To the friends to help us continue our Educational Mission , we very much appreciate it. Once again, many, many thanks for coming out. Enjoy the rest rest of your evening. Thank you. [applause]. We want to hear from you. Tweet us your feedback about the programs you see here. Twitter. Com book tv. And now, i am thrilled to intrajuice malcolm gay. He is an arts reporter for the boston globe where he covers visual and performing arts. He previously worked as a writer for the New York Times where he reviewed visual and performing arts. His writing is also appeared in wired, the atlantic, and shine among other publications. In 2004, the four, the society of professional journalists, Northern California chapter named gay the years outstanding outstanding emerging journalist. In 2005 he received an award for nutrition or food related awards. His work has received other National Accolades from the association of alternative news look weekly and in 2009 from nine from the National Association of black journalists. In 2010, he was awarded the Woodward Bernstein award for the Missouri Association of criminal defense lawyers. He was named an Alicia Patterson fellow in 2013. He studied philosophy and art at the colorado college, later earning in mm j from the California Berkeley School of journalism where he studied narrative nonfiction. The brainthe brain electric s first book. Author of americas great debate calls the brain electric and masterpiece of reporting and science writing at its best. Tonight malcolm will be discussing his book the brain electric, answering questions and signing copies of his book that we have available for sale at the desperate plea join me in welcoming malcolm day [applause]. Hello, i actually know many of you. I think you have heard a lot about this book over the years and months and what seems like decades. Thank you all for coming. I think we have all had conversations about the brain electric in some ways or another. One thing that people asked me again and again is, knowing me and knowing my history and my interest, how did summary like me become interested in a question like this . Its the one question that people reliably asked me people hear about the brain and they think its the last place they want to go, but theres a lot of things that contribute to this. If there was one place to put it to my interest, it is about a neurosurgeon and genius extraordinaire and he is in his 40s. I think he has more than 800 patents to his name. He had a robust neurosurgery practice. He wrote as Science Fiction novel it was a painter and had a research lab. Hes one of these guys that makes the rest of us crazy. Hes just incredible. So i started talking to eric after hearing about his work in the first thing that i was planning to do was a magazine story. I was going to do a quick thing, i was writing journalism everywhere and it seems like a great exiting topic. Eric brought me into, he was very generous and brought me into a surgery immediately. Eric works with three sections of the brain to find the bad brain or the root of any epileptic seizure. This case was not an epilepsy case, it was was a tumor. It was not a well defined tumor, it was a tumor that grows throughout the brain. So, at the surgery, the patient goes down, the guy goes down and hes a neste size. Eric opens his head and in the middle of the surgery eric wakes him up. The guy is dazed and wondering where he is and then the surgical assistant is asking the guy about the most mundane things. Hes asking about his job and how the cardinals are doing and what they like to do on the weekend 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 he wasnt encroaching on any of the Language Centers of the brain. So as the guy was talking about stocking the shelves at his job and he couldnt remember the name for peas, eric would remember that he needed to back off of this section. To me it was an incredible moment for me. I think i had some kind of ill formed notion of what makes a personality and what makes us who we are and how we communicate, but here he was working with the biological matter of what we are and he was able to manipulate that and talk about that. Not only was he able to work with the substance of the brain itself, but he was able to pull, using electrodes electrodes, thoughts out of the brain. And that to me, all of a sudden these philosophical and biological questions come rushing forward. I realize pretty quickly that the magazine piece had to be scrapped and this was a much bigger piece. One of the things that i think, youre looking at Something Like the brain and youre looking at this poorly understood object that we never see but is us and its a difficult thing to say, well, whered you get a story about this. A lot lot of the questions are interesting, but how do you keep it or how do you make it into a story. How do you make it something that somebody like me would want to read. Whats the narrative setting that youre really looking for . Its a well and good to go to surgeries and talk about these intellectual issues, but the brain is really a black box. I started calling around and started speaking with people who were deep in this field. Among them ted berger who is a neuroscientist out of ucla and ted, 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. He will use an older brain structure that is critical to memory and he can disable that. Then he will, using electrodes, read the neural signals that are coming into the hippocampus. Then hell put those out to a computer and what hill and up doing is, hes crafted what he believes to be a master algorithm of memory. What he can do is bring these incoming signals into his algorithm and that will spit out outgoing signals that mimic the same signals that the hippocampus would create. Then hell mimic that area of the brain to form memories. Other people were working in aesthetics of the optics and the visual cortex. One person was working with a palette that you place on the tongue that allowed people to see because it would be a video camera that would scan the area and that would send small signals to the tongue which is this warm, moist, highly sensitive area. The brain will take those signals and interpret them after time as visual information. People are able to rock climb and hike and play soccer, blind people. Theres just tremendous, all all of these things are wonderful and interesting, but what you come up against is how do you avoid this becoming this huge catalog of heres this Interesting Research and heres this Interesting Research. I wanted this to be something that brought the stakes of whats happening home. Thats the time i met one of the top guys in the field. He works all over the field in terms of motor and other sensory areas. Miguel, at the time was whispering about this new neural prostatic that would bind the brains of multiple animals and create a range of brains. This kind of multi organism creation that would be a sideboard network. He was also working with bringing in infrared visual information and allowing animals to see area of the spectrum they would not otherwise be able to see. He was doing really edgy, a lot of people would say sciencefiction crazy stuff. He also said that everybody in the field was an amateur and that he was the only guy that had the straight dope on this. That to me, thats a telling moment, right, because all of a sudden you realize its not one big happy family. It was around that time that i ran into andrew swarts. Andrew swarts is another one of these top guys, and andrew was, at the time and still is, working on motor. He was working on trying to reproduce fluid dexterous movement that would mimic an approach of the human body. He had incredible results and andrew, hes one of these guys that doesnt, he is under swayed by social charms. He is interested in measurables and hes interested in results and hes interested in science. I really kind of kept quiet around andy a lot but learned a tremendous amount from him. One of the things he said was that everybody in the field doesnt know what theyre talking about. So at this point, i kind of of started to realize, here are these two top guys and they have these diametrically opposed ideas of each other and they agree on the field. All of a sudden this narrative architecture of how i can tell this story and enter into these rich intellectual questions and biological and evolutional and philosophical questions. That this would act as a real bridge to be able to talk about that. So what i wanted to concentrate on was this fierce Competition Among these top neuroscientists. I think a lot of them would believe the ultimate prize and thats the nobel. That makes it a very difficult thing to report because a lot of these guys have multimilliondollar labs and if its thursday theyre going to be in korea. Its just the hard way to get into it, but once you actually get into that upper wrong, you were never true or three questions away from talking to these top guys and then asking a question in them saying i have no idea, we really dont know. Thats where we are with the brain. There are so many questions that we have so many relating an exciting minute windows onto this mass narrow galaxy and yet we still dont know basic things. At one point andrew says we want to know all of this but we dont know the first thing about why a neuron fires. Thats the most basic thing. One of the grand ironies of this and what i thought was an interesting way to go about it is that 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. They are working with paraplegics and quadriplegics and people who have had brain stem strokes. These people have, theyre not really interested in these big sciencefiction questions, theyre interested in being able to feed themselves and take care of their daily business. They are interested in just getting to normal. The truth is, most of these people will never actually benefit from this technology. We are really in the beginning portion of this race. They are going into this with no real thought on how will this affect them. Theyre undergoing voluntary brain surgery with the hope that it will help future generations. You get this kind of huge ego, incredible science, multimillion dollar project and then these fragile people who are all working together. In a sense theyre all working together for this very fundamentally human story. Thats harnessing technology to make us more of what we are already are, to make us more human. Its this quest, and i think it gets into some very heady issues. There are lots of ways to approach this question, but i think ultimately where this goes is this quest for betterment and for bettering who we are. Its very easy to get into Science Fictional questions about where were going to have google in our brain and cars and other things that may happen. One of the researchers i was speaking with said we know we have arrived when were doing the most normal, mundane things with this like brushing our teeth and combing our hair. Thats really what a lot of these people are working with. I think that was really what the story is about. Its about neuroscience and all these other questions. Its also about people who are deeply engaged in these questions out of these fundamental human needs. That is a little bit about what my thinking, in terms of how i put the the book together and what i wanted the book to be. There is a lot of serious neuroscience and it but i wanted to write a book about something that somebody like me would want to read. I think ill and there and we can talk about it more. I hope you enjoyed it. Im going to read the beginning of chapter six. I dont have any water. Andrew swarts knew if you wanted to stay relevant you have to stick penetrating electrodes into the cortex. The agency had opted to go with the laboratory at Johns Hopkins. They have tons and tons of military contracts. They are used to dealing with these guys, he said. They have a comfort. They like to do all these 3d gantt charts. When they announced the project, it also releases potential performers, Research Laboratories that the agency is willing to fund as part of the project. Any researcher that can administer a project can choose from that list, building a team across institutions. For swarts, that that meant working with a project manager on a select up of robotic experts to build an arm before linking to the brain. There less than six people in the world who know how to build a robotic arm and they all come from mit. All these other yahoos basically said we can build a robe robot arm. Its like, im sitting there and youre going to be my boss he said . Need this dissenting get on any of those teams but he was effectively locked out. The. The pentagon had shut the door. But his funders were far from cutting him off. They wanted him to keep working with monkeys and awarded him a 2 milliondollar contract for a study that would catapult his research onto 60 minutes and New York Times. They have people doing the same kind of thing i was doing, a lot more people with a lot more money. They didnt get anywhere. They they cap meet at the backup lab. Other researchers had successfully close the loop with a robotic arm. It had either taken place in virtual environments with computer screens. Mental control of a cursor would be a boom to a quadriplegic. He wanted a brain controlled limb that could use to brush her teeth are, your hair. The race was on and swarts devoted his Research Funds aimed directly at that goal. It turned out to be great. I didnt have to report to anybody. I just did my own work. With electrodes in hand, he and his colleague began to work with two monkeys and a pair of robot arms. They train the Research Monkey and that fell somewhere between research and science. You cant tell a monkey what to do so they have to derive genius ways to familiarize the animals. Its a delicate procedure and he trained his monkeys to use a joystick. Pressing the joystick joystick forward they learned how to use the robotic arm. As the monkey brought the marshmallow back, they fixed it in one of four positions for the monkey to grab. Once the monkeys were familiar, they remove the joystick. Meanwhile they recorded the neural activity while placing the arm under automatic control giving researchers command over the arm if it grabbed food and brought it to the monkeys mouth. One the great discoveries of the late 20th century happen in the lab of a famous scientist. He had implanted an electrode of a monkey hoping to listen in on neurons he thought were associated with hand and mouth movement. The researchers record individual neuron activity as the monkey reach for up peanut. By that measure the experiment did not differ tremendously from the other researchers in other labs. What set his apart, during a break between task, the monkey sat idly in the chair. The monkey wasnt moving at all. When one of the researchers snatched up peanut and popped it in its mouth the neurons that they had been recording erupted as if the monkey grabbed the peanut itself. It was a shocking discovery. The brain or at least this group of cells seemed not to distinguish between an action performed in an action observe. Here was a class of neurons that was involved in motor planning but was also interested in the physical actions of others. Much has been written and brain researchers have proposed that these systems play a critical rolls in recognizing the needs of others. We feel deep sympathy for characters in the film and those who are injured. At some basic level our brain physically recreates the experience as if it was our own. Those are the fundamental mechanism by which we feel empathy but also play a role in series of mind enabling us to recognize that people have ideas that are separate from our own. The brains ability to to recreate actions prepare the monkeys brain for brain computer interfaces. As the monkey watch the arm grab a piece of food, the animals neurons began firing as if they were grabbing the fruit with your own arm. Meanwhile they use the information to build their decoder. The computer algorithm that specific firing patterns with particular movements. As the researchers continued moving the arm, the algorithmic association grew stronger. Eventually they began to dial down. The monkey dash they encourage the monkey to move the arm and the desired back and forth movement. It was the synergy between animal and all all the algorithm. The results on paper published in 2008. Cbs and 60 minutes came calling. This study was on the front page of the New York Times and was picked up by countless other news organizations. No one had ever seen such elegant neuro control. He had knocked it out of the park. It was a gratifying moment but not a comfortable one for a guy whos more interested in the science. I hated it. I can never express what i wanted to express. Yes they can grab food and bring it to their mouth. Still, he was undeniably proud of the work. He showed proof of principle. Not only could the monkey gain control over a robot arm but he could use it as a worthy surrogate of its biological counterpart. This factor of dci kept the public interested and the cash flowing. It was the underlying science that excited swarts. They were telling him things about how the brain turns, its relationship to objects and thought itself. I always laugh when i always say you to find that for me. They cant define it. They cant even define the necessary parameters of thought so how my supposed to find it. What swarts develop was a closed input output system. He could use it to test the accuracy of the model. We can prove how well it works because we can look at the movement with the performance. You cant do that if you say oh, thought takes electricity. Wheres your model . Based on my model my hypothesis, my, my subject can do this. Ill stop there. [applause]. So the book has many different labs and many different researchers. Andy plays a big role in it. A lot of these guys are doing terrific work. If you have questions i will be happy to answer them to the best of my ability. How did you get people to give you time . You mention many of them are such big fish and have so much responsibilities and money and other people try to inte