June 24, 2014 • 30 mins
The future of brain-machine interaction will expand human intelligence and forever alter our experience of reality, but where are we now and how long till neurotechnology elevates us to higher human form? Find out in this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie,
I think most of our listeners probably tuned into our
episode but the future Shot, so they are probably familiar
(00:23):
with the concept. But even if they're not familiar with
the concept the future shot, I think they might feel
a little of it. Let's get through with this episode. Yeah,
because the toddlers in Future Shot talked about this idea
of having these sort of neural prosthetics. I didn't call
him that, but it's more like brain computer interfaces. And
this was a wild idea in the seventies. But hey,
(00:45):
let's let's get real here. I mean, this thing is happening.
In two thousand and three, the world's first brain prosthesis
was put into an animal, and then just this year
there was an auditory brain implant in a toddler. So
we can see that this is becoming more and more common.
And I attended a panel at the World Science Festival
(01:07):
on this very topic. It's called cells to silicon your brain.
And by the way, it always seems to be like
the the year that all this stuff is going to
be here for real. I don't know if you've noticed that,
but they talked about the steps there that they're taking
right now to make this more of a reality. And
(01:27):
we'll talk about that in a second. Yeah. Yeah, to
your point, those are the new two thousand's, I guess,
the years we can look to and say, this is
the technology we're gonna have, This is the life we're
gonna have because of these advancements. And to your point,
we've seen some pretty impressive steps made thus far. I mean,
the uh cyborg rat with the with the brain berth
(01:49):
thesis and cyborg Toddler. It's pretty great now not to
not to to get too caught up in the idea
of the cyborg, because if we've we've discussed before, technological
adaptations on your body, inside your body are becoming more
and more every day, you know, ranging from a pacemaker
to a risk watch, and so we're just seeing the
natural extrapolation of that idea. Yeah, you're augmenting your natural abilities, right.
(02:12):
I wear glasses, so I'm augmenting my vision. Yeah. None
of this makes anybody less human. All it does is
either makes up for injuries or or or some sort
of shortcomings in one's biology, or it is it is
gaming the system a bit, or maybe gaming the system
a lot, depending on what the augmentation is well. And
(02:33):
you would need this sort of gaming of the system
quite a bit if you were someone like I say,
stroke patient who have lost the ability to move your limbs.
And neuroscientists John Donohue was actually talking about this on
the panel. Specifically, he referenced a stroke patient named Cathy,
and he showed this film of her. She sustained permanent
(02:54):
damage to her brain and as a result, the axons
that run along her spine and deliver information from her
motor cortex or her limbs were incapacitated, and so she
was relegated to a life in a wheelchair with others
helping her to move and to feed her. And then
she signed on to this five year experiment with Donna
(03:14):
Hue and others other researchers, and there was an implant
inserted into her brain that interacted with robotic arms that
would do some things for her, like like get the coffee,
like actually bring coffee to her lips, which she hadn't
done for years. Yeah, in the video footage, of this
is pretty remarkable because, yeah, she has not in and
(03:34):
over a decade, she has not raised a cup of
coffee to her own lips, of her own volition, and
now she's doing it. She's thinking the robot arm into action.
It's there's nothing, you know, she's not moving anything with
their tongue, it's nothing with their muscles. It's all inside
her mind. She's thinking about the movement and it is happening,
and it's amazing. It's it's it's the stuff that you
(03:54):
would often think, even today, you tend to think of
as science fiction, the idea that I'm commanding a machine
with my mind, I'm moving something other than my physical
body with my mind, and yet here it is. Yeah,
it is amazing. And so how do you get your
thoughts externally out there to do something for you. Well,
it turns out that what you do is you insert
a wire into the r motor cortex. And what this
(04:16):
wire is doing, it's just it's not a very big wire,
so it's not like she's got things, you know, sticking
out of her head. But what it's doing is it's
fishing for neural spikes. Now, what are neural spikes? Okay,
every time neurons fire in the brain, they're shuttling ions
back and forth, and there's an electrical potential change there.
So if you have a wire inserted into the brain
(04:38):
that can detect that electrical change and when it does, uh,
you know, changes in the ions when you're on stir
about and meat Uh, it will actually transmit information out
to a computer to say, I detect neural activity here
right now, and it's measuring that. So we've talked about
(04:58):
this before with the Jennifer anistone neurons. I think that's
what we called them. That when someone is thinking about
Jennifer Anderson, some people I which I should say not everybody,
you will see a spike in neuronal activity because there's
a whole database of information and memory they are related
to Jennifer Aniston and so the signal is really very strong. Well,
(05:21):
the same thing happens when you're thinking and you're concentrating,
like I would like to move my arm right now,
and I'm trying to think about moving my arm. All
of those neurons which sort of coalesced together to give
off a strong signal, and that's what that wire could detect,
identifying what that signal looks like and then feeding it
out to this machine. I I often in looking at
(05:43):
this topic, I keep thinking of it in terms of
the road, like a mountain road. The early examples we
talked about that the rat prosthesis that had to do
with the damaged hippocampus, or the the toddler um prosthesis,
which specifically was an auditory brain stem and plant. These
are cases where you have point A, point B, and
(06:04):
point C. All right, you know you have a road,
imagine a road across the mountains from your house to
the store. But then that middle point is is a
part of the road that's washed away by by a flood.
So what do you do? How do you get from
A to to C? Well, you put a bridge over it, right,
And that's what a lot of this technology is figuring
out how to fill in that that gap, to how
(06:27):
to bridge that gap from from one from a healthy
part of the brain to another healthy part of well,
let's just say, a healthy part of the chain of
of of action and reaction to to bridge that gap,
you know, in a way that lets you function again.
And then in this we see we see a situation
where we're not only bridging the gap. We're building the
bridge out of the organism itself into an external system,
(06:51):
an external robotic system. You're right, because in this case,
point A is the neuronal activity. Point B would normally
be those acts on in her spine, but because they
can't send the signals to the body, what we're doing
here are what researchers are doing is they're taking those
signals out externally, out of the organism, as you say,
(07:12):
into the computer to decode that neuronal activity, and then
points C would be the robotic arms instead of her
own arms. And what is so amazing, so fascinating about
this is that what they're doing is that they're taking
the sounds that that these neuronal spikes made and they're
decoding them. So you might have like five blips that
(07:34):
that really mean move the arm to the right. You
might have seven blips that are decoded as move the
arm to the left, and that is then being put
into the robotic arm as a command. So the fact
that they can even take the information out and decode
it in a way that makes sense um and then
(07:55):
obviously matches up to what Cathy is thinking because she
can corroborate that. Yeah, you really get the sense. It's
almost like listening to a conversation through a wall, and
they're making sense of it through uh in sort of
indirect ways, but they're getting enough information out of it.
They're getting they're they're getting enough of the points they
get their high highlighting those neural spikes and then figuring
(08:16):
out what it's it's asking for and then reproducing it. Now,
the crazy thing about this, it's that they are getting
this neuronal activity from just a sampling of the neurons.
So maybe about fifty neurons out of the billions of
neurons in your brain, uh or the billions of synapsis.
So that's I mean, that's tiny, that tiny bit of
(08:38):
neural activity can be picked up and then acted upon.
I believe in the in the in they talk to you
you attended World Science Festial Robert crow which Um compared
it to to voting, where you have like a small
portion of the population that's voting and the rest are
not voting, but you're you're figuring out what the public
wants as a whole based on this small sample. And
(08:58):
that's kind of what's happened here with the with this situation. Yeah,
definitely check this out. You can go to RORLD Science
Festival to their website and just look for cells to
Silicon and you can see this talk. It's really great. Um,
so there are drawbacks this of course. There's the idea
that it may not be something that you could have
in your brain long term. Kathy has had it for
five years. She hasn't had any problems. But we know
(09:20):
that the body doesn't like foreign objects in it. That's true. Also,
it's worth noting that the robotic reach and grasp actions
are not going to be as fast as or as
accurate as those of the enable bodied person. I think
that's that's that should be pretty obvious. We're not at
the point in the technology where it's going to be
a one for one, but but it's it's a step
in that direction. Yeah, and uh. Donny Hue says that
(09:41):
the neural spikes are not always the same from trial
to trial. In other words, there's five blips, might be
six flips the next time or seven, and so they
have to figure out the pattern each time. And he
said that it's very likely that those neural spikes are
influenced by other conditions at the time, so it could
be hunger, it could be a particularly emotional state or
a physical state. UM, which is all really fascinating because
(10:05):
we've talked about a propri reception before, and we talked
about it and people who have lost the ability to
move their limbs and um, and how all of this
influences the body, the physical state of the body. So um.
Obviously it's not something that is perfect right now, but
it's the beginnings of something that could be really important,
(10:27):
that kind of neural pixie dust of the future. And
we'll get to that later. Now. Another fascinating example of
this technology can be found in the work of HeLa Nuremberg,
who is a neuroscientist working on technology for a prosthetic
I yeah, because she says that more than ten million
people in the US are blind or facing blindness because
(10:50):
of diseases like macular degeneration, and for the vast majority
of them, it's the prosthetic devices that are available right
now that are their best hope, but the ones that
that are common right now are not necessarily the best.
And she has created a neural prosthetic device that is amazing. Yeah.
(11:11):
Now think back again to that analogy I'm made about
the road point A, point B. In point C and
point B that middle point is washed out by a flood.
How do you get across it? How do you build
that bridge? So, when when you're looking at something just
with normal vision, normal healthy vision, you have the image
that's going to your eye, it's hitting your retina and
then the middleman that point B that it is the
retinal circuitry, and this essentially extracts information from it and
(11:34):
converts it into a code. And these are electrical pulses
that are sent to the brain. So to your point,
what do you do when the photo receptors die? What
do you do when one link in the chain vanishes? Yeah,
because that's what happens with macular degeneration. Those photoreceptors on
the retina die off, and then over time all the
other cells and the circuits that are connected to them
die off to renderingly you effectively blind. So the only
(11:58):
thing that you're left with are those put cells, and
those are the ones that send the signals to the brain.
But because of all that degeneration, they're not sending any
signals anymore. And if you have a regular prosthetic for eyesight,
um you could allow a person to see bright lights
or high contrast edges, but these are shadowy with like
really no real detail. And what you're using in this
(12:20):
regular prosthetic for eyesight is an encoder that takes in light,
but the firing pattern is all over the place. So
what you need then is a device that can mimic
the actions of that the front end circuitry of sight
send signals to the retina's output cells and and and
in this you're you end up mimicking the actions of
that front end circuitry, so you're taking the image converting
(12:42):
them into the retina's own code. Yeah. What Nuremberg has
created is um this prosthetic device that has two parts,
an encoder and a transducer. Now that encoder mimics the
actions that you say, that front end circuitry, and then
the transducer makes the output cells send the code to
the sin and the result is this retinal prosthetic that
(13:02):
can produce normal retinal output. And we're talking about is
is a set of equations that they can implement on
a chip. And so she's saying, hey, it's just math here.
And that's the exciting part is that if you take
these two components of the prosthetic device, then you can
mimic real eyesight in a person who is blind. Yeah,
(13:24):
it's pretty pretty, pretty phenomenal. And we're talking about that
the individual would wear a sort of camera that has
an encoder of a device that's taking that information from
the camera and translating it into the retinas code, translating
it into a version that the brain can make sense of.
You're talking about a real direct link between mechanical artificial
(13:45):
sensory and organic reasoning of that sense information. Now, to
get a sense of this, you should definitely check out
the talk because she shows two different examples of how
this works with a regular prosthetic device and with this
new one. And what she shows is sort of a
readout of the neural firing activity and regular eyesight um
(14:08):
the regular prosthetic and the new one. And you will
see that in the new prosthetic and regular eyes eyesight,
those patterns are almost identical. It's not perfect, but that
middle part, the regular one right now that just has
the encoder that just takes in light, is very imperfect.
And then she gives the second example of she said,
(14:28):
you know, we wanted to take a snapshot of what
people were seeing or what these primates were seeing, because
I believe they're in human trials right now, clinical trials.
But what those um images that we're seeing. You see
the regular eyesight, you see a baby's face. It's perfectly rendered,
of course, right because you have perfect eyesight. Then you
have the regular prosthetic and it's very shadowy. You can't
(14:51):
even make out the pattern, which is amazing because you know,
you and I have discussed before how humans are pattern
recognition machines and yet there's no not enough data points
here to really make a clear picture. And then you
have this new device that she came up with, and
it is plain as day that that is the baby space.
It is not exact, but can you imagine being someone
(15:14):
who has lost their sight and you all of a
sudden are hooked up with this neural prosthetic device for
your eye and you're able to see something is I
don't know, iconic and recognizable as a tree or a
baby space. Again, yeah, I mean you would have have
some level of detail as well as just you know,
an abstract idea of your environment just for navigational purposes.
(15:39):
So it's pretty pretty amazing stuff. Yeah, And as you
had said, this sort of washed out areas, um, you know,
from points A to C. This is something that Nuremberg
is is imagining for the rest of the brains, and
not just eyesight, but for stroke victims. So in the
cortex of trying to create this sort of communications center
using the same sort of device. Yeah, figuring any any
(15:59):
kind of situation where there's a there's a gap, where
there's a missing link in the chain or a damage
link in the chain, then we could conceivably go in
there and build that that bridge, that neural bridge from
point A to point C. All Right, we're gonna take
a quick break, and when we get back, we're going
to talk about it. Just sort of neural dust that
we may all have sprinkled into our brains in the year.
(16:31):
All right, we're back. Uh So, if you were not
future shocked by the earlier information about sort of the
current state in the in the depending state um of
these these neural enhancements, then hold onto your bridges, because
we're about to look at where this could go, where
this is going, and how it could dramatically change not
(16:52):
only our lives, but but but what it is to
be human. Yeah, Okay, so think back to Kathy and
think about that wire in her brain time I believe
is referred to as brain gate. UM. Michael Maharbits has
created a new kind of prosthetic in the form of
these cubes as small as neurons. Okay, we're talking about
(17:13):
fifty microns across. Now. The thing is is that they
don't um they don't work with electromagnetic frequency because they're
too small, so you can't have something like a wire
detecting them. But you can use sonogram to detect these.
And what they're thinking is that you could have these
(17:33):
sprinkled throughout your brain and you would have all these
different data points measuring that neuronal activity, and you could
have a far more robust system that not only exports
the sort of neural activity, the sort of thoughts that
you're having, that maybe even imports information. So when you
(17:53):
start to think about this, this neural dust as it's called,
and you start to see how you could have these
prosthetics not just external to you, but implanted in you,
and you could have this this really very uh sophisticated
system of information coming in and going out of your body,
out of your brain. Yeah, I mean, we're talking about
(18:15):
the ability to to have more of a hands on,
real time idea of what the brain is doing just
throughout the course of the day, not just when you're
hooked up to some machines or or your run through
an fMRI. I. This would be like a daily constant
understanding of what your brain is doing. Yeah, and I
(18:36):
mean you you see this. That the fact that you
could have more of this neural dust spread throughout your
brain again, more data points of collection, more ability to
import that data. But not only that, you could have
this stuff in there maybe for the rest of your life,
because as we discussed before, the brain is not like
foreign objects. But if you have something as tiny as
(18:56):
a neuron, it's very possible that it could pass in
the body as something that's uh supposed to be there. Okay,
so at conceivably then at even an early age, you
are injected. Your brain is injected with this dust, and
this dust is spread out through the brain and it's
all reporting and receiving information from the outside. Well. Right,
(19:18):
So for someone like Cathy for instance, um, she would
get sort of an upgrade here because again let's assume
that there's some sort of implant here or a prosthetic
device that could easily allow her to to move her
body around um, and maybe even she could receive directions UM.
And that's where this thing gets really weird, because you
(19:42):
could effectively use this as a brain upgrade. And we
talked about this before, and I think it was in
monkeys that they had their neural path at ways tinkered
with when they were making decisions, and the idea was
you could increase neural activity in one direction so that
they made spec scific um movements or decisions about what
(20:02):
they were about to do the right decision, right. So
what if you have this neural pixie dust and it
could bolster your memory, It could create stronger neural pathways
to information. I mean, you wouldn't have to study so much, right.
It's it's pretty fascinating because we're talking about not only
not only using this technology to bridge gaps and to
(20:23):
service a bridge where an area was damaged, but just
to speed up the connections, to improve the the the
overall road to where you have you know, just imagine
again to use the analogy of the mountain mountain roads
where you have lots of bridges, not because the the
road is unsafe, but because this makes the transportation, faster, smoother,
(20:44):
uh and uh and and altogether more effective. Right, It's
a kind of true all because not only would it
be helpful for say, struck victims or someone with you know,
immacular degeneration in this case, UM, but because conceivably it
could work in the same way that nurembergers to be
sing her system. But yeah, it could just give you
that sort of lift that everybody has been fantasizing about
(21:07):
and thinking about in terms of upgrading your brain in
a way that it runs faster and smoother. As you say, yeah,
and you could have like a daily or weekly email
that you received telling you what you're almost like you
would web traffic for your website, except you would have
a readout saying, hey, this is how your brain is doing.
This is your your neural activity for a given day,
a given week. Yeah. And here's the thing again, this
(21:28):
is that we're not just talking about um output here
working with an implanted prosthetic devices, but we're also talking
about input. And while this doesn't work on an electromagnetic frequency,
it does work on that that sort of ultrasound. In fact,
these neural pixie dusts are called tuning forks for ultrasound. Uh,
the idea is that maybe you could still kind of
(21:51):
hack into this system, and that would be a problem, right,
you could hack into someone's neural circuitry and have them
doing things. So, so you don't mean just in the
sense of life hacking where I'm improving my brain by
having the neural pixie dust. You're talking about an outsider
hacking into the device that's it's it's attuned with my
neural pixie dust and essentially hacking my brain, hacking my
(22:15):
my memory, even hacking my my perception of reality or
my my actual consciousness. Yeah, now, of course this is
this is all predicated on the idea that we have
a much better idea of how the brain works in
twenty or thirty years, and we have a kind of technology,
technology that's so pervasive that people would have access to
these systems. But what if all of that came together
(22:38):
and we all had neural pixie dust spread throughout our
brains to help us, right, to help us remember things,
to help us do things. And I could say, go
and hack the system for you and say I would
really love for Robert to do ten cart wheels today.
And who knows that you should get that sophisticated. Um.
But that's a possibility. I mean, that's that's the wonderful
(23:00):
and the horrific thing about this kind of technology, as
you can really go off the deep end, um and
kind of go to the dark side and imagine all
of these things. Of course, we know that science has
a lot of integrity and that technology so far has
been uh not used really that much for ill will.
(23:20):
But oh no, I can't think of a single example
of technology being used to hurt anyone. Um. Well there, yes,
you have a point there, But I guess what I'm
saying is that I so far have not been able
to pick up on the black market yet an exco
exo skeleton that can sort of let me U rampage
through the streets of Atlanta. It's true. So you know,
(23:42):
maybe this will be a technological advancement that society will
be able to stay abreast off instead of letting it
get ahead of of of society as we often do
with technological advancements. That would be the hope. But here's
something I want to say to any kids listening. If
you guys are interested in neuros science, um, and you're
also interested in engineering or even chemistry or mathematic mathematics,
(24:05):
you might want to consider joining up with neuroscientists on
this because, as they were saying on the panel, they
need people who are coming from these different disciplines, even
like physics, to help figure out how some of these
technologies work with the brain and how best to do this.
It's not just neuroscientists figuring out. They need other disciplines
(24:27):
to really make this work. Yeah, otherwise, how are we
going to get to the point where you can actually
download a copy of your brain and have that stored
away potentially for safe keeping, and we could reach the
point where, um, I instantly think of the book Altered
Carbon by writer Richard K. Morrigan, in which you have
(24:48):
individuals who have are certainly individuals who can afford it,
the super rich, for instance, who have copies of their
brain backed up so that if something happens to their body,
they can just have their mind re sleeved into a
new body. Or you want to explore another planet, you
just have you a copy of your mind sent, uh,
(25:10):
you know, at the speed of light to to this
location where it can be put into a new body
or a robotic body to do whatever needs to be done. Yeah,
but before all this happens again, they they need to
put the rubber to the road here and figure out
how the brain works. Also, technology they need to upgrade
here because you know, using fMRI I too to look
at these neuronal spikes, it's not a perfect science because
(25:31):
the neuronal neuronal activity is happening at something like one
thousands of a second, but the imaging itself is only
happening it one second, so it's not a true picture
of the brain and what's happening. Right, But through this technology,
well we were conceivably having much better idea of what
the brain is doing. Yeah, and and Maha Ribbits said
that where we are with the brain is a lot
(25:51):
like where we were with cosmology right before the Hubble telescope,
right and and just like the Hubble telescope allowed us
to really peer into uh into space and get an
idea of the breadth and depth of it. He suing,
there are technologies coming online now that will allow us
to do the same thing with a brain that middle
(26:13):
space that we don't know much about now. You know,
you're talking about hacking earlier, the idea of someone hacking
into your personal thoughts in India, the inner workings your brain. Um,
I can't help it, wonder So, so right now we're
as we as a civilization or we as a culture anyway,
are obsessed with the lives of celebrities and or not
(26:34):
even necessarily celebrities, but sort of the the reality stars
just some sort of ordinary persons thrust in the limelighte.
We get to watch everything they're doing. But imagine a
future where it would maybe not even be there just
their lives, but their actual thoughts we could tap into.
Or someone's a great thinker, perhaps their thoughts would be
considered art thought art And for that matter, then is
(26:56):
there such thing as hate thought? Could you be prosecutecuted
for hate thought? Well, that's the idea, right, because all
of a sudden you have would have access to neuronal
activity that would point to your subconscious. And we know
the subconscious is all it's down under there making all
of these diabolical decisions for us, things that we aren't
really aware of until it reaches the surface of consciousness.
So if you were able to peer into your subconscious
(27:19):
via this technology, would you become super aware, a really
self aware of person, or would you become super paranoid
that you know, someone was able to predict your movements
before you could even complete that thought. Yeah, what if
Google ends up selling your subconscious to advertisers in the future.
What if hackers what have you turned in the news
(27:41):
one day? Sorry, hackers got into Amazon and they stole
everybody's subconscious and their credit cards. But don't worry, we'll
monitor your credit card for a full year. Dark stuff,
my friend. But fascinating and wonderful in the current abilities
to actually help people who need that bridge from a tocy. Yeah,
and I mean that's the bottom line here, looking at,
(28:02):
especially in the near term, ways that this technology can
drastically improve the lives of people who need to have
uh that that gap bridge that need links in their
neural chain reforged. Alright, So there you have a neural
pixie dust. I'm sure everyone has some thoughts on this
particular topic, be it the the near term health applications
(28:26):
that we're talking about or the long term science fiction
e stuff. Uh. Either way, we'd love to hear from
you with your inside on this um. You can reach
us out to us in a number of different ways.
As always, go to stuff to bow your mind dot com.
That's the mother ship. That's where you will find all
of our blog post, all of our podcasts, all our videos,
links out to our social media accounts, and hey be
sure to go to YouTube where we are mind Stuff Show.
(28:48):
Check out all of our video series, including this fabulous
new Elevator series. It is wonderful quirky stuff. Um as I,
as I think I was explained to to somebody recently
our video projects, I feel like what we we're trying
to do different scoops of ice cream for different viewers.
So whereas the Monster Science series might be a bit
(29:09):
to um cotton candy and gummy worms for some listeners. Uh,
some viewers rather uh the the the the information Elevator,
I feel like it's more what's a refined but creative
ice cream flavor? M m, maybe a lemon timebet yeah yeah,
Or I had this one the other day, an actual
ice cream. It was dates and the salmon vinegar. Uh yeah.
(29:33):
But now I feel like you're like, we're talking about
park Avenue here. Yeah, yeah, park Avenue. We can some
of our stuff is Park Avenue. Monster Science is not
Park Avenu. This is sort of like I feel like
Elevator information elevator might be. This is sort of like
someone who might hang out in your elevator on Park
Avenue and they're not really paid to be there, but
they hang out there. That's that's perfect. And they stopped. Yeah, yeah,
(29:57):
thanks for the call. Yeah, and guys, if you haven't
checked out moll the scientists got to do it because
it is a wonderful like gummy worm packed full of
ice cream, super normal stimuli shot of science. That's right,
that's what that's what we're trying to do to all right. Uh,
you guys have thoughts, We want to hear them and
you can send them to blow the mind at how
stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands
(30:23):
of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie,
I think most of our listeners probably tuned into our
episode but the future Shot, so they are probably familiar
(00:23):
with the concept. But even if they're not familiar with
the concept the future shot, I think they might feel
a little of it. Let's get through with this episode. Yeah,
because the toddlers in Future Shot talked about this idea
of having these sort of neural prosthetics. I didn't call
him that, but it's more like brain computer interfaces. And
this was a wild idea in the seventies. But hey,
(00:45):
let's let's get real here. I mean, this thing is happening.
In two thousand and three, the world's first brain prosthesis
was put into an animal, and then just this year
there was an auditory brain implant in a toddler. So
we can see that this is becoming more and more common.
And I attended a panel at the World Science Festival
(01:07):
on this very topic. It's called cells to silicon your brain.
And by the way, it always seems to be like
the the year that all this stuff is going to
be here for real. I don't know if you've noticed that,
but they talked about the steps there that they're taking
right now to make this more of a reality. And
(01:27):
we'll talk about that in a second. Yeah. Yeah, to
your point, those are the new two thousand's, I guess,
the years we can look to and say, this is
the technology we're gonna have, This is the life we're
gonna have because of these advancements. And to your point,
we've seen some pretty impressive steps made thus far. I mean,
the uh cyborg rat with the with the brain berth
(01:49):
thesis and cyborg Toddler. It's pretty great now not to
not to to get too caught up in the idea
of the cyborg, because if we've we've discussed before, technological
adaptations on your body, inside your body are becoming more
and more every day, you know, ranging from a pacemaker
to a risk watch, and so we're just seeing the
natural extrapolation of that idea. Yeah, you're augmenting your natural abilities, right.
(02:12):
I wear glasses, so I'm augmenting my vision. Yeah. None
of this makes anybody less human. All it does is
either makes up for injuries or or or some sort
of shortcomings in one's biology, or it is it is
gaming the system a bit, or maybe gaming the system
a lot, depending on what the augmentation is well. And
(02:33):
you would need this sort of gaming of the system
quite a bit if you were someone like I say,
stroke patient who have lost the ability to move your limbs.
And neuroscientists John Donohue was actually talking about this on
the panel. Specifically, he referenced a stroke patient named Cathy,
and he showed this film of her. She sustained permanent
(02:54):
damage to her brain and as a result, the axons
that run along her spine and deliver information from her
motor cortex or her limbs were incapacitated, and so she
was relegated to a life in a wheelchair with others
helping her to move and to feed her. And then
she signed on to this five year experiment with Donna
(03:14):
Hue and others other researchers, and there was an implant
inserted into her brain that interacted with robotic arms that
would do some things for her, like like get the coffee,
like actually bring coffee to her lips, which she hadn't
done for years. Yeah, in the video footage, of this
is pretty remarkable because, yeah, she has not in and
(03:34):
over a decade, she has not raised a cup of
coffee to her own lips, of her own volition, and
now she's doing it. She's thinking the robot arm into action.
It's there's nothing, you know, she's not moving anything with
their tongue, it's nothing with their muscles. It's all inside
her mind. She's thinking about the movement and it is happening,
and it's amazing. It's it's it's the stuff that you
(03:54):
would often think, even today, you tend to think of
as science fiction, the idea that I'm commanding a machine
with my mind, I'm moving something other than my physical
body with my mind, and yet here it is. Yeah,
it is amazing. And so how do you get your
thoughts externally out there to do something for you. Well,
it turns out that what you do is you insert
a wire into the r motor cortex. And what this
(04:16):
wire is doing, it's just it's not a very big wire,
so it's not like she's got things, you know, sticking
out of her head. But what it's doing is it's
fishing for neural spikes. Now, what are neural spikes? Okay,
every time neurons fire in the brain, they're shuttling ions
back and forth, and there's an electrical potential change there.
So if you have a wire inserted into the brain
(04:38):
that can detect that electrical change and when it does, uh,
you know, changes in the ions when you're on stir
about and meat Uh, it will actually transmit information out
to a computer to say, I detect neural activity here
right now, and it's measuring that. So we've talked about
(04:58):
this before with the Jennifer anistone neurons. I think that's
what we called them. That when someone is thinking about
Jennifer Anderson, some people I which I should say not everybody,
you will see a spike in neuronal activity because there's
a whole database of information and memory they are related
to Jennifer Aniston and so the signal is really very strong. Well,
(05:21):
the same thing happens when you're thinking and you're concentrating,
like I would like to move my arm right now,
and I'm trying to think about moving my arm. All
of those neurons which sort of coalesced together to give
off a strong signal, and that's what that wire could detect,
identifying what that signal looks like and then feeding it
out to this machine. I I often in looking at
(05:43):
this topic, I keep thinking of it in terms of
the road, like a mountain road. The early examples we
talked about that the rat prosthesis that had to do
with the damaged hippocampus, or the the toddler um prosthesis,
which specifically was an auditory brain stem and plant. These
are cases where you have point A, point B, and
(06:04):
point C. All right, you know you have a road,
imagine a road across the mountains from your house to
the store. But then that middle point is is a
part of the road that's washed away by by a flood.
So what do you do? How do you get from
A to to C? Well, you put a bridge over it, right,
And that's what a lot of this technology is figuring
out how to fill in that that gap, to how
(06:27):
to bridge that gap from from one from a healthy
part of the brain to another healthy part of well,
let's just say, a healthy part of the chain of
of of action and reaction to to bridge that gap,
you know, in a way that lets you function again.
And then in this we see we see a situation
where we're not only bridging the gap. We're building the
bridge out of the organism itself into an external system,
(06:51):
an external robotic system. You're right, because in this case,
point A is the neuronal activity. Point B would normally
be those acts on in her spine, but because they
can't send the signals to the body, what we're doing
here are what researchers are doing is they're taking those
signals out externally, out of the organism, as you say,
(07:12):
into the computer to decode that neuronal activity, and then
points C would be the robotic arms instead of her
own arms. And what is so amazing, so fascinating about
this is that what they're doing is that they're taking
the sounds that that these neuronal spikes made and they're
decoding them. So you might have like five blips that
(07:34):
that really mean move the arm to the right. You
might have seven blips that are decoded as move the
arm to the left, and that is then being put
into the robotic arm as a command. So the fact
that they can even take the information out and decode
it in a way that makes sense um and then
(07:55):
obviously matches up to what Cathy is thinking because she
can corroborate that. Yeah, you really get the sense. It's
almost like listening to a conversation through a wall, and
they're making sense of it through uh in sort of
indirect ways, but they're getting enough information out of it.
They're getting they're they're getting enough of the points they
get their high highlighting those neural spikes and then figuring
(08:16):
out what it's it's asking for and then reproducing it. Now,
the crazy thing about this, it's that they are getting
this neuronal activity from just a sampling of the neurons.
So maybe about fifty neurons out of the billions of
neurons in your brain, uh or the billions of synapsis.
So that's I mean, that's tiny, that tiny bit of
(08:38):
neural activity can be picked up and then acted upon.
I believe in the in the in they talk to you
you attended World Science Festial Robert crow which Um compared
it to to voting, where you have like a small
portion of the population that's voting and the rest are
not voting, but you're you're figuring out what the public
wants as a whole based on this small sample. And
(08:58):
that's kind of what's happened here with the with this situation. Yeah,
definitely check this out. You can go to RORLD Science
Festival to their website and just look for cells to
Silicon and you can see this talk. It's really great. Um,
so there are drawbacks this of course. There's the idea
that it may not be something that you could have
in your brain long term. Kathy has had it for
five years. She hasn't had any problems. But we know
(09:20):
that the body doesn't like foreign objects in it. That's true. Also,
it's worth noting that the robotic reach and grasp actions
are not going to be as fast as or as
accurate as those of the enable bodied person. I think
that's that's that should be pretty obvious. We're not at
the point in the technology where it's going to be
a one for one, but but it's it's a step
in that direction. Yeah, and uh. Donny Hue says that
(09:41):
the neural spikes are not always the same from trial
to trial. In other words, there's five blips, might be
six flips the next time or seven, and so they
have to figure out the pattern each time. And he
said that it's very likely that those neural spikes are
influenced by other conditions at the time, so it could
be hunger, it could be a particularly emotional state or
a physical state. UM, which is all really fascinating because
(10:05):
we've talked about a propri reception before, and we talked
about it and people who have lost the ability to
move their limbs and um, and how all of this
influences the body, the physical state of the body. So um.
Obviously it's not something that is perfect right now, but
it's the beginnings of something that could be really important,
(10:27):
that kind of neural pixie dust of the future. And
we'll get to that later. Now. Another fascinating example of
this technology can be found in the work of HeLa Nuremberg,
who is a neuroscientist working on technology for a prosthetic
I yeah, because she says that more than ten million
people in the US are blind or facing blindness because
(10:50):
of diseases like macular degeneration, and for the vast majority
of them, it's the prosthetic devices that are available right
now that are their best hope, but the ones that
that are common right now are not necessarily the best.
And she has created a neural prosthetic device that is amazing. Yeah.
(11:11):
Now think back again to that analogy I'm made about
the road point A, point B. In point C and
point B that middle point is washed out by a flood.
How do you get across it? How do you build
that bridge? So, when when you're looking at something just
with normal vision, normal healthy vision, you have the image
that's going to your eye, it's hitting your retina and
then the middleman that point B that it is the
retinal circuitry, and this essentially extracts information from it and
(11:34):
converts it into a code. And these are electrical pulses
that are sent to the brain. So to your point,
what do you do when the photo receptors die? What
do you do when one link in the chain vanishes? Yeah,
because that's what happens with macular degeneration. Those photoreceptors on
the retina die off, and then over time all the
other cells and the circuits that are connected to them
die off to renderingly you effectively blind. So the only
(11:58):
thing that you're left with are those put cells, and
those are the ones that send the signals to the brain.
But because of all that degeneration, they're not sending any
signals anymore. And if you have a regular prosthetic for eyesight,
um you could allow a person to see bright lights
or high contrast edges, but these are shadowy with like
really no real detail. And what you're using in this
(12:20):
regular prosthetic for eyesight is an encoder that takes in light,
but the firing pattern is all over the place. So
what you need then is a device that can mimic
the actions of that the front end circuitry of sight
send signals to the retina's output cells and and and
in this you're you end up mimicking the actions of
that front end circuitry, so you're taking the image converting
(12:42):
them into the retina's own code. Yeah. What Nuremberg has
created is um this prosthetic device that has two parts,
an encoder and a transducer. Now that encoder mimics the
actions that you say, that front end circuitry, and then
the transducer makes the output cells send the code to
the sin and the result is this retinal prosthetic that
(13:02):
can produce normal retinal output. And we're talking about is
is a set of equations that they can implement on
a chip. And so she's saying, hey, it's just math here.
And that's the exciting part is that if you take
these two components of the prosthetic device, then you can
mimic real eyesight in a person who is blind. Yeah,
(13:24):
it's pretty pretty, pretty phenomenal. And we're talking about that
the individual would wear a sort of camera that has
an encoder of a device that's taking that information from
the camera and translating it into the retinas code, translating
it into a version that the brain can make sense of.
You're talking about a real direct link between mechanical artificial
(13:45):
sensory and organic reasoning of that sense information. Now, to
get a sense of this, you should definitely check out
the talk because she shows two different examples of how
this works with a regular prosthetic device and with this
new one. And what she shows is sort of a
readout of the neural firing activity and regular eyesight um
(14:08):
the regular prosthetic and the new one. And you will
see that in the new prosthetic and regular eyes eyesight,
those patterns are almost identical. It's not perfect, but that
middle part, the regular one right now that just has
the encoder that just takes in light, is very imperfect.
And then she gives the second example of she said,
(14:28):
you know, we wanted to take a snapshot of what
people were seeing or what these primates were seeing, because
I believe they're in human trials right now, clinical trials.
But what those um images that we're seeing. You see
the regular eyesight, you see a baby's face. It's perfectly rendered,
of course, right because you have perfect eyesight. Then you
have the regular prosthetic and it's very shadowy. You can't
(14:51):
even make out the pattern, which is amazing because you know,
you and I have discussed before how humans are pattern
recognition machines and yet there's no not enough data points
here to really make a clear picture. And then you
have this new device that she came up with, and
it is plain as day that that is the baby space.
It is not exact, but can you imagine being someone
(15:14):
who has lost their sight and you all of a
sudden are hooked up with this neural prosthetic device for
your eye and you're able to see something is I
don't know, iconic and recognizable as a tree or a
baby space. Again, yeah, I mean you would have have
some level of detail as well as just you know,
an abstract idea of your environment just for navigational purposes.
(15:39):
So it's pretty pretty amazing stuff. Yeah, And as you
had said, this sort of washed out areas, um, you know,
from points A to C. This is something that Nuremberg
is is imagining for the rest of the brains, and
not just eyesight, but for stroke victims. So in the
cortex of trying to create this sort of communications center
using the same sort of device. Yeah, figuring any any
(15:59):
kind of situation where there's a there's a gap, where
there's a missing link in the chain or a damage
link in the chain, then we could conceivably go in
there and build that that bridge, that neural bridge from
point A to point C. All Right, we're gonna take
a quick break, and when we get back, we're going
to talk about it. Just sort of neural dust that
we may all have sprinkled into our brains in the year.
(16:31):
All right, we're back. Uh So, if you were not
future shocked by the earlier information about sort of the
current state in the in the depending state um of
these these neural enhancements, then hold onto your bridges, because
we're about to look at where this could go, where
this is going, and how it could dramatically change not
(16:52):
only our lives, but but but what it is to
be human. Yeah, Okay, so think back to Kathy and
think about that wire in her brain time I believe
is referred to as brain gate. UM. Michael Maharbits has
created a new kind of prosthetic in the form of
these cubes as small as neurons. Okay, we're talking about
(17:13):
fifty microns across. Now. The thing is is that they
don't um they don't work with electromagnetic frequency because they're
too small, so you can't have something like a wire
detecting them. But you can use sonogram to detect these.
And what they're thinking is that you could have these
(17:33):
sprinkled throughout your brain and you would have all these
different data points measuring that neuronal activity, and you could
have a far more robust system that not only exports
the sort of neural activity, the sort of thoughts that
you're having, that maybe even imports information. So when you
(17:53):
start to think about this, this neural dust as it's called,
and you start to see how you could have these
prosthetics not just external to you, but implanted in you,
and you could have this this really very uh sophisticated
system of information coming in and going out of your body,
out of your brain. Yeah, I mean, we're talking about
(18:15):
the ability to to have more of a hands on,
real time idea of what the brain is doing just
throughout the course of the day, not just when you're
hooked up to some machines or or your run through
an fMRI. I. This would be like a daily constant
understanding of what your brain is doing. Yeah, and I
(18:36):
mean you you see this. That the fact that you
could have more of this neural dust spread throughout your
brain again, more data points of collection, more ability to
import that data. But not only that, you could have
this stuff in there maybe for the rest of your life,
because as we discussed before, the brain is not like
foreign objects. But if you have something as tiny as
(18:56):
a neuron, it's very possible that it could pass in
the body as something that's uh supposed to be there. Okay,
so at conceivably then at even an early age, you
are injected. Your brain is injected with this dust, and
this dust is spread out through the brain and it's
all reporting and receiving information from the outside. Well. Right,
(19:18):
So for someone like Cathy for instance, um, she would
get sort of an upgrade here because again let's assume
that there's some sort of implant here or a prosthetic
device that could easily allow her to to move her
body around um, and maybe even she could receive directions UM.
And that's where this thing gets really weird, because you
(19:42):
could effectively use this as a brain upgrade. And we
talked about this before, and I think it was in
monkeys that they had their neural path at ways tinkered
with when they were making decisions, and the idea was
you could increase neural activity in one direction so that
they made spec scific um movements or decisions about what
(20:02):
they were about to do the right decision, right. So
what if you have this neural pixie dust and it
could bolster your memory, It could create stronger neural pathways
to information. I mean, you wouldn't have to study so much, right.
It's it's pretty fascinating because we're talking about not only
not only using this technology to bridge gaps and to
(20:23):
service a bridge where an area was damaged, but just
to speed up the connections, to improve the the the
overall road to where you have you know, just imagine
again to use the analogy of the mountain mountain roads
where you have lots of bridges, not because the the
road is unsafe, but because this makes the transportation, faster, smoother,
(20:44):
uh and uh and and altogether more effective. Right, It's
a kind of true all because not only would it
be helpful for say, struck victims or someone with you know,
immacular degeneration in this case, UM, but because conceivably it
could work in the same way that nurembergers to be
sing her system. But yeah, it could just give you
that sort of lift that everybody has been fantasizing about
(21:07):
and thinking about in terms of upgrading your brain in
a way that it runs faster and smoother. As you say, yeah,
and you could have like a daily or weekly email
that you received telling you what you're almost like you
would web traffic for your website, except you would have
a readout saying, hey, this is how your brain is doing.
This is your your neural activity for a given day,
a given week. Yeah. And here's the thing again, this
(21:28):
is that we're not just talking about um output here
working with an implanted prosthetic devices, but we're also talking
about input. And while this doesn't work on an electromagnetic frequency,
it does work on that that sort of ultrasound. In fact,
these neural pixie dusts are called tuning forks for ultrasound. Uh,
the idea is that maybe you could still kind of
(21:51):
hack into this system, and that would be a problem, right,
you could hack into someone's neural circuitry and have them
doing things. So, so you don't mean just in the
sense of life hacking where I'm improving my brain by
having the neural pixie dust. You're talking about an outsider
hacking into the device that's it's it's attuned with my
neural pixie dust and essentially hacking my brain, hacking my
(22:15):
my memory, even hacking my my perception of reality or
my my actual consciousness. Yeah, now, of course this is
this is all predicated on the idea that we have
a much better idea of how the brain works in
twenty or thirty years, and we have a kind of technology,
technology that's so pervasive that people would have access to
these systems. But what if all of that came together
(22:38):
and we all had neural pixie dust spread throughout our
brains to help us, right, to help us remember things,
to help us do things. And I could say, go
and hack the system for you and say I would
really love for Robert to do ten cart wheels today.
And who knows that you should get that sophisticated. Um.
But that's a possibility. I mean, that's that's the wonderful
(23:00):
and the horrific thing about this kind of technology, as
you can really go off the deep end, um and
kind of go to the dark side and imagine all
of these things. Of course, we know that science has
a lot of integrity and that technology so far has
been uh not used really that much for ill will.
(23:20):
But oh no, I can't think of a single example
of technology being used to hurt anyone. Um. Well there, yes,
you have a point there, But I guess what I'm
saying is that I so far have not been able
to pick up on the black market yet an exco
exo skeleton that can sort of let me U rampage
through the streets of Atlanta. It's true. So you know,
(23:42):
maybe this will be a technological advancement that society will
be able to stay abreast off instead of letting it
get ahead of of of society as we often do
with technological advancements. That would be the hope. But here's
something I want to say to any kids listening. If
you guys are interested in neuros science, um, and you're
also interested in engineering or even chemistry or mathematic mathematics,
(24:05):
you might want to consider joining up with neuroscientists on
this because, as they were saying on the panel, they
need people who are coming from these different disciplines, even
like physics, to help figure out how some of these
technologies work with the brain and how best to do this.
It's not just neuroscientists figuring out. They need other disciplines
(24:27):
to really make this work. Yeah, otherwise, how are we
going to get to the point where you can actually
download a copy of your brain and have that stored
away potentially for safe keeping, and we could reach the
point where, um, I instantly think of the book Altered
Carbon by writer Richard K. Morrigan, in which you have
(24:48):
individuals who have are certainly individuals who can afford it,
the super rich, for instance, who have copies of their
brain backed up so that if something happens to their body,
they can just have their mind re sleeved into a
new body. Or you want to explore another planet, you
just have you a copy of your mind sent, uh,
(25:10):
you know, at the speed of light to to this
location where it can be put into a new body
or a robotic body to do whatever needs to be done. Yeah,
but before all this happens again, they they need to
put the rubber to the road here and figure out
how the brain works. Also, technology they need to upgrade
here because you know, using fMRI I too to look
at these neuronal spikes, it's not a perfect science because
(25:31):
the neuronal neuronal activity is happening at something like one
thousands of a second, but the imaging itself is only
happening it one second, so it's not a true picture
of the brain and what's happening. Right, But through this technology,
well we were conceivably having much better idea of what
the brain is doing. Yeah, and and Maha Ribbits said
that where we are with the brain is a lot
(25:51):
like where we were with cosmology right before the Hubble telescope,
right and and just like the Hubble telescope allowed us
to really peer into uh into space and get an
idea of the breadth and depth of it. He suing,
there are technologies coming online now that will allow us
to do the same thing with a brain that middle
(26:13):
space that we don't know much about now. You know,
you're talking about hacking earlier, the idea of someone hacking
into your personal thoughts in India, the inner workings your brain. Um,
I can't help it, wonder So, so right now we're
as we as a civilization or we as a culture anyway,
are obsessed with the lives of celebrities and or not
(26:34):
even necessarily celebrities, but sort of the the reality stars
just some sort of ordinary persons thrust in the limelighte.
We get to watch everything they're doing. But imagine a
future where it would maybe not even be there just
their lives, but their actual thoughts we could tap into.
Or someone's a great thinker, perhaps their thoughts would be
considered art thought art And for that matter, then is
(26:56):
there such thing as hate thought? Could you be prosecutecuted
for hate thought? Well, that's the idea, right, because all
of a sudden you have would have access to neuronal
activity that would point to your subconscious. And we know
the subconscious is all it's down under there making all
of these diabolical decisions for us, things that we aren't
really aware of until it reaches the surface of consciousness.
So if you were able to peer into your subconscious
(27:19):
via this technology, would you become super aware, a really
self aware of person, or would you become super paranoid
that you know, someone was able to predict your movements
before you could even complete that thought. Yeah, what if
Google ends up selling your subconscious to advertisers in the future.
What if hackers what have you turned in the news
(27:41):
one day? Sorry, hackers got into Amazon and they stole
everybody's subconscious and their credit cards. But don't worry, we'll
monitor your credit card for a full year. Dark stuff,
my friend. But fascinating and wonderful in the current abilities
to actually help people who need that bridge from a tocy. Yeah,
and I mean that's the bottom line here, looking at,
(28:02):
especially in the near term, ways that this technology can
drastically improve the lives of people who need to have
uh that that gap bridge that need links in their
neural chain reforged. Alright, So there you have a neural
pixie dust. I'm sure everyone has some thoughts on this
particular topic, be it the the near term health applications
(28:26):
that we're talking about or the long term science fiction
e stuff. Uh. Either way, we'd love to hear from
you with your inside on this um. You can reach
us out to us in a number of different ways.
As always, go to stuff to bow your mind dot com.
That's the mother ship. That's where you will find all
of our blog post, all of our podcasts, all our videos,
links out to our social media accounts, and hey be
sure to go to YouTube where we are mind Stuff Show.
(28:48):
Check out all of our video series, including this fabulous
new Elevator series. It is wonderful quirky stuff. Um as I,
as I think I was explained to to somebody recently
our video projects, I feel like what we we're trying
to do different scoops of ice cream for different viewers.
So whereas the Monster Science series might be a bit
(29:09):
to um cotton candy and gummy worms for some listeners. Uh,
some viewers rather uh the the the the information Elevator,
I feel like it's more what's a refined but creative
ice cream flavor? M m, maybe a lemon timebet yeah yeah,
Or I had this one the other day, an actual
ice cream. It was dates and the salmon vinegar. Uh yeah.
(29:33):
But now I feel like you're like, we're talking about
park Avenue here. Yeah, yeah, park Avenue. We can some
of our stuff is Park Avenue. Monster Science is not
Park Avenu. This is sort of like I feel like
Elevator information elevator might be. This is sort of like
someone who might hang out in your elevator on Park
Avenue and they're not really paid to be there, but
they hang out there. That's that's perfect. And they stopped. Yeah, yeah,
(29:57):
thanks for the call. Yeah, and guys, if you haven't
checked out moll the scientists got to do it because
it is a wonderful like gummy worm packed full of
ice cream, super normal stimuli shot of science. That's right,
that's what that's what we're trying to do to all right. Uh,
you guys have thoughts, We want to hear them and
you can send them to blow the mind at how
stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands
(30:23):
of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com
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