Booktv, 48 hours of nonfiction books and authors. Television for serious readers. Now we kick off the weekend with malcolm gay. He explores the signals from the brain that dictate motor skills. And now i am very thrilled to introduce malcolm gay to left bank books. Malcolm gay is an arts reporter for the boston globe where he covers visual and performing arts. He previously worked as a contributing writer at the New York Times and the critic at large for our very own riverfront times where he reviewed of visual and performing arts. His writing has appeared in wired, the olympic, and time, among other publications. In 2004 the society of professional journalists Northern California chapter named him that youre supposed in the emerging journalist. At a 2005 he received the James Beard Award for nutrition or food related consumer issues. His work has since received other national accolades, including top honors in 2008 from the association of alternative news weeklies, and in 2009 from the National Association of black journalis journalists. In 2010 he was awarded the Woodward Bernstein award for the Missouri Association of criminal defense lawyers. He was named in patterson fellow in 2013. He studied philosophy and art of the Colorado College later earning and m. J. From the university of california, Berkeley Graduate School of journalism where he studied narrative nonfiction. The brain electorate which details the race among top neurosurgeons emerge the mind with machine is his first book. Author of americas great debate calls the brain electric a masterpiece of reporting in sight right at its best. Tonight, he will be discussing his book the brain electric, answering questions from you and sign copies of his book that we have available for sale at the desk. So please help me in welcoming malcolm gay to left bank books. [applause] hello. I actually know many of you, so you all have heard a lot about this but i think over the years and months, it seems like decades sometimes. But anyway thank you all for coming. I think weve all had conversations about the brain electorate in some way or another. And one thing that people ask me again and again is knowing me knowing my history and my interest, how did somebody like me become interested in the question like this. The one pushing people reliably ask me. A lot of people here to hear about the brain and to think its absolute the last place i would like to go. Its too complicated, its too crazy, its inside the head. But there are a lot of things that contribute to my interest in this. The first person and probably if there were one place to put it, my interest in this at the feet of eric who is a neurosurgeon, neuroscientist, expert, genius extraordinaire at orange right up the street. Hes in his 40s. I think he has more than 800 patents to his name. He had a robust neurosurgery practice. He had written a Science Fiction novel. He was an abstract painter. He had a research lab. He was one of these guys who makes the rest of us crazy. Hes incredible. So i started talking to eric after hearing about his work, in the first thing he said i was plenty to do with a Magazine Store and ask him to do a quick thinker i was writing journalism everywhere, and it seemed like a great magazine topic. Eric brought me into, he was very generous and brought me into a surgery immediately. Eric, what he really works with is sections of the brain to find a bad brain, the rooted in epileptic seizure. And what he started doing, this case actually was not an epilepsy case. It was a tumor and it wasnt a welldefined tumor because one of these tumors that grows throughout the brain. And so after surgery, 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 dirt that god is kind of dazed and wondering where he is, and then he, eric, a surgical assistant is asking eric, or asking the guy about the most mundane things. Is asking him about his job and is asking to have the cardinals are doing and what is elected on the 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 come as he was taking out this cancer, he wanted to make sure he wasnt encroaching on any of the Language Centers of the brain. Answer as the guy was talking about stocking the shelves at the Grocery Store and he could remember the name for peace, erica would realize that no, i need a buck 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 person held and what makes us who we are and how we communicate. I hear he was working with the biological matter of what we are. He was able to manipulate that and talk about that. And not only was able to work with 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, all of these philosophical questions come intellectual questions, biological questions come rushing to the four. I pretty quickly realized the magazine these have to be scrapped and this was a much bigger peace. One of the things that i think youre looking at Something Like the brain, and youre looking at this kind of poorly understood, mysterious object that we never see but is us, its really kind of a difficult thing to say well, were to get a story about this . A lot of the questions are really interesting but how do you keep it, how do you make it into a story . How to make it to book that someone like me would want to read . Whats in their dissenting that youre looking for wax its 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 start speaking with people that were deep in this field. Among them ted berger is a narrow scientist out of ucla, and ted got all of these guys are always the smartest guy in the room, but ted works with memory, building additional procedures for memory. So basically what people do is he will disable the hippocampus which is kind of an older brain structure which is critical to the formation of memory and youll be able to disable the. Then he will, using electrodes, read the signals that are coming into the hippocampus, and he would then carry those out to a computer. And ted as a mathematician and neuroscientist, but what he will 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 mimicked the same signals that the hippocampus would create. And then he will offload those into the areas of the brain to form memories. Other people were working in visual prosthetics, so prosthetics of the optics. Some directly on the visual cortex as opposed to simply the eye. One person was working with a palette that you would place on the tank that allowed people to see. It basically because of the two 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 is plastic enough that it will take those signals and interpret them after time as visual information. People are able to rock climb and hike and play soccer, lined people, with this. Fish is a tremendous, all of these things are wonderful and really interesting. But what you come up against is how do you avoid becoming just this huge catalog of theres this Interesting Research and heres this Interesting Research . I wanted the story and wanted something that brought the stakes of whats happening home. Thats about the time that i met my deal magill was one of the top guys in the field. He works all over the field in terms of motor and 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 brain to brain interface. So this kind of multiorganism creation that would be a cyborg network. He was also working with bringing in infrared come of visual information and allowing animals to see areas of the spectrum they otherwise would not be able to see. He was doing really edgy, really, a lot 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 the straight dope on this. That to me, thats a telling moment because all of a sudden you realize its not one big happy family. 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, still is, working on motor. He was working with trying to reproduce fluid dexterous movement and the robotic arm that would mimic an approach, the grace of the human body. He had incredible, i will not say luck results, and andrew, hes one of these guys that doesnt, hes unswayed by social charms. Aunties interested in measurable and is interested in results. Aunties interested in science. So i really kind of kept quiet around him a lot, but learned a tremendous amount from him here and one of the things he said was everybody in the field doesnt know what theyre talking about. And so at this point i kind of start to realize here are the two top guys and they have these diametrically opposed views of the least each other, but they agree on the field or all of a sudden theres this narrative architecture of how i can tell this story and how i can enter into these rich intellectual questions and biological questions, evolutionary questions, philosophical questions and some pretty high flying neuroscience along the way, that this would act as a real bridge to be able to talk about that. What i wanted to concert it was on this fierce Competition Among these top neuroscientists who are prestige, intellectuals, and ultimately think i think a lot of them would believe the ultimate prize, and thats the nobel. Of course that makes it very difficult thing to report because all of these guys have multimillion dollar labs. If its thursday theyre going to be in korea, so its just a hard way to get into the. But once you get into the upper wrong, you know, you were never two, three, four questions went from talking with these top guys and then asking a question and then saying, i have no idea. We just dont know. And thats really where we are with the brain. Theres so many questions that we have so many titillating and exciting, minute windows onto the vast neural galaxy. And yet we still dont know basic of basic things. In the book at one point andrew says, 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. But one of the grand ironies of this, that was kind of interesting way to go about it is your this clash of titans to give these incredibly and vicious men, and they are mainly men, who are working with the weakest among us. The award with paraplegics and quadriplegics and locked in same people who have it brain stem stroke. These people, they are not really interested in these big sciencefiction questions. They are interested in being able to feed themselves and take care of their daily business. They are interested in just getting to normal. And the truth is, is that 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 really thought about how this is going to affect them, how its going to help them. They are undergoing voluntary brain surgery with the expectation that it will help future generations. You get this kind of crazy juxtaposition of this multimillion dollar project, huge egos, incredible science, and then these incredibly fragile people. And they are all working together. In a sense they are all working together for this, what i would say is, this very kind of fundamentally human story, and thats harnessing technology to make us more of what we already are. Harnessing this technology to make us more human. Back to me, its this quest and i think it gets into some very heady issues, and theres lots of ways to kind of approach this question, i think that ultimately where this goes is this kind of quest for betterment and for bettering who we are. Its very easy to get into kind of sign sciencefiction questions of where were going to have google in our brain and were going to have neurally implanted cars and things like that. And that may happen. That actually may happen, but one of the researchers i was speaking with said, we know weve arrived we were doing the most normal, mundane things with this, brushing our teeth, combing our hair, being able to call people. Thats really what a lot of people are working with. I think that was kind of, thats really what the story is all about. Its about neuroscience and its about all of these other questions, but its also about the people that are engaged, deeply, deeply engaged in these questions, out of this fundamental human need. So in any case, thats kind of a little bit about what my thinking in terms of how put the book together and what i wanted the book to be. Theres a lot of, theres a lot of nerve science in it, but what it wanted to be able to do was to write a book that somebody like me would be able to read and want to read. I think i will end without but i will read a little bit and we can maybe talk about the book some, i hope you enjoy it. So im going to read the beginning, chapter six, its called a backup plan. I dont have any water. Andrew schwartz knew that if he wanted to stay relevant in youtube cinks penetrating electrode into the cortex. Darpa could provide that opportunity but the agency opted to go with the applied Physics Laboratory at johns hopkins. They have tons and tons of military contracts, so they are used to dealing with these guys he said. They have become virtually like to do all these 3d charts which darpa seem to like it when darpa announced a product, it also releases a list of potential performers, Research Laboratories from the agency is willing to fund as part of a project. Any researcher or lab that competes can choose from that list, building a team across institutions. For schwartz, that minority with a project manager manager and a select group of robotics experts to build an oil before linking it to the brain. To our less than six people in the world that know how to build a robotic arm and all come from mit. All these other doctors basically said we can build a robot arm, you know. We know were doing. Both hopkins and the other can talk about enjoying their darpa. Im sitting to so youll be my boss, he said . Needless to say i didnt get on any of those games. Schwartz was effectively locked out. The pentagon had shut the door a darpa funders were far from cutting him off that they 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 26 these 60 percentage of pas of the New York Times, but eventually would give them a shot at the human motor cortex. They of people doing the same kind of thing i was doing, a lot more people with a lot more money and they didnt get anywhere. They cant count as a backup plan. Other researchers are circling around the problem of how to link the brentwood multijointed prosthetic limb, but few have successfully closed the loop with a robot arm. Earlier work ethic in place in either virtual or environment or a computer screen and essays to save distance. Mental control of a cursor would be a boon to quadriplegics but darpa wanted a brain controlled prosthetic limb that you could use to brush your teeth or comb your hair. The race was on an schwartz devoted his Research Funds to a suite of experiments. Elegant neural control of a dexterous multijointed limb. It turned out to be great. I did not report to apo or anybody. I just did my own work. With electrodes in hand, schwartz and his colleagues began to work with to monkeys and a pair of robot arms. Training the Research Monkey fall somewhere between art and science. Said you cant do a monkey what to do, researchers must devise ingenious ways to familiarize the animals with a physical essence of a task. Its a delicate procedure and schwartz began by training is lucky to control the arm using a joystick or pressing the joystick forwar forward the anis learned they could extend a limited theres fixed point in space, grab a marginal or sliced great and pull back on the joystick to bring it to the mouth. As the monkey brought the marsh bill back researchers fixed it and wouldve for positions with animal to grab. Once the monkeys were unfamiliar with the task, researchers removed the joystick in mobilize the animals are by placing them in tube attached to the task chairs. They recorded their active well placing the arm undercoat automatic control giving researchers command over the arm to grab food and brought to the monkeys mouth. One of the great discoveries of the late 20 something happened at a lab of jaco. The site is that implanted electrodes of 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 reach for a peanut tracing the sound firing pattern before, during, and after the movements. By that measure his experiment did not differ tremendous leap from the recordings is so researchers are making in other labs. Whatsit his work apart a car by accident. During a break between tasks the monkey sat idly in its chair as researchers build about three. The monkey wasnt moving at all but when one of the researchers snatched a spare peanut and popped it in his mouth, the neuron theyve been recording had erupted as the monkey and grabbed the pso. The brain or lease a specific class of cells seemed not too distant was between an action performed an action absorbed. It was a class of neurons that was involved in motor planning but there was also interested in physical actions of others. Much has been written about mirror neurons and Brain Research is how proposed mirror neuron systems play a critical recognizing the needs of others. We flinch when we see someone injured on the street. We throw at a