And law, National Nonprofit exits an adjunct professor at stanford. Hes best known for his work on sensory substitution, time perception, brain plasticity, and neural law. Livewired his new book presents new standings in his lab, from dreaming to wearing devices that revolutionize how we think about the senses. He will discuss by packers, humans using echolocation and the present and future of ai. I am so excited to hear dr. Eagleman talk today. Welcome, david. The floor is all yours and i will be back in a bit to modera some q a. Great, thank you, beth. Its a great pleasure to be here. I have been to politics and prose in the past and so i couldnt be there this year but im pleased you can join me this way online today. I want to tell you a little bit give a brief oveiew about some of the main themes and ideas in the book and then we are going to take questions. Lets start with this question. How many of you have ever seen a baby zebra get born . So it can run in about 45 nutes. It wobbles and it runs around, same with baby giraffes. Dolphins aborts when insulin. How many of you have received a homo sapiens get born . You might notice its different, the situation. Theyont run around after 455 minutes and this is because it is trying too hard wire everything at, Mother Nature found a simple and more flexible strategy wh humans which is allow neurons toelf modify based on theirxperience in the world. In other words, we drop into the world halfbaked, and will let the world shape us. This is a completely new sort of strategy for Mother Nature but it has worked really well in the sens that we homo sapiens had ken over every corner of the planet we invented the internet. The church smallpox, have gotten tohe and so on. Its really working for us, and this is all due to this feature of brains, which is they are not really hardware. You can think of them that way. They are not software. Instead its is what i call lie and hence the title of the book livewired and in the field we talk about this as brain elasticity, a term you may have heard. The fact is this was a term that was quite a century ago by william james, because he was impressed by the way that you could take something plastic and molded into shape and it will hold that shape thats what the word plastic means. He was impressed when you learn something, when you log want me is david, then theres a change in the physical structure of your brain and his hold on to that. Thats when used the word elasticity. But, in fact, what i argue is it is so much more than that going on. You have 86 billion neurons, and each one of these has about 10,000 connections with its neighbors. Which means we have. 2 quadrillion connections going on in the brain. Your entire life Company Moment of your life, these things are plugging and unplugging and seeking and finding new places and so on. Its a Dynamic Living electric fabric that is not just something you mold and hold on shape but instead it is changing your whole life and thats why i have coined pushing the term livewired instead of plastic. This is incredible technology. We dont know in Silicon Valley we dont know how to build things like this yet but we have an existence of this technology because were Walking Around with three pounds of it. What i want to be very briefly is just keep a sense of some of the principles that i have worked to distill from the field. There are about 30,000 papers in the literature now on brain plasticity of what i try to do is to drought what is, what are the main principles that we can point to hear. Thats what im going to try to tell you. The first principle is that unlike Computers Come brains are extraordinarily flexible. I will give an example of that. There was a case a few years ago, a 44yearold man, normal iq have mild like ainslie went to the doctor to try to figure out what was going on. They couldnt figure out the doctor soon to get a brain scan just in case. This is a normal brain scan. Look at number three which points to this little area called the latter calendrical which is the most base in your brain that is filled with cerebral spinal fluid. The point is this gentleman who went in his brain look like this. The section labeled lv, it was completely filled with cerebral spinal fluid with such pressure that pushed his bring up against the sides of his skull. The remarkable flexibility of this material because it didnt hamper his neurodevelopment, his normal cognition and behavior. The thing is you cannot take your phone or laptop and smoosh it like that and hope it is still going to work. This is a whole different kind of the beast that were talking about with liveware. We have strange examples of this. When children get an epilepsy that affects one half of the brain, one hemisphere of the brain, they can go into for what is called a hemispherectomy where you remove half of the brain. You take it out. Originally surgeons would fill the empty space with sterile pingpong balls but it turns out you dont need to do that they realize because the cerebral spinal fluid provides enough pressure so they just leave it empty and the child has half a brain pick you might think oh, my gosh that poor kid come hes going to real deficits. Thats the weird part. They dont. As long as you do the under users under the age of about seven the kid can speak into math problems and can learn history and so on. They tend to have a slight limp on the other side of the body because this side of the brain and trolls the other side of the body. They are a little bit weaker there, otherwise they are perfectly fine. The book is full of examples of this sort of thing to sort of set the ball rolling of what we are talking about with liveware is a different beast than what were used to doing because i cant take my laptop answer half the motherboard out and expected to still function. Thats principle number one, just two or yet us. Principle number two ishat brains are locked in the silence and darkness of thekull. They have no idea what your body looks like and yet when you look at the brain what we find is there is a map of the body. I wont go into details except to say that the part of your brain that cares about inputs coming from your body, theres a map of your body and sang 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 in the body . The answer is it must be genetically prespecified but it turns out thats not actually the correct answer. We know that for many reasons. One of them know is that say you lose an arm in an accident. So that it says i see, i am a body without an arm so changes its maps of the map is always changing dedicated on what information is coming from the body. Predicated. This is a picture i talk about admiral lord nelson in the book was a hero of trafalgar and other british wars but most people dont notice he hes mig his right arm because it got shot off in one of his battles and he described what it was like. But now he understands what happens in his brain. It happens fast. Just a quick analogy, which is how does the brain understand what the map should look like . I use the analogy of colonization. Colonization, the key thing it is a fulltime business. 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 fewer ships than a british and the spanish, and so it ended up losing the territory, and it is exactly the same thing with the brain if admiral nelson said right arm is sending fewer ships because it is now gone, then the maps change in territory gets taken over. The key is nothing lies fallow in the brain. Its a competitive system. Part of the reason we can see that is with people who are blind, people who are born bld normalizations taken care of by the back of your head, the occipital lobe. Somebody who is blind, wait, sorry. I missed a. Here it is. For somebody who is bnd, the occipital lobe is taken over by sound, touch, things like that. Its not like the visual system l me put it this week. Even thoug we learn and neuroscience 101 class as part of the brain is the visual system, it only the visual system if your eyes are working and if there are shifts of data coming in. If there are no ships coming in, and h says thats cool, i would us this territory for the neighboring couries, which in this case are sound and touch. We tend to look at the witch hunt might look at a globe of the earth and think all those country borders are somehow predestined or thats the way it had to have come out. We know if you are into politics and world history, you know those country borders could have, very differently if this king had died or is this battl had died the other way. The same way in the brain. Its a extremely fluid system. The thing i want to emphasize is that the takeover of territory is very rapid. This is something that is new, a New Discovery just within the last several years in neuroscience. What i mean by that is lets say you take someone come a sighted Person Injured blindfold them and stick them in this scanner. What you find is you start seeing activity in their visual cortexbased on sound and touch, as it happens within about an hour. This encroachment starts to happen. What this tells us its a very competitive system happening under the hood. Things are moving fast. The whole thing is sprung like a mouse trap. As soon as assistances im not getting vision back there, it starts making changes and theres this annexation that begins to happen. What my student and i realized some years ago is this leads to a very new, interesting theory that we have now published on about why we dream. Its this. In the chronic comtition for brain real estate, the vual brain in particular has a unique problem to do with because of the rotation of the planet. We are cast into darkness about 12 hours every cycle. And, of course, im talking about evolutionary time, not having electricity. What happens is in the dark your touch and are hearing under spell and your case can work just fine but your vision is the thing that segment is deprived. How does the visual system deal with this unfair disadvantage for we suggested by keeping the occipital cortex active at night, keeping it protected y if we call this the defensive acvation theory, and the idea is that what it is doing is, dreams are the brains weight of fighting takeover from the other senses. Every 90 minutes you have this very spefic circuitry in the brain that last activitynto the occipital cortex and thats all that circuitry doe its extremely specific. It just goes to this part of the brain. Thats what hpens during the night. I understand whats going on with bra plasticity we can real open up why understanding we can open up this whole new set of theories and framework about what the brain is doing under the hood and why. I want to tell you the next principle. I am moving fast to some highlights. The next principle is the brain will wrap ielf the brain wrap itself around new data streams and actually you probly can hear the audio but this i a ted talk i gave aew years ago. I built a vest with vibratory tor on it and so its like little buzzers on your cell phone. The vest is capturing sound and turning sound into pattes of vibration on the ski what was happening was i was speaking and my skin is feeling that going on from low to High Frequency. Heres the video. This woman on the left is saying the word sound and on the right she sang the word touch. If you just look at the way to motors are mapped from low to High Frequency you can see sound and then touch. If you look on her shoulder and you can see theres a highfrequency there. So the point is for people who are deaf come what we can do is feed information to an unusual channel which is the scan. Instead of the interview which is this sophisticated biological machine that capture sound on the instrument breaks into frequencies and schiff set off to the brain in terms of spikes, electrical spikes, we are capturing sound breaking into frequencies here and send it to the brain of the spinal cord into the brain. The brain can figure what to do with information. It doesnt know, again it is trapped in silence and darkness in the fall of your skull and policies ever are spikes coming in. It doesnt know if those spikes are photons or her compression waves or mixtures of molecules. What the brain is good at doing is putting together an understanding of what is correlate with what and figure out how to understand that did it. Heres an example of the very first participant we have tested with us. He is on the left. My graduate students on the right. My graduate students as a word, in this case he says the word you and the general mythos completely deaf on the left writes down what hes understanding. My graduate students as where. And this german writes down the word where and then scott says touc gentleman. So the hes doing this on his skin and is able to translate this complicated pattern of vibrations in an understanding of what is getting said. What its doing is the patterns of vibration onto the wrist and ts is our very first paicipant, this is before, when it was a clunky prototype, but just to give you a sense of what its like for him to be able to feel sound. So as i said, we spun off this company, neo sentry, its called the buzz and its on wrists all over the world. Taking a neuroscience idea to a device thats changing. And im a scientific advisor for the show west world, and our vest made an appearance. I dont know if any of you watch the show about you this was season two, episo seven. Thats the vest on the screen there. The gentleman in the middle is wearing the vest and whats happening here is he feels spacially where the robot, the hosts are located and he can fashion accordingly. What were doing is translating location of something into a spacial feeling here. So suddenly they feel theres a host in the room and they werent expecting one there. Okay, so my vests wont save you if the robots go bad, but taking this idea and using this with people who are blind. In this case, this gentleman feels everybody around him and feels theres somebody ahead of him, behind him, left and right, he can feel exactly where you are and which makes it better than what a sighted person has. Being able to understand everything going around you 360 and navigation directions. Hes never been here before and we have navigation directions and he can go right where hes going. So theres much more to say about this. If anyone is interested in this general type of thing, creating new senses, please check out the ted talks that i gave on this, but the book goes deep into why this works and dozens of examples about this. So, let me move on to the next principl now, which is the brain, as i mentioned, is, you know, its trapped in there. It doesnt know what your body looks like, but it figures out how to control it. So one example i discussed in the book is about faith the dog who was born without front legs and so what did she do . Well, she figured out how to walk on her back legs like a human. What this tells us, dogsrains do not arrive preprogramed to drive dog bodies. Instead like brains across the animal kingdom, what they want to do, get to food, get to water, get to Player Mother and away from danger and they figure out the body theyre in. Thats all there is to it and we see this in humans all the time. It turns out the worldsest archer is armless. He got this archery holds t record for the long eest accurae shotment and his brain says, okay ill pull this thing back. If anybody saw my television series, the woman her she had a spinal cord injury and this controls the robotic arm with the signals in her motor cortex. And she imagines using her real arm and she gets better and better at it it because of brain plasticity and figuring out. When i think this, it does this, a little bit wrong and im think about it a different way and figures out how to use it and you can have things outside of your body. And it turns out the whole idea how can you like livewired things to at that big out what the brain does. And a colleague of mine has the starfish that doesnt know its body and then it figures out trying different moves and seeing what happens to the body. So it actually figures out how to get where its trying to get to the right side of the table here, to get to reward. And so it figures it out, but the key is then, you can snap a leg off of this and it figures out how to walk again, just like humans and other animals do because it figures out its body by trial and error. Okay. So the next principle, actually this is the last thing i will mention and then i want to get to q a. Part of the reason that i think its so amazing to understand what is going on under the hood is because we can actually build new devices this way, with completely new principles, how were thinking about things. One example i give in the book, you know, if you look at the mars rover spirit, it was a multibillion dollar project, we got it up to the red planet and it did a great job there. But what happened eventually, it got i. T. Right front wheel stuck in the martian soil and couldnt get out and died there and now its a multibillion dollar piece ofpace junk sitting there. If you compare that to a wolf, the leg caught in the trap. What the wolf will do, chew his leg off and figure out how to walk on three legs. Thats what all animals do. They have relevae, they want to get to safety, seek water, escape danger and get food. And its aions are undergirded by its stomach and its predators and the wolf tracks ineference to gome. The brain drinks up information about the environment and its capabilities inhat environment. In otherords, what its limbs allow it to do and its brain translates capabilities into e most useful mot output. So the wolf carries o with the li because animals dont shut down with moderate damage and neithe should our machines. And so, in the last part of the book, i talk about the next steps, how we can actually bud a completely different kind of machine that in the case of the mars rover got its wheel stuck. So it chews its wheel off and operates in a different way with a differentody plan. All ofhis is to say that theres so much amazing stuff happening under the hood there that were just scratching the surface, everyone especially out here in Silicon Valley is so impressed with Artificial Intelligence and so on, you know what . Thats baby stuff going on compared to what is actually here, this strange material, this living dynamic electric fabric that we have under the hood. What id like to do is answer questions about anything. Thank you so much for that. That was so cool and we have a bump much of a bunch of Great Questions. And a broader topic that people have questions about, this idea of the brain remapping itself when senses are deprived based on amputation or you know, just deprivation. Ed asked, you hear about amputees having feelings from the absent limb. Is this something that happens only until the brain remaps to recognize it doesnt have that limb . Thats a great question. I have a whole chapter on that. The way you think about the brain, dinner time scales. Some things are changing rapidly and others are slowly and theyre daisychained in order. And they have to present enough level of evidence for them to say, okay, i believe that and then that changes and so on. What happens when somebody loses a limb, some parts of their brain, change and readjust right away. And that was actually the picture i showed you of the area called the somatocentric cortez. And others think the information theyre getting is from the hand because their whole life it was from the hand. And they get confused. And sometimes if you touch the face, they think oh, that is the hand and there could be pain because of the interaction between the layers. And by the way, this is a whole new framework that i present and it explains so much of what happens in neuroscience. One example, one of the actually the oldest rule in neurology is called rybos law. Older memories are more stable than the new memories. You know somebody on their death bed. They dont remember the last month, but they remember their childhood just fine. And we dont have those properties where older memories are more stable. The way it happens, it go more and more stable with time and by the way, often on their death beds people will revert to their childhood language. Just one example, albert einsteins last words, nobody knows what they were because he was speaking in german on his death bed and the nurse didnt speak german. And this same concept, what is happening in the brains of people who are put on ventilators to recover from covid . Not necessarily sensory input and we can conceive of the five senses, but when a body part is kind of replaceed with an external machine . Does at that same kind of remapping happen . Thats a very interesting question. We dont know the answer to that. I mean, one of the things that is fascinating about replacing body parts in general is that youre fine with it. You can get an artificial heart, a respirator to take care of your lungs or anything like that. You can lose limbs or anything like that, and youre still the same person n contrast, if you damage or lose even a little chunk of brain tissue, that can change you entirely, your decision making, your risk aversion, to name animals or see colors or music or a hundred other things that we see in the labs every day. And this is how we know that the brain is the densest representation of you in the whole body. In other words, people ask what about the rest of the body . Doesnt that yeah, a little bit. Its like the body is like the greater metropolitan area, but this is the urban center and you can change the stuff and replace it and there doesnt really seem to be much of a difference at all, but the brain is really dense. Absolutely. I have a question, just for 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 a lab . Is it sleep studies . Do you make people not dream . How do you do that . Yeah, great question. We just published a paper on this where we did deep research on 25 different species of primates, homosapien being one of them and even on primates, which is a close cousin, 70 million from this one and 30 million from these and so on. It turns out there are Different Levels of plasticity. So for example, a particular kind of lemur, you know, it comes out of the womb, it reaches adolescence pretty rapidly, it walks pretty rapidly, stuff like that, as opposed to homosapiens thats very slow at all of these things and you can look at these behavioral messages to see how plastic the brain is and preprogramed it is. And then we have Rapid Eye Movement and correlates perfectly, which is to say the less plastic the animal, the less dream sleep it needs. Why . Because the visual cortex is not in danger of getting taken over because it doesnt have that much plasticity. The more plastic you are, the more dream sleep you have because you need to protect the brain because its in more danger of taking over the visual cortex. So thats how we study it and what were next on, it turns out that some people on tri cyclical antidepressants and inhibitors, a study on it, if everything is approximate mri the same and youre not getting dream sleep at night. One of the things i noticed people on antidepressants say that their vision gets blurry ap the doctors, clinicians say its because of dry eyes and that might be right, but it might not be right and thats what im going to be looking into. Thats awesome. You talk about Different Levels of plasticity in different species, but theres a question about Different Levels of plasticity from human to human. Do human brains lose plasticity as we get older . If so, are there behavioral ramifications . Yes, so generally the brain gets less plastic as it ages. And most people view this as a bad thing, but in fact, the reason it happens is because the job of the brain is to build an internal model of the world out there. And so what the brains trying to do is figure out how do i optimize my behavior in this world, and what should i do so that i can have a career and so this is the way that the brain is trying to do this at all points, and what happens is, you get better and better at it as you age. So the reason the brain is less flexible is because youre putting together a pretty good understanding of how to operate in the world. And so thats why we become less plastic, but the really important part is to always make certain that you are challenging yourself with novelty so that you can build new roadways and maintain plasticity. Ill just give you a one second thing about a study thats been going on for a long time, many decades where people donate their brains upon death and it turns out that people who say cognitively active their whole lives when they die, some of them turned out they had alzheimers disease and nobody knew it. They didnt have the cognitive deficits because they were cognitively active at every moments, they interacted with people, chores, responsibilities. Even though with alzheimers, they were building new bridges where things were falling apart. As opposed to people who retire and lives shrink and dont challenge themselves and not dealing with other people, that is the worst thing you can do. So really one of the main lessons that has emerged from neuroscience is challenging your brain with novelty all the time. Thats the thing you can do. As soon as youre good at Something Like sudoku, do continue, do something youre bad at. Thats great. And the question, aging without the effects of memory loss and, you know, cognitive decline. A couple of other Great Questions about dreams. Asked 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, lucid dreaming is when you become aware youre in a dream and you essentially take control of the dream. It is very rare. Most people never have it in their life or maybe once and theres ways to train up on it and try to get better at it. I actually think its had a bug not a feature. Its something that, you know, the brain puts a lot of work into generating consciousness and then that turns off when youre sleeping and sleep has these other functions like taking out the neural trash and consolidating things you learned during the day and so on. What happens, lucid dreaming is an accidental interface between the two thats not typically supposed to happen. So, in answer to your question, i dont think theres any evolutionary purpose to it, i think its a little bug that can be found in there sometimes. Totally. And then evie asked this question about dreaming. How do we see our dreams if were not really seeing with our eyes, is it our imagination . Whats going on there . So, this is a very important this is a very important fundamental concept to get, which is that your what you consider vision is all about internal activity. Whats happening in here. And you dont even need your eyes to see as evidenced by dreams every night. Your eyes are closed and youre having full, rich visual experience. Turns out if you look at the circuitry perfectly, only 5 of the data back here, only 5 is coming back through the eyes and the rest is feedback loops and things going on here. Vision is not at all like a camera. Its all about the internal model of what you expect to be seeing there. Things like visual illusions, for example, which are interesting to, like eight years old and neuro scientists growing up. It doesnt matter physically, what matters is what your brain is telling you. And colors dont exist, all you have is different waves of electro radiation and your brain finds these to test the ripe fruit in the trees, okay, im going to call that red, call that green and have a direct perceptual experience of it. Visual is about internal activity and when you blast activity into the occipital cortex, then youll see. All right. The no colors thing always freaks me out a little bit. Me, too. Another person asked about the brain activate or like while it is sleep deprived or brains that have insomnia, whats going on in the brain then. I mean, in one sentence, its just that to make this switchover from the wake state to the sleep state is like this huge thing switching over the factory and making the changes and its a transition thats supposed to occur well, but often does not and there are a dozen ways that it can go wrong. So people have narcolepsy. Sleep too much, insomnia and sleep too little, but thats the answer. A question about the vest you designed. Where did the initial feedback come from to train the brain to understand the collect words from the vibration . What you need to always understand. Anything is having a correlation, so, let me back up for one step, none of us remember this, but when you were a baby, you had to learn how to use your ears, right . So you watched your mothers mouth ap theres the visual input coming in there and theres the auditory input coming here and put together, okay, theres a correlation in there and theyre matched up and do things like clap your hands or knock on the bars of the your crib and you realize, okay, im doing motor output here and every time i do that, ive got the spikes here, thats how you learn with correlation. So, with a person who is deaf, they learn the buzz or the vest by watching the world. They see the dogs mouth move and they feel the bark here and at first they dont know what that is, but it doesnt take very long for the brain to say, oh, ive got it. Those two things are linked and puts it together. In the case of learning words, what the video you saw, that was his fifth day. He had been trained for two hours a day for four hours before that. Sorry, four hours, two hours a day. And so he sees the word and feels the word, but thats how he makes the correlation there. Thank you for the question. Yeah. This other question, how is learning from reinforced learn. Trying to learn its body, reenforcement learning, im not familiar with the term, maybe you are. Let me not go into too much detail on that, reenforcement learning is the way that psychologists described and computer scientists have taken on, essentially with feedback, you know, punishment, reward is what tells you, okay, strengthen this and weaken this, so on. A lot of what happens in the some fraction of what happens in the brain is reinforced in learning, but its actually more than that and just as an example. Its not all about reward and punishment. Thats a part of it. Its about relevance to you. What matters in your environment and so on. And also about the tension. The job of the brain is to build an internal model of the world and what the brain is good at doing, detecting, oh, wait, something dont quite match with the model and thats what we call attention and we then Pay Attention to that and put our High Resolution sensors on it to try to get information on it and so on. You asked a technical question you might be interested in in chapter 8 of the book. I proposed a new frame work called infra tropism. When you look at plants, phototropism. When you have the light the plants will follow them. What theyre doing, constantly changing the maximum amount of data theyre getting from the world. Just one example is with your retina. The back of your eye, youve got the photo receptors. During the day, the photo receptors have a very high spacial resolution and theyre just capturing photons, saying, i have photons, and theyre going back to the brain. As it gets dark, they say theres not enough and they start linking arms with each other and they link arms with each other so they have lower spacial resolution and higher sensitivity and catch photons that way. Theyre maximizing the amount of information they can take from the world in all moments and its like this with all systems. So, it sound like from your very good question that you might be interested in the notions of things like info tropism that go well beyond learning. Yeah, well, well take a few more questions, there are some really great ones. About ai. Which i know is a you know, a component of your book. Do you think theres anything about human intelligence, emotions, consciousness, et cetera, that emerge in our brains that ai will not be an i believe to reproduce or are we, you know, on track, maybe all of that. Yeah, well, thats a great question. As far as we can tell, the brain is a machine. Its an unbelievably complicated machine and its the level of cessation is something that bankrupts our language. Its a physical machine and when it gets damaged in ways and so on. Because of that theres no theoretical reason why we shouldnt be able to simulate that on silicon or any, you know, build it out of beer cans or tennis balls, whatever you want. It should work. Now, you know, that said, you know, were still a young science and so it may be that we discover something in a hundred years and didnt realize that. If we discover that, we might replicate that new thing, too, and ai should be able to get there eventually. Will it map in our lifetime . I really doubt it. The reason is ai, it does these wonderful things with super human performance, but its actually really stupid compared to a threeyearold child who can navigate a room and manipulate adults and get food to her mouth and do all kinds of things. So, ai is missing what we call agi, you know, artificial generalized intelligence, which is to say an ai can distinguish pictures of cats from dogs with super human performance. If you say distinguish bears from camels or something, it will fail catastrophically. It can get trained on one thing, but cant generalize to other things and where we are now i think is a long ways off. Another question about different component of your book that we havent quite touched on yet. Can we talk more about the brains of centipedes. Are they using different pathways for mathematics or equations . Okay, for anybody who doesnt know, with the mixture of the senses, they might look at a letter,j, b, or whatever and triggers a color experience in their head. For them a is red, b is orange and so on and it used to be thought of as rare. Now we know its about 3 of the population has it. Its not considered a disorder or a disease. Its the way that some people see the world and others dont see the world this way. Theres a lot to say about it. And if youre interested i have a book on it called wednesday is indigo blue about this and some of them can do mathematics differently precisely because numbers have colors and sometimes genders and personalities and shapes as well and so it just helps them to hold onto it. As an example if i tell you my phone number, you might forget it a week from now, but they might remember it has an autumn pattern to it and makes you remember better and have a better memory. Totally. Okay. Were about at time to wrap up, but theres another question about your opinion on braincomputer 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 braincomputer interfaces. Theres the kind of stuff i build, a noninvasive wristband for a couple hundred dollars and computer. And then the other thing, elon musks company neurolink he did a presentation the other way, thats about drilling a hole in your skill and inserting electrodes in your brain. What hes doing is cool and pushing the technology on that and that will be useful for clinical application. Will it go beyond clinical . I doubt it. Even though the mythology, oh, yeah, consumers will do that so they can interface faster with their cell phone. In fact, neuro surgeons will not do the surgery because theres risk of infection and death on the operating table. Theres no reason to do open surgery so they can have a faster text. Were doing a whole bunch of projects about infrared light or stock market or twitter data or drones. Were experimenting with all kind of great stuff beyond the clinical realm, but i doubt that people will get an open head surgery with that. If pingpong balls werent a great idea in the past maybe that isnt today. And i have one last question, what are you reading these days . Oh, i just finished a couple of books about material science, i thought was fascinating. Stuff matters, and by the same author, forget the title. Travelling the ace age by craig chiles. On the ice age. Its about being up in alaska and where the behring land bridge used to be. Oh, thank you for taking time with us today and i think that everybody out there in the audience, you asked amazing questions. I would encourage you to check out dr. Eaglemans future events, maybe you can ask those questions at one of those. And i hope that everybody out in the audience continues to stay well, to stay wellread. The link for livewired you can find it on politics and proses website, thank you. Thank you, great to be back here at politics and prose, thank you guys. Youre watching book tv on cspan2. Created by americas Television Cable companies as a Public Service and brought to you today by your television provider. 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