Video, live and ondemand to follow the transition of power and President Trump and president elect biden with news conferences and events coverage at cspan. Org. Good afteron everybody and welcome to politics and prose live at lunch where we bring you our politics and prose are grammy during our lunch time hour. Im an Event Coordinator and we thank you so much for joining here to celebrate the release of livewired by doctor David Eagleman. At any time during the event today you can click the link that i will put in the chat to purchase a copy of tonights books on pnps website. Yocan ask the author a questions afternoon by setting it to the q a box the button for which can be found at the bottom of your screen and be sure to put your question in the q a and not in the chat to make sure that the author and i see it. On to our main event this afrnoon. Doctor David Eagleman is a neuroscientist and a New York Times best selling author and he has the center for science and law National Nonprofit institute and serves as an addict professor at stanford university. He is best known for his work on countr substitution, time perception, brain quest to city and neural law. Live wired, his new book, esents new findings from doctor eaglemans lab from dreaming to tech devices that revolutionize how w think about the senses. He would discuss bio hackers, humans using echolocation and the present and future of ai. Im so excited to hear doctor eagleman talk today. Welcome, david. The floor is all yours and i will be back in a little bit to moderate some q and a. Okay, great. Thank you, beth. Its a great pleasure to be here. Ive been to pitics and prose in person in the past and im sorry i cannot be there this year but im so pleased you could join me this way online today. I want to tell you andiving a brief oveiew about some ofhe main schemes and ideas in the book and then we will take questions. So lets sta with this question, how many of you have ever seen a baby zebra get born . Itan run at about 45 minut and it wobbles to its tense elite legs and runs around same as a baby giraffe and a dolphin and they are born swimming and so onnd how many of y have seen a homo sapiens and you might notice that its different the situation and they dont run around after 45 minutes and this isecause insad of trying to hardwire everything in at birth Mother Nature found a simpler and more flexibletrategy with humans whi is allowed neurons to self modify waste on their experien in the world. In other words, we drop io the world halfbaked and we let the world shape us and this is a you know, completely new sort of a rategy for Mother Nature but worked really well in the sense that we take over every corner of the planet and weve onto the internet and cured smallpox and goto the moon and itsorking for us and this is all due to the feature of brains which is that there not really hardware and you cant think of him that way but not really software but its what i call live where and that is hence the title of the book live wired and in the field we talk about this as brain plasticity and a term you may have heard but the fact is this was a term that was coined a century ago by William James because he was impressed by the way you could take and im looking for someone classic but take something plastic and mold it into shape and it will hold that shape and thats what the word plastic means and he was impressed that when you learned something for example when you learn that my name is david then there is a change in the physical structure of your brain and it hold onto that so that is why i use the word plasticity but in fact what i argue is that it is so much more than that going on and got 86 billion neurons and these are the cells of the brain and each one of these has 10000 connections with its neighbors which means you have point to quadrillion connections going on in the brain and your entire life, every moment of your life these things are plugging and unplugging and seeking and finding new places and so on and its a dynamic living, electric fabric that is not just something you mold and hold onto it shape but changes your whole life and that is why i prefer and coined in pushing the term livewired instead of plastic. And so, you know this is Incredible Technology and we dont know in Silicon Valley and we dont know how to build things like this yet but we have an existence proof of this technology because we are all Walking Around with 3 pounds of it. I want to do briefly is give you a sense of some of the principles that ive worked to distill from the field so there are about 30000 papers in the literature now on grand plasticity but what it try to do is figure out what is the main principles that we can point to hear so that is what i will try to tell you here. The first principle is that unlike computers brains are extraordinarily flexible and i will give you an example of that. There is a case a few years ago 44 yearold man normal iq, had mild leg pains we went to the doctor to try to figure out what was going on and they couldnt figure it out and the doctor sent him to get a brain scanning case there was something going on there. It turns out what a normal brain scan looks like is Something Like this. This is a section right down the middle and then the thing i want you to look at is number three and what points to this area called the lateral ventricle which is a space in your brain that is filled with cerebral spinal fluid. This german women his reign look like this. The section labeled lv, lateral ventricle, was completely filled with cerebral spinal fluid with such pressure if pushed his brain up against the sides of his goal but the thing that the story illustrates is the remarkable flex ability of this material because it didnt hamper his neurodevelopment or normal cognition and behavior and the thing is you cant take your phone or laptop and, you know, switch it like that and hope it will work and this is a whole different kinds of beast that we are talking about with life where. We have many strange samples of this when children get an epilepsy that effects one half of their brain and one hemisphere of the brain they can go in for what is called a hemisphere ectomy where you remove half of the brain and you take it out and originally surgeons would fill the empty space with sterile pingpong balls but you dont need to do that as they realize the cerebral spinal fluid provides enough pressure so they leave it empty and the child has half a brain. You might think oh my gosh, that poor kid but he will have deficits but that is the weird part. They dont. As long as you do this under the age of seven the child is perfectly normal cognition and can speak, can do math problems and can learn history and so on but they tend to have a slight limp on the other side of their body because the side of your brain controls the other side but they are a little weaker there otherwise they are perfectly fine in the book is full of examples of this thing that sets the ball rolling that what were talking about was her nine is a very different piece than what we are used to doing because i cant take my laptop and terror have the motherboard out and expect it to still function. That is principle number one just to orient us. Principle number two is that brains will,rains are locked in t silence and darkness of the skull. They dont have any idea wha your body looks like and yet we look at the brain or we fin is that there is aap of the body so i wont go into details here except to say that part of your brain the inputs coming from your body and theres a map of your body and same with your motor cortex which is putting information out to your body to move it around. This was discovered in the 60s that there is this map and so the question is how is there this map of the brain and the body and the obvious answer is that it must be genetically prespecified but it turns out thats not actually the correct answer. We know for many reasons one of them is you lose an arm in an accident in your brain map will adjust so that its a body without an arm out and takes over and changes its map so the map is always changing predicated on what information is coming from the body and so you know, this is a picture i talk about admiral lord nelson in the book who is the hero of trafalgar and other british wars but most people dont know hes missing his right arm because his right arm got shot off in one of his battles and he, you know, describes what it was like but now we understand what happens in his brain and happens fast and just a quick analogy here which is how does the brain understand what its map should look like and i use the analogy of colonization. Colonization the key thing is that its a fulltime business so what happened with the french in the new world is they had a lot of territory in the new world but eventually the french were sending over your ships than the british and the spanish and so they ended up losing the territory and it is exactly the same thing with the brain if admiral nelsons right arm is sending fewer ships because it is now gone than the maps change and territories get taken over and the key is nothing lies shallow in the brain and every thing is taken over and is very competitive system there could part of the way we can see that it is with for example people who are blind and born blind, for example, normally vision is taken care of by the back of your head, the occipital lobe. And someone who is blind the or wait sorry, i missed the slide. Here it is. Someone who is blind the occipital lobe is taken over b sound and by touch and things like that so it is not like the visual system and let me put it this way, even though we learn in neuroscience 101 class this partf the brain is a visual system and its only t visual system if your eyes are worng. If there are ships of data coming in the it becomes the visualystem but if there are no ships coming in minute oh cool, ill use ts territory for the neighboring countries which in this case are sound and touch. Its a very fluid syste and this isne of the things to really understand aut the brain even though we tend to ok at it the way that a child might look at a globe of the eah and think that all those country borders are sehow predestined or thats the way but we know i you are into politics and World History you know that those country borders couldve come out. If only if t king had died in his youth or the battl to the other way so its the same thing in the bra despite the fact that we learn about it as though its diagrammed out and its a extremely fluid system. The thing i want to emphasize is the takeover of territory is very rapid and this is something that is new and a New Discovery over the last several years and what i mean by that is lets say you take a sighted person and blind for them and stick them in the scanner but what you find is you start to see an activity in their visual cortex based on sound and touch and that happens for about an hour, this encroachment starts to happen so what this tells us is a very competitive system under the hood and things are moving fast and the whole thing is sprung like a mouse trap so as soon as a system says wait a minute, im not getting vision back there it starts making changes and there is annexations that begins to happen and so on my student and i realized years ago is this leads to a very new interesting theory that we have now published on about why we dream and it is this in the chronic competition for brain real estate the visual brain in particular has a unique problem to dl with because of t rotation of the planet so were cast into darkness about 12 hours every cycle and of course im talking about evolutionary time, not having electricity and so what happens is in theark you are searing but yr vision is a thing that suddenly is the private so how does the visual system deal with his unfair disaantage . We suggest it is by keeping the occipital cort active at night and keeping it protective and we call thi the defensive activation theory and the idea is that what it is doing is dreams of the brains way of fighting takeover from the other senses so every 90 minutesou have this very specific search tree in the brain the blast activity into the occipital cortex and that is all that circuiy does, by the way and its extremely specific andust goes to this part of the brain and that is what hpens during the night. My underanding of what is going on with brain plasticity we can really open up this whole new set of theories and the framework about wt the brain is doing under theood and why. Okay, i want to tell you the next principal and im moving fast through highlights here. The next principal is that the brain will rapid self or the brain wraps itself aroun new data streams and actually guys can hear the audio here but this is a ted talk i ge a few years ago and i built a vest with vibratory motors on it and so its like the ltle buzzers on your cell phone and the vast is capturing sound and turning souninto patterns of vibration on the skin and so what was happening is i was speaking and my skin is feeling tha going on from low to High Frequency but here is the video, by the way. This woman on the left is saying the word sound and on the right she saying the word touch and if you just look at the way the motors are mapped from low to High Frequency you can see it sound and touch and if you look on her soldiers you can see that there is a High Frequency there so the point is for people who are deaf what we can do is feed the information through an unusual channel which is the skin and instead of the inter ear which is is incredibly sophisticated little biological machine that captures sound on the eardrum and bringing frequency and shipped off to the brain in terms of spikes and electrical spikes we are capturing sound breaking frequencies here and sending it to the brain of the spinal cord and the brain can figure out what to do with the information and it doesnt know and again its trapped in silence and darkness in the vault of your skull and all it sees ever are spikes coming in and it doesnt know at the spikes are present the transition of photons or air compressed waves or mixtures of molecules but all it sees is spikes with the brain is really good at doing is putting together an understanding of what is correlated and figuring out how to understand that data. Heres an example of the very first participant we ever tested with this and is on the left, graduate student on the right in my graduate student says a word and in this case is the word you and gentleman who is completely deaf on the left writes down what is he is understanding so they say where and theudgment writes on vote word where and scott says touch and so the gentleman feeling this on his skin and able to do a complicated vibrations of what is getting saidnd what weve done in the meantime is i ended up spending a company out of my lab called neo sensory and weve shrunkhis down to the size of a wristband on the wristband has vibratory motors in the ban and it captures sound and there is a whole, you know, computer board here and what it is doing is translating the sounds into patterns of vibration on the wrist and here is our very first participant here, this was before it was a prototype but just to give you a nse of what it is like for him to be able to feel sound. [sence] as i said we spun off this Company Called the buzz and weve got this on wrists all over the world now. Its wonderfully satisfying to take a neuroscience idea and go all the way from theoretical concepts to a deve that is changing peoples lives all over. I will also mention im a scientific advisor for the show westworld and so we had our best make a cameo appearance in westworld and i dont know if any of y watched the show but this was season two, episode seven and that is the best on the screen there in the gentleman in the middle, as you can see, the gentleman in the middle is wearing the vest and he feels spatially where the robots and the host are located and he can fashion accordingly. What were doing is translating location of something into a spatial feeling here so suddenly they feel theres a host of the room that they werent expecting and okay so that vest will not save you it the robots go bad but weve taken this idea and use this with people who are blind. In this case this gentleman feels everybody around him and can feel there is someone ahead of him and someone behind him and if youre walking up to the left or right he can feel where you are which actually makes it better than what he is a sighted person has been able to understand every thing going around in 360 and we can add navigation directions on top of that so is never been here before we have navigation and go right where hes going. So, there is much more to say about this and if anyone is interested in the general type of thing about creating new senses, please check out a ted talk i gave on this but the book goes deep into why this works and dozens of examples of dous about this. Let me move onto the next prince wi now which is the brain, as i mentioned, is, you know, trapped in there and does not know what your body looks lik but figures outow to control it. When example that i just got from the book is about faith the dog born without fnt legs and what did she do . She figured out how to walk on her back legs like a human. At this tells us is dog brains doot arrive he programmed to drive dog bodies but instead, like brains across the animal kingdom, what they want to do is get t food and get to water or get to their mother and get away from danger so they figure out how to control the body that they are in. Thats all there is to it. We see this in humans all the time and turns o the worlds best archer is armss. He got interested in arche and holds the world record forhe longest accurate shot and this is because his brain inside could say cl, ill use my legs and pull this thing back and do it like that. If aone saw my intelligent series, the brain, one of the cases i carried was this woman jan who got paralyzed completely with spinal cord was damaged and so the brain waves dont go out so she got brain implants and this allows her to control this robotic arm, a very beautiful sophisticated robotic arm and controls this with the signals in her motor cortex. She imagines moving her real arm and that gets translated into moving this robotic armpit of course, she gets better and better at it because of brain plticity and because shes figuring out when i think this does this in a little wrong so think about it a different way and she figures out how to use it to connect things outside of your body. It turns out that this whole idea about how good you actually make livewire devices a figure out the body the way the brain does is were just starting this and one colleague of mine at columbia makes this little robot called the starfish robot that isnt preprogrammed to know its body but instead figures out its body by trying out different moves and is seen what happens to the body and so it actually figures out how to get somewhere is trying to get over to the right side of the table here. The next principle, this is the last thing i will mention and then moved to q a. Part of the reason its so amazing to understand what is going on under the hood is because we can build new devices with completely new principle of how were thinking about things. As one example i gave in the book, if you look at the mars rover, spirit, it was a multibillion dollars project. We got up to the red planet and it did a great job of what happened is a got its right front wheel stuck in the martian soil edit couldnt get out and so it died there. Now its a multibilliondollar piece of space junk. If you compare that to aolf that gets its leg caught in the trap. What the wolf will do is to its lake often figure how to walk on three legs. Thats what all animalso, they have a sense of relevance. They want to get safety to seek water come to escape, to find food, and so its actions are undergirded by the demands of its stomachnd the threat o editors, and the wolf traffics deference to its goal. Its brain drinks up information out the environment and its capabilities in that environment and, in other words, what it limbs allow i to do. The brain translates those capabilities into the most usef motor output. A woman carries on with a limp because animals dont shut down with moderate damage in neither should our machines. A wolf i talk about nt steps of how we can bld a completely different kind of machine that is in the case of the mars roverets a wheel stuck and says i got my wheel stuck and in figures out how to operate inifferent way with the different body plan. All of this is to say theres so much amazing stuff happening under the hood there that we are just scratching the surface. Have you went especially in Silicon Valley is impressed with whats going on with Artificial Intelligence but that is baby stuff going on compared to what is actually here, this strange confrontation material, this living dynamic electrical fabric will have under the hood. What id like to do is answer questions about anything. Thank you so much for that. That was so cool here we have a bunch of great questions. I will start with a broader topic that people seem to have a lot of questions about pickets this idea of the brain remapping itself when senses are deprived based on like amputation or just deprivation. Add asks come here about amputees having feelings on the absent limb. Is this something only happens until the brain has remapped to recognize that doesnt have that limb . I have a whole chapter on that. The right way to think about the brain is your different timescales that change. Some things are changing really rapidly and other things are changing very slowly and they are all daisychained in order. The things that change fast has to present enough evidence to the next level for them to say okay i believe that, i will change, that changes and so. What happens when someone you loses a lamp is some parts of the brain change in religious right away and that was the picture i showed you of this area. Deeper areas in the brain still think that the information they give is from the hand because their whole life that gotten information from that and that is been the hand of the get confused and so sometimes they think theyre still getting signals from the hand. If you touch the face they say that must be the hand that is being touched and so on. There can be pain as result of the interaction between these different layers. This is a whole new framework that i present, and it explains so much of what happens in neuroscience. Ill give one example. One of the, actually the oldest rule in neurology is all the memories are more stable than newer memories. If youve ever known someone at the end of their life, mr. Gardner deathbed, i dont remember whats happened the last month, the last year but the remember their childhood just fine which is unusual. Other systems dont have that property where older memories are more stable than newer memories. The reason it happens is because of the way things work the way down in the system and they become more and more and more stable with typing this is why often under deathbeds people will revert to childhood language, just as one example, Albert Einstein last words nobody knows what that word because he was speaking in german on his deathbed and the night nurse didnt speak german so thanks. Certainly. Another question about this kind of same concept. What is happening in the brains of people who are put on ventilators to recover from covid . Not necessarily like sensory input as we can continue the five senses but when a body part is replaced with an extra machine, does that same kind of remapping happen . Thats an interesting question. We dont know the answer to that. One of the things thats fascinating faceting about replacing body parts in general is that you are fine with it. You get an artificial heart, you can get a respirator, then later come you can lose limbs and stuff like that and youre still the same person. In contrast if you damage or lose even a little chunk of brain tissue, that can change you entirely, that can change your decisionmaking, the risk aversion, your capacity to namet animals perceive colors or understand music or a hundred other things we see in the labs everyday. This is how we know that the brain is the densest representation of you in the whole body. In other words, people often ask what about the rest of the body . A little bit. Its like the body is in the greater metropolitan area but this is the urban center. You can change the step and replace it and it doesnt seem to be much of a difference at all, but the brain is really dense. Absolutely. I have a question. Just from me. Im so, so interested in the idea that dreams are meant to make sure that the other senses dont take over as we sleep. How do you test that in in a l . Is it sleep study, might make people not dream, how do you get . We just published a paper on this where we did deep research on 25 different species of primates, homo sapiens being one of them. It turns out even across primates which are a close cousin, we only split off 70 million years ago from the ones over and 30 million years ago insulin. Theres very Different Levels of plasticity. So, for example, a lemur, comes out of the womb, reaches adolescence pretty rapidly, walks pretty rapidly, stuff like that as opposed to homo sapiens which is very slow to all these things and so you can look all these behavioral measures to figure out plastic the brain bs versus how preprogrammed it is. We look at how much rem sleep thicket, Rapid Eye Movement sleep which correlate with dream sleep. It turns out the correlate perfectly which is to say the last plastic the enemy list dream sleep it needs. Why . The visual cortex is not endangered getting taken over because it didnt have that much plasticity but the more plastic you are the more dream sleep you have because you need to protect the brain because its in more danger of takeover of the visual cortex. Thats how we studied it. What we are next on is it turns out some people on depressants or inhibitors have less dream sleep. Now we will be looking at that and doing studies on it Everything Else is hopefully approximate the same that you are just not getting dream sleep at night, what is the effect . One of the things i noticed right away his as people of the antidepressants pulsate the vision gets blurry and the doctors, clinicians also its because of dry eyes. That might be right but it might not so thats what we would be looking into. Thats awesome. You talk about Different Levels of plasticity in different species but is question mark Different Levels of plasticity from human to human. The human brains lose elasticity as we get older and still other behavioral ramifications . Yes. Generally the brain gets less plastic as it ages. Most people view this as a bad thing but, in fact, the reason it happens is because the job of the brain is built an internal model of the world out there. What the brain is trying to do stick out how to optimize my behavior in this world, how do people react to me . What should i do . How to make it good at something so i can have a career . This is a way the brain is trying to do this at all points and what happens is you get better and better add as you age between the brain is less flexible is because you you are putting together a pretty good understanding of how to operate in the world. Thats why we become less plastic, but the good news, the really important part is to always make certain your challenging yourself with novelty so that you can build new roadways and mccain plasticity. Ill give you a onesecond think about us that this been going on for a long time, many decades, where what people donate the brains upon death. It turns up people who stay cognitively active their whole lives, when they die some of them turns that had alzheimers disease but nobody knew it when they were alive. The reason is they didnt have any cognitive deficits because there they were cognitively active to the last moment, they were dealing with other people, challenging themselves and had chores and responsibilities and so on. Even if they were physically degenerating with alzheimers there because of the building new bridges were things have fallen apart. As opposed to people who retired and lives in shrink and they dont challenge themselves and connecting with other people, that is the worst thing you can do. Really one of the main lessons that has emerged from neuroscience is importance of challenging or bring with novelty all the time. That is the thing you can do. What that means is as soon as you get good at Something Like sudoku, then dont do that anymore. If youre good at it can do something or bad at. Thats great and the answers a question about aging with that kind of a facts of like memory loss and cognitive decline. A couple of other quick questions about dreams. What do you think is the evolutionary purpose of lucid dreaming . And why can some people do it and others take practice and cant ever do it . Yeah, for anyone who doesnt know, lucid dream is when you become aware that you are in a dream and you can essentially take control of the dream. It is very rare. Most people never have it in a life or maybe once and theres ways to train upon to try to get better at it. I think its a bug, not a feature. Its something that the brain puts a lot of work into generating consciousness and that turns up when youre sleeping and sleep is always of the functions by taking out the neural trash and consolidating things you learned during the day. What happens with lucid dreaming is this accidental interface between the two thats not typically supposed to happen. In answer to your question i dont think theres any evolutionary purpose, its just a little bug that can be found in the sometimes. Totally. And then, how do we see our dreams if were not really seen with our eyes . Is it our imagination . What is going on . This is a very important, a very important fundamental concept to get, which is that what you consider vision is all about internal activity, whats happening in here. You dont even need your eyes to see as evidenced by dreams every night. Your eyes are closed. You having full rich visual experience. If you look at the circuitry carefully, only 5 of the data back here, only 5 is coming coming in through the eyes. All the rest is all feedback loops and other things going on back here. Vision is not at all like the camera. Its all about the internal model of what you expect to be seen out there. Things like visual illusions conference which are interesting to like eightyearoldneuroscientist when they grow when they grew up is the issue of, it demonstrates it doesnt matter was out the physically. What youre seeing is whatever your brain is putting together a county. You may know that comes to an even exist. You have is different life winks and your brain finds these and just for speed to detect the right food and the trees and says okay, im going call the red, green, and have direct perceptual experience of it. But anyway, vision is all about internal activity and when you blast activity into the occipital cortex see. All right. Then no color thing is always, it always freaked me out a little bit. Me, to. Another person asks about the brain, like while it is sleep deprived of brains that have insomnia, whats going on in the brain then . I mean come in one sense it suggest to make this switch over from the awake state to the sleep state is this huge thing like switching over the whole factor in making all these big changes, and its a transition that is supposed to occur well but it often does not. There are a dozen ways they can go wrong. People with narcolepsy, and so on but thats essentially the answer. A question about the best you decide. What was the initial feedback coming from to train the brain to detect the correct words from the vibration . What were doing is complete question because what you need always to understand anything is having a correlation. Let me back up for one step which is none of us remember this but when you were a baby you had to learn how to use your ears. Write what you watched your mothers mouth and theres the visual input coming in there and auditory come here and eventually he put together theres a correlation there, matched up and then you do things like clap your hands or not on the bars of your crib and you realize okay im doing and motor output and heavy, do that i get spikes come in here. Thats how you learn is with correlation. With a person who is deaf, they learn the buzz or the best by watching the world. They see the dogs mouth moves and they feel the park year and a first they dont know what that is but it doesnt take very long to the brain say those two things are linked and puts them together. In the case of learning words, with the bidding you saw was his fifth that hed been trained for two hours a day before that. Sorry, four hours a day, two hours a day. So he sees the word and feels the word about so he makes the correlation. Thank you for the question. This other question, how is liveware different from reinforcement learning . What you described an agent try to figure out its environment or body sounds like reinforcement learning. Im not familiar with the term. Maybe you are. Let me not go into too much great keep a good detail on that but reinforcement is what psychologist originally described as in Computer Science and ai folks have taken on his way of learning which is essentially with feedback, with punishmentreward is what tells you okay, strengthen this, we can this, and so on. A lot of whats happens, some fraction what happens in the brain is reinforcement learning but its more than that. An example, its not just about reward and punishment although thats an important part. Its about relevance to you, what matters in your environment and so on but also about attention. As i said the job of the rink is to build an internal model of the world and with the brain is good at doing is detecting weight, something doesnt quite match the model. Every thing else is but that doesnt and thats what we call attention. We didnt Pay Attention to that the putter highresolution sensors on to get more information and so on. One of the things because yes, this technical tactical questit be interested in is in chapter eight, i propose a new framework called info tropism and the idea is when you look at plants doing photo tropism, they followed with a like this if you move the like in the plants will move here what brings to his info tropism we with her constantly changing what they do to maximize the amount of data theyre getting from the world. Just one example is with your retina, the package or i come all these photoreceptors. During the day the photoreceptors have a high Spatial Resolution and just capturing photons and say hey i have some antennae back to the brain. As it gets dark the photoreceptors say there are not enough photons here, so they start linking arms with each other, sophisticate process, they linked together so them lower Spatial Resolution by higher sensitivity. They can catch photons that way. What they do is maximizing the amount of information that they can take from the world at all moments i dislike this with all systems. It sounds like like a very good question you might be interested in these notions of things like info tropism cycle will be on reinforcement learning. Yeah. We will take a few more questions. Theres some really great ones. About ai which i know is a component of your book. Do you think theres anything about human intelligence, emotions, consciousness, et cetera that emerge from our brains that ai will not be able to reproduce, or are we on track for maybe all of it . Thats a great question. As far as we can tell the brain is a machine, and unbelievably complicated machine. Its the level of sophistication is something that bankrupts our language. Will have way of putting this into words. But when we look at its a a physical machine and when you damage it, you damage it in the way she expect and so on. So because of that there is no theoretical reason why we shouldnt be able to simulate that on silicon or any come build it out of beer cans or tennis balls or whatever you want. It should work. That said, we are still a young science and so it may be we discover something in 100 safe we did realize that the it we discovered we might be able to replicate that new thing, too. Ai should be able to get there eventually. What happen in our lifetimes . I really doubt it. The reason is ai right now, it does these wonderful things with superhuman performance by its really stupid compared to a threeyearold child who can navigate the room and manipulate adult and get through to her mouth and all kinds of things. So ai is missing what we call agi, artificial generalized intelligence, which is to say ai can distinguish pictures of cats and dogs with superhuman performance but if you say that distinguish pictures of bears from camels and will fail because they can get trained in one thing but it cant generalize to other things. Where we are now is a very long ways off. Another question about different component of your book we havent quite touched on yet. Can you talk more about the brains of centipedes . Are the using different pathways to perform mathematics or other equally asian . Okay. Anyone who doesnt know, they have a slight mixture of the census of you might at the letter like jay or be ordered and the triggers a a color experience in their head. For them a is red and he is orange and so one. It used to be thought of as a river we know now its about 3 of the population has it. Its not considered a disorder or disease. Its just the way some people see the world and of the people dont see the world this way. Theres a lot to say about if youre interested in the book on it called wednesdays when they go blue about synesthesia. Some of them can do mathematics typically precisely because numbers have colors and sometimes vendors and personnel is an shape as well, and so it helps them to hold onto it. If i tell you my phone number you might forget it in a week from that but if youre synesthesia you might remember it had this night autumn pattern and it helps you to remember so it proves you have better mimic. Totally. We are about at time to wrap up but theres another question about your opinion on brain computer interfaces and if you think there are any nonmedical applications that are going to emerge in the future . So it depends what you mean by interface. Its a kind of stuff i i build which is a noninvasive wristband you put in for a couple hundred dollars and then you of a new stream of data. On the other inspection theres things like Elon Musk Company which he just did a new presentation on the other day and that is not truly all in your skull and inserting electrodes into the brain. What hes doing is very cool and is pushing for the technology on that, and that will be very useful for particular clinical application. Will it go beyond clinical . I doubt if youre even though the mythology around neural link is consumers would do this so they can and if its fast with her cell phone. In fact, neurosurgeons will not do the surgery because theres always risk of infection and death on the operating table. Theres just no point in opening come to doing an open had surgy on Somebody Just so they can send a faster text. Thats the answer i think brain computer interface of this sort of the can think of putting a bunch of projects where we are feeding in information for infrared light or stock market data or drones. We are experimenting with all kinds of great stuff the that s on the clinical realm but i doubt people will get an open it surgery for the. Right. If pingpong balls were not a great idea in the past maybe computer still are not a great idea today. Thank you so much, dr. Eagleman. I do have one last question and that is going what are you reading these days . Oh, i just finished a couple books about material science. One was called stuff matters and the others called liquid rules by the same all the. I just read a book about, im forgetting the title come Something Like travel to the ice age or something by craig childs. I totally blanked on the title but its about being up in alaska looking at where the bering land bridge is to be an animal so used to live the its absolutely beautiful. Love that. Well again, thanks so much for spinning spending time with us today and i think everybody who whos out there in the audience. You are awesome and amazing questions. I would encourage you to check out future events. Maybe you can ask questions at one of those. And hope everyone in the audience continues to stay well come to stay well read. The link live wired is in the chat and you can find on our website. So thank you. It is much. Great. Great to be back at politics and prose. Thank you, guys. Tonight on the communicators we take a look at issues independent phone broadbent and video providers face with matt polka president and ceo of aca connects, and boycom vision president patricia jo boyers. Our members have done such a great job of serving their communities and beating the need and keeping americans connected with so many of our members stepping up to adopt a fccs pledged to keep americans connected. By the same token we also recognize that there is still continuing needs, needs to serve students, needs to work with schools, needs to work with, i need to work with hospitals and medical facilities so we can improve telehealth, ways we can increase the Broadband Network speeds, ways we can serve unserved areas. Watch the communicators tonight at eight eastern on cspan2. Tonight former president barack obama on his new memoir, a promised land, reflecting on his life and political career. Hes anything but Washington Post columnist Michele Norris and Mellon Foundation president t elizabeth alexander. Former president barack obama tonight at 8 30 p. M. Eastern on cspan2. You are watching booktv on cspan2 every weekend with the latest nonfiction books and authors. Cspan2 created by americas cabletelevision companies as a public servicend brought tod by your television provider. With joe biden as president elect, stay with cspan for live coverage of the election process in transition of power. Cspan, your influence you of politics. I am katherine eban. Myoo