. And hes, you know, in his 40. I think he has more than 80 patents to his name. He had a robust neurosurgery practice. Hed written a Science Fiction novel. I mean, he was one of these guys that was just incredible. And the first thing that i was planning to do was a magazine story. I was going to do kind of a quick thing. I was writing journalism everywhere, and it seemed hike a great mag teen magazine like a great magazine article. He worked to find the root of any epileptic seizure. And what he started doing, and this case, actually, was not an epilepsy case. It was a tumor. And it wasnt a well defined tumor. It was one of these tumors that kind of grows throughout the brain. And so at the surgery, you know, the patient goes down, the guy goes down, and hes anesthetized. Eric opens his head. And in the middle of the surgery, eric wakes him up. And the guy is, you know, kind of dazed and wondering where he is, and then he, and then he erics, the surgical assistant is asking eric or asking the guy, you know, about the most mundane things. Hes asking him about his job, and hes asking him about how the cardinals are doing and what they like to do on their weekends and things like this. But the whole idea was that he wanted the man to keep talking because as eric was pulling away at the tumor, as he was taking out this cancer, he wanted to make sure that he wasnt encroaching on any of the Language Centers in the brain. And so as the guy was talking about, you know, stocking the shelves at the grocery store, and he couldnt remember the name for peas, eric would realize that, no, i need to back off of this section. And to me, it was an incredible moment for me. It was, you know, i think i had some kind of illformed notions of what makes a personality and what makes us who we are and how we communicate. But here he was kind of working with the biological matter of what we are, and he was able to, you know, manipulate that, talk about that. And not only was he able to work with the actual substance of the brain itself, but he was able to pull using electrodes thoughts out of the brain. And that, to me, all of a sudden, you know, all of these, you know, philosophical questions, intellectual questions, biological questions, you know, come rushing to the fore. And i pretty quickly realized that, you know, the magazine piece had to be scrapped and that this was a much bigger piece, you know . And what, i mean, one of the things that i think, you know, youre looking at Something Like the brain, and youre looking at, you know, this kind of poorly understood, mysterious object that, you know, we never see but is us, you know, its really kind of a difficult thing to say, well, where do you get a story about this . I mean, a lot of the questions are really interesting, but how do you keep it, how do you make it into a story . How do you make it into a book that somebody like me would want to read . How do you get it to, you know, whats the narrative setting that youre really looking for here . You know, because, i mean, its well and good to go to surgeries and talk about these intellectual issues, but, you know, the brain is really a black box. So i started calling around and started speaking with people that were deep in this field, you know, among them ted berger whos a neuroscientist out of ucla. And ted is, i mean, all of these guys are always the smartest guy in the room, but ted works with memory, and hes building a digital prosthesis for memory. And so, basically, what he will do is hell disable the hippocampus which is kind of an older brain structure which is critical to the formation of memories, and hell be able to disable that. And then he will, using electrodes, read the neural signals that are coming into the hippocampus, and hell then ferry those out to a computer. And ted is a mathematician and neuroscientist, but what hell end up doing is hes crafted what he believes to be kind of a master algorithm of memory. And so what he can do is bring these incoming signals into his algorithm, and that will actually spit out outgoing signals that mimic the same signals that the hippocampus would create. And hell offload those into areas of the brain to form memories. You know, other people were working in visual prosthetic, so prosthetics of the optics. You know, some directly on the visual cortex as opposed to similarly in the simply in the eye. One person was working with a pallet that youd actually place on a tongue pa let that allowed people to see, it would basically be a video camera that would scan the area and that would send small signals to the tongue which is this, you know, warm, moist, you know, highly sensitive area. And the brain is plastic enough that it will actually take those signals and interpret them after time as visual information. And so people are able to the rock climb and hike is and play soccer, blind people, with this. So theres just a tremendous, i mean, all of these things are wonderful and really interesting. But what you come up against is, you know, how to you avoid this becoming just this, you know, huge catalog of heres this Interesting Research, and heres this Interesting Research . I wanted a story, and i wanted something that really kind of brought the stakes of whats happening home. And thats about the time that i met miguel who is one of the top guys in the field. And he works, he works all over the field in terms of motor and, you know, other sensory areas. But miguel at the time was whispering about this new neural prosthetic that would bind the brains of multiple animals and create what he called a braintobrain interface. So this kind of multiorganism creation that would be a cyborg network. He was also working with bringing in infrared visual information and allowing animals to see other areas of the spectrum that they otherwise would not be able to see. So he was doing really edgy, really a lot of people would say Science Fiction, crazy stuff. But he also said that everybody in the field was an amateur and that he was really the only guy that really had, you know, the straight dope on [laughter] bci. And that, to me, i mean, thats a telling moment, right . Because all of a sudden you realize, oh, its not one big, happy family. And it was around that time that i ran into Andrew Schwartz. And Andrew Schwartz is another one of these top guys. And andrew was at the time working, he still is, working on motor. And he was working with, you know, trying to reproduce fluid, dexterous movement in a robotic arm that would mimic an approach, the grace of the human body. Hed had incredible i wont say luck, results. And andrew, you know, hes one of these guys that doesnt, hes unswayed by social charms. And hes interested in measurables, and hes interested in results. And hes interested in science. And so i really kind of kept quiet around andy a lot. But learned a tremendous amount from him. And one of the things he said was that everybody in the field doesnt know what theyre talking about. And so at this point i kind of started to realize, you know, here are these two top guys, and they have these diametrically opposed ideas, well, at least of each other. So all of a sudden this kind of narrative architecture of how i can tell this story and how i can enter into these, you know, kind of rich intellectual questions and biological questions and evolutionary questions and philosophical questions and some pretty, you know, high flying neuroscience along the way, that this would act as a real bridge to be able to talk about that. You know . And so what i wanted to kind of concentrate was on this fierce Competition Among these, you know, top neuroscientists for prestige, intellectual, you know, morals and, you know, ultimately fame. And i think a lot of them would believe, you know, the ultimate prize, and thats the nobel. You know, of course, that makes it a very difficult thing to report, because all of these guys have multimillion dollar lab, and labs, and if its thursday, theyre going to be in korea. So its just a hard way to get into it. But once you actually get into that upper running, you know, youre never two, three, four questions away from talking with these top guys and asking a question and them saying, i have no idea. We just dont know. And thats really where we are with the brain. I mean, theres so many questions that we have so many, you know, titillating and exciting, minute windows on to this vast neural galaxy. And yet we still dont know basic, basic things. In the book at one point andrew says, you know, we want to do all of this, but we dont know the first thing about why a neuron fires, and thats the basic, thats how it all starts. And so, you know, but one of the kind of grand ironies of this, of this and what i thought was kind of an interesting way to go about it, you have this clash of titans, you have these incredibly ambitious men and they are mainly men who are working with the weakest among us. Theyre working with paraplegics and quadriplegics and lockedins and people who have had brain stem strokes and, you know, these people have, you know, theyre not really interested in these big Science Fiction questions. Theyre interested in being able to feed themselves and, you know, take care of their daily business. Theyre interested in just getting to normal. And the truth is, is that most of these people will never actually benefit from this technology. Were really in this beginning portion of this race. And, you know, so theyre going into this with no real thought about, you know, how this is going to affect them, how its going to help them. Theyre really, i mean, theyre undergoing voluntary brain surgery with the expectation that it will help future generations. You know . So its, you get this kind of crazy juxtaposition of this, you know, multimillion dollar project, you know, huge egos, incredible, you know, incredible science, and then these, you know, incredibly fragile people. And theyre all working together. You know, in a sense theyre all working together for this, what i would say is, you know, this very kind of fundamentally human story. And thats, you know, harnessing technology to make us more of what we already are. Harnessing this technology to make us more human. And that, to me, you know, its this quest. And i think its, you know, it gets into some very, you know, heady issues, and theres lots of ways to kind of, you know, approach this question. But i think that, ultimately, you know, where this goes is this kind of quest for, you know, betterment and for bettering who we are. You know . Because, i mean, its very easy to get into kind of, you know, Science Fictional questions of, you know, where, you know, where were going to have google in our brain, and were going to have neurallyimplanted cars and things like that. And that may happen. [laughter] that absolutely may happen. But one of the researchers i was speaking with said, you know, we know weve arrived when were doing the most normal, mundane things with this, brushing our teeth, combing our hair, being able to call people. You know, thats really what a lot of these people are working with. And so i think that that was kind of, you know, where thats really what the storys about. I mean, its about neuroscience and its about all of these other questions, but its also about, you know, kind of, you know, the people that are engaged, deeply, deeply engaged in these questions, you know, out of this fundamental human need. And so in any case, thats kind of a little bit about what my thinking in terms of how i put the book together and what i wanted the book to be. You know, theres a lot of, you know, theres a lot of, you know, neuroscience in it, but what i wanted to be able to do was write a book that, you know, somebody like me would be able to read and would want to read. So i think ill end with that, but ill read a little bit, and then we can maybe talk about the book some, and i hope you enjoy it. So im going to realize the beginning to read the beginning, chapter six, its called the backup plan. I dont have any water. Andrew schwartz knew that if he wanted to stay relevant, he needed to sink his penetrating electrodes into the cortex. Darpa could provide that opportunity, but the agency had decided to go with johns hopkins. They have tons and tons of military contracts, so theyre used to dealing with these guys, he said. They have a comfort, so they like to do all these 3d charts which darpa seemed to like. When they announce a product, it also releases a list of potential performers, the agency is willing to fund as part of the project. Any researcher or lab that competes to administer a project can choose from that list, building a team across institutions. For schwartz, that meant working with a project manager and a select group of robotics experts to build an arm before linking it to the brain. There are less than six people in the world that really know how to build a robotic arm, and they all come from mit, said schwartz. All these other yahoos said, oh, we know what were doing. He added that hopkins and dean caymans team spoke with him. Its like im sitting there, so youre going to be my boss, he said . Schwartz was effectively locked out. The. Gone had pentagon had shut the door, but darpa wanted him to keep working with monkeys and awarded him a 2 Million Contract for a study that would not only catapult his research on to 60 minutes and into the pages of the New York Times, but eventually would give him a shot at the human motor cortex. They had people doing the same kind of thing i was doing, a lot more people with a lot more money, and they didnt get anywhere, he said. Other researchers were circling around the problem of how to link the brain to a multijointed prosthetic limb, but few researchers had successfully closed the loop with a robot arm. Loop work had taken place in virtual environment or at a safe distance as with Matthew Nagel who performed a simple pinching action. Mental control of a cur corps would be a boon to quadriplegics, but he wanted a limb you could use to brush your teeth or comb your hair. Schwartz devoted his Research Funds to a suite of experiments, elegant neural control of a dexterous, multijointed limb. I didnt have to report to apl or anybody, i just did my own work. With electrodes in hand, schwartz and his colleagues began to work with two monkeys and a pair of robot arms. Training the Research Monkey falls somewhere between art and science. Since you cant tell a monkey what to do, researchers must devise ingenius ways to familiarize the animals with the physical essence of a task. Its a delicate procedure, and schwartz began by pressing the joy stick forward. The animals learned they could extend their limb to a various fixed point in space, grab a mar b mall low and pull it back on the joystick. A disease the monkey brought the marshmallow back, researchers fixed it in one of four positions for animal to grab. Once the monkeys were familiar with the task, researchers removed the joystick, immobilizing the animals arms by placing them in tubes attached to the task chairs. Meanwhile, they recorded their neural activity while police stationing the arm under placing the arm under, quote, automatic control. One of the great discoveries of the late 20th century happened at the lab of [inaudible] the scientist had implanted electrodes in monkeys hoping to listen in on neurons he believed were associated with hand and mouth movements. The researchers recorded from individual neurons as the monkey reached for a peanut tracing the fire pattern before, during and after the movements. His experiment did not differ tremendously from the neural recordings his fellow researchers were making in other labs. What set his work apart, however, occurred by accident. During a break between tasks, the monkey sat idly in its chair as researchers milled about the room. The monkey wasnt moving, but when one of the researchers snatched a snare peanut, the neuron they had been recording erupted as if the monkey was eating i himself. It was a shocking discovery. It seemed not to distinguish between an action performed and an action observed. Here was a class of neurons involved in motor planning but that was also interested in the physical actions of others. Much has been written about mirror neurons, and brain researchers or at the university of Californialos Angeles have proposed that mirror neuron systems play a Critical Role in recognizing the needs of others. We flinch when we see someone injured on the street, and we feel deep sympathy for the fictional trials of characters in film and theater. Why . Because at some basic level our brain physically recreates the experience as though it were our own. Mirror neurons, these researchers believed, not only are t fundamental mechanism by which we feel empathy, but also play a role in socalled theory of mind, enabling us to recognize that other people have desires that are distinct from our own. The brains penchant to recreate observed actions helps researchers such as schwartz to prepare the monkeys brain for braincomputer interfaces. As the monkey watched the arm grab a piece of food, the motor neurons began firing as though it were grabbing the fruit with its own arm. Meanwhile, they built a decoder, the computer algorithm that associates specific neuralfiring patterns with particular movements. As the researchers continued moving the arm, the algorithmic association patterns grew stronger. Eventually, they began to dial down their control of the arm, blending automatic control with signals from the animals motor cortex. The scientists could still correct its movements. If the arm began to go wildly off course, they had effectively given the monkey training wheels, encouraging it to move the arm in the desired back and forth direction but constricting the movement from side to side. It was a synergy between animal and algorithm. The computer was beginning to better interpret the mode. The resulting paper published in 2008 was a watershed moment for the lab. Cbs and 60 minutes came calling. The study landed on the front page of the New York Times and was subsequently picked up by countless other news organizations. No one had ever shown such scroll. Schwartz had knocked it out of the park. It was a yachtfying moment for schwartz but not a comfortable one for a guy whos more interested in the science than in the demo. I hated it. I could never express what i wanted to express. All i could say is selffeeding, yeah. They can grasp pieces of food and bring it to their mouth, he said. You end up telling the same damn thing over and over. Till schwartz, who was un