Guest my great pleasure. Thank you so much. You can watch this and all of our what are you reading interviews booktv. Org. Use the search bar at the top of the page. Good afternoon everybody and welcome to politics and prose, live at lunch, where we bring you our politics and prose programming during your lunch time hour. My name is beth and imn Event Coordinator and we thank you so much for joining here to celebrate the release of a livewired by doctor david eaeman. At any time to the event you can click the link that will put in the chat to purchase a copy of tonights bo on pnps website. You can ask the author of questions by sabina to the button for which can be found at the bottom of your screen. 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 afternoon doctor David Eagleman is a neuroscientist in the New York Times best selling author and he has the nter for science and law a National Nonprofit institute and serves as an adjunct professor at stanford university. Hes best best known for his work on substitution, time perception, brain plasticity, neural law. Livewired, his new book, presents newindings from doctor eaglemans lab from streaming to tech devices that revolutionize how we 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. Thank you, beth. Its a great pleasure to be here. Ive been to politics and prose in person in the past and im sorry i cannot be there this year but im so pleased that you can join me this way online today. I want to tell you a little bit and will give brief overview about the main themes in the ideas in the book and then we will take questions. Lets start with this question but how man of you have ever seen a baby zebra get born . So, it can run in about 45 minutes, wobble to its pensively legs and runs around same as a baby giraffe, dolphins are born swimming and so on. How many of you has seen a homo sapiens get born and you may notice that its different the situation and they dont run around after 45 minutes and this is because instead of trying to hardwire everything in at birth Mother Nature found a simpler and more flexible strategy with humans which is allow neurons to self modify based on their experience in the world. In other words, we dropped into the world halfbaked and we let the world shape us and this is a you know, a completely new sort of strategy for Mother Nature but it has worked really well in the sense that we, homo sapiens, take over every corner of the planet and have been inventing the internet and cured smallpox and gotten to the moon and so on so it is really working for us and this is all do to this feature of brains which is that they are not really hard whered and theyre not really Software Running on top but its what i call live where. That is hence the title of the book livewired and in the field we talk about this as brain plasticity and a term some of you who 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 something plastic. You can take something plastic and mold it into a shape and it will hold that shape and that is what the word plastic means. He was impressed that when you learn something. For example, when you learn my name is david theres a change in the physical structure of your brain and it hold onto that. 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. You got 86 billion neurons into the cells of the brains that each 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 identity mac living electric fabric that is not just something you mold and hold to its shape but instead changing your whole life and that is why i prefer and ive coined in pushing the term livewired instead of plastic. This is an Incredible Technology and we dont know in Silicon Valley, we do not know how to build things like this yet but we have an existence proof of that analogy because we are all Walking Around with the pounds of it. What i want to do briefly is give you a sense of some of the principle that ive worked to distill from the field. There are about 30000 papers in literature on brain plasticity but what ive tried to do is figure out what is the main principles that we can point to hear. That is what i will try to tell you here. The first pnciple 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 said send him to get a brain scan. It turns out what a normal brain scan looks like is Something Like this. This is a section down the middle and the thing i want you to look at is number three which points to this area called the lateral ventricle which is a small space in your brain thats filled with cerebral spinal fluid. The point is this gentleman went in his brain looked like this. The section labed lv, lateral ventricle was cpletely filled with cerebral snal fluid with such pssure that it pushed his brain u against the side of his goal but the thing in the story illustrates is the remarkable flicks ability of this material because it didnt hamper his neurodevelopment or normal cognition and behavior and the thing is you cannot take your phone or laptop and, you know, smash it like that and hope it is still going to work. This is a whole different kind of peace that we are talking about with life where. Of course w have many very strange examples of this where when children get an epilepsy at affects 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. You take it out and originally surgeons would fill the empty spaces with sterile pingpong balls but turns out you dont need to do that because the cerebral spinal fluid provides enough pressure so they leave it empty and the child has half a brain. You might think all my gosh, that poor kid will have a real deficit but that is the weird part. They dont. As long as you do it under the age of seven the child is perfectly normal cognition and can speak, math problems, 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 the brain controls the other side of the body but they are a little weaker there but otherwise they are perfectly fine. The book is full of examples of this sort of thing to set the ball rolling that what we are talking about with liveware is a very different beast than what we are used to doing because i cant take my laptop and tear half the motherboard out and expect it to still function. So, that isrinciple number one to orient us. Principle number two is that brains are locked in the silence and darkness of the skull and have no idea what their body looks like and yet when we look in the brain but we find is that there is a map of the body so i wont go into details here except to say that you know, the parts of your brain that cares about the inputs coming from your body and there is a map of your body and same with your motor cortex putting information out to your body to move it around and so this was discovered in the 60s that there is this map and so the question is how is that it is map of the brain in 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 that for many reasons and one of them is lets say you lose an arm in an accident yr brains map will adjust so that it says i see, i am a body without an arm and thats cool and it tak over and changes its map so the map is alway changing predicated on what information is coming from the body. And so,ou know, this is a picture i talked about admiral lord nelson inhe book was the he of trafalgar and other british wars but most people dont kn hes missing his right arm because his right arm got shot off in one ofis battles and he, you know, described what it w like but now we understand what happens in h brain. It happened fast and just a quick analogy here which is how do the brain understand whats its map should look like and i use the analogy of colonization. Colonization, the key thing is it is a fulltime business so what happened with the french in the world is they had a lot of territory in the new world but eventually the french were sending over fewer ships than the british and 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 then the maps change and territory gets taken over. The key is nothing wise and shallow in the brain and having gets taken over in a very competitive system in there. Part of the way we can see that is with, for exam, people who are blind and people born by for example normally vision as it taken care of by the back of her head in the occipital lobe and one who is blind the or wait, sorry. I missed a slide but here it is. For someone who is blind the occipital lobe is taken over by sound and by touch and things like that. It is not like the visual syst system, let me put it this way. Even though we learn in neuroscience 101 that this part of the brain is a visual system is only the visual system if your eyes are working. If there are ships of data coming in and then it becomes the visual system but if there are no ships coming in then its thats cool, ill use this territory for the neighboring countries which in this case are sound and touch. And so, its a very fluid system. This is one of the things to understand about the brain even though we tend to look at it in a way a child my look at a globe of the earth and think that all those countries borders are somehow predestined or that is the way it has to come out but we know if you are into politics and World History you know that those country borders could have come out. If only if this king had died in his youth or this battle had tipped the other way and so on. Its the same thing in the brain. Despite the fact we learn about it as though its all diagrammed out is extremely fluid system and then the thing i want to emphasize here is that the takeover of territory is very rapid and this is something that is very new, a New Discovery for the last over years and neuroscience and what i mean by that is lets see you take someone, a sighted person and blindfold them and stick them in this scanner but what you find is that you start seeing activity in their visual cortex based on sound and touch and that happens within about one hour. Thisncroachment starts to happen. What this tells us is a very competitive system happening under the hood there and things are moving fast. The whole things sprung like a mouse trap so as soon as a system says wait one moment, im not getting vision back there it starts makinghanges and there is this annexations begins to happen. My student and i realized years ago that 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 estatehe visual brain, in particular, has a unique problem to deal with because of the rotation of the planet so 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, youre hearing, your taste, your small work fine but your vision is a thing that suddenly is deprived for it how does the visual system deal with this unfair disadvantage . We suggest it is by keeping the occipital cortex active at night and keeping it protected and we call this in the defensive activation theory and the idea is that what it is doing is dreams are the brain waves of taking over senses. Every 90 minutes you have this very specific circuitry in the brain the blast activity into the occipital cortex and that is all that circuitry does. Its extremely specific and it just goes to this part of the brain and that is what happens during the night. My understanding of whats going on with blaine plasticity we can open up this whole new set of theories and the framework about what the brain is a doing under hood and why. I want to tell you the next principle and im moving fast through highlights here but next principle is that the brain will rapid itself the brain wrapped itself around new data streams and you can to the audio here but this is a ted talk i gave and i built a vest with vibratory motors on it and its like the buzzers on your cell phone and the best is capturing sound and turning the sound into patterns of vibration on the skins whats happening is i was speaking and my skin is feeling that going on from low to high equency and this is a video, by the way. Thisoman on the left is saying the word of sound and on the ght shes saying the word touch. If you just look at the way the tors are mapped from low to High Frequency y can see its sound and if you look on her shoulders you can see thathere is a High Frequency there. The pnt is for people who are deaf what we can do is feed the information through an unusual channel which is the scheme so the inner ear which is this incredibly sophisticated biological machine that capture a sound on the eardrum from t frequencies and ships it to the brain in terms of spikes the little electrical spikes and we are capturing the sound of breaking the frequenes here and sending it to t brain up the spinal cordnto the brain and the brain can figure out what to do with the information. It doesnt know and again its trapped in silence and in darkness and the bul of your skull and all it sees ever are spikes coming in andt doesnt know the spikes rep of the transition of photonsr air compression waves or mtures of molecules but all it sees as spikes and with the brain is od at doing is putting together an understanding of what is correlated with what and figuring out how to understand that data. Heres an example of the very first participant we ever tested with this on the left, graduate student on the right to my graduate student says a word in this case says you and the gentleman who is completely deaf on the left writes down what hes understanding so my question says where and the gentleman writes down where and scott says touch. The gentleman is feeling this on his skin and able to translate the comp hit a by understanding of what is getting said. What weve done in the meantime is that they ended up being mean on Company Animal upholds bidding century and this is a wristband and vibratory motors in the ban and it captures a sound and theres a whole computer board here and what it is doing is translate that sound into patterns of vibration on the wrist and here is our very first participant here this is before what it was a clunky prototype but just to give you a sense of what it is like for him to be able to feel sound. [silence] so, as i said, we spun off this Company Called neo century called the buzz and we 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 device that is changing peoples lives all over. I wl also mention im a scientific advisor for thehow westworld and so we had our best to make a cam appearance in westworld and now we call it vest world as a result and i dont know if you watched the show but this was season two episode seven and thats the best on the screen and the gentleman in the middle if you can see here the gentleman in the middle is wearing out fast and with happening here is he feels spatially where the robots and the hosts are located and what we are doing is translating locations of something into a spatial feeling here so suddenly they feel theres a host of the room and they werent expecting one there and okay, it wont save you if robots go bad but anyway, we taking this idea and uses with people who are blind. In this case this judgment feels everybody around and he could feel theres someone ahead and behind and if youre walking up to the left or to the right he can see where you art which actually makes it better than what it cited person has been able to understand everything going on around you in 360 and we can at navigation directions on top of that so hes never been here before we add navigation directions and he can go right where hes going. So, there is much more to say about this and if anyone is interested in the general type thing about creating nuisances then please check out ted talks that i gave on this but book goes deep into why this works and dozens of examples about this. Let me move on to the next principal now which is the brain, as i mentioned, you know its trapped in there and does not know what your body looks like but one example that i discussed in the book is about faith the dog born without front legs. What did she do . She figured out how to walk on her back like a hum. What this tells us is that dog brains do not arrive reprogrammed to drive dog bodies but instead like brains across the Animal Kingdom what they want to do is get to food and get to water and to their mother and get away from danger and stuff like that so they figure out how to control the body better and thats all there is to it and we see this in humans all the time and it turns out the worlds best archer is armless. He got interested in archery and holds the world record for the longest accurate shot and this is because his brain inside there could say okay, cool, i will use my legs and pull this thing back and do it like that. If anyone saw my series, the brain when the cases i cover is this woman jan who is completely paralyzed and got damage to her spinal cord and soak the signals can go from her brain out to her body so she got these brain implants and this allows her to control this robotic arm and its very beautiful sophisticated robotic arm and she controls us with the signals in her motor cortex. She imagines moving her real arm and that gets translated to moving this robotic arm and of course, she gets better and better at it because of brain plasticity and because ss figuring out when i think this it does this a little wrong so think about it a different way and she figures out how to use it so you can have things outside your body. It turns out that this whole idea about how good you actually make live wire devices that figure out your body the way your brain does and this is what we are just starting one colleague of mine at columbia makes this little roadblock called the starfish robot which is not preprogrammed that it figures out its body trying out different moves and then seen what happens to the body and so it figures out how to get somewhere is trying to get over to the right side of the table here to get to reward and then it figures it out that the key is then you can snap a leg off this and figures out how to walk again just like humans and other animals do because it just figures out its body by trial and error. So, the nt principal or actually this is last thing i will mention and then i moved to q and a but you kno part of the reason i think its so azing to understand what is going on under the hood is because we can build new devic this way and completely new crystals of how we are thinking about things. As one example given the book you know, if you look at the mars rover spirit it was a multibilliondollar project we got it up to the red planet and it did a great job there but what happened eventually is it got its right front wheel stuck in the martian soil and it could not get out and so it died there. Now its a multibilliondollar piece of space junk sitting there. If you compare that to a wolf that gets its leg caught in a trap what the world will do is to its leg off and then figure out how to walk on three legs. Thats what well do. Thats what all animals do. They have a sense of relevance and they want to get to safety to seek water or find food and its actions are undergirded by the demands of its stomach and the threats of predators and the wolf traffics in deference to its goal. Its brain drinks up information about the environment and its capabilities in that environment and, you know, what its limbs allow it to do and its brain translates those capabilities into the most useful motor output. And so, a wolf carries on its limb because it doesnt shut down with moderate and neither should our machines. The last part about our talk about the next steps of how we can build a completely different machine that in the case of the mars rover gets stuck so it chooses wheels off and figures out how to operate in a different way. All of this is to say there are so much amazing stuff happening under the hood there that we are just stretching the surface of. Especially out here in Silicon Valley its Artificial Intelligence and that is baby stuff going on compared to what is actually here, the strange material in this living dynamic fabric that we all have under the hood so now what i would like to do with that instruction is to answer questions about anything. Thank you so much for that. That was so cool. We had a bunch ofreat questions and i will start with a kind of broaderopic that peopleeem to have questions about andhis idea of the brain remapping itself when senses are deprived based on imitation or just deprivation. Ed asks you hear about amputees having feelings in the absent limb and is a something only happens until the brain has remappedo recognize it doesnt have that limb . Great question. I have a whole chapter on that. Heres the thing the right way to think of the brain is that you have different timcales of change so some things are changing rapidly and other things a changing slowly and chained in order so the things that change fast hav to present enough evidence to the next level for them to say oka i will cnge to and then that changes and so on so what happens when someone loses a limb is that some parts of the brain change and readjust right away and that was the picture i showed you called the sensory cortex but dper areas in the brain still think that the information they are getting is from the hand because their whole life theyve gotten informatiofrom that and thats their hands so they get confused and so sometimes they think they ar still getting signals if you touch the face the say that must be the hand being touched and so on and there can be pain as a result of the interactions between theseifferent layers. By the way,his is a whole new framework that i present and it explains so much of what happens in neuroience. One of the or the oldest rule in neurology is older memories are more stable than newer memories. If youve ever known someone at the end of their life may be on their deathbed they dont remember it was happened in the last month for the last year but they rememr their childhood just fine which is unusual and we dont, other systems dont have that property were older memories are more stable than newer memories but the reason it happens is because of the way things work their way down the system and become more and more stable with time and ts is why, by the way on their deathbedeople will refer to their childhood language just as one example ill blurt einsteins last wds no one knows what theyere because he was speaking in german on his deathbed and the night nurse did not speak german so thanks. Certainly. Another question about this kind of same concept. What is happening in the brain of people who are put on ventilators to recover from covid so not necessarily like sensory input as we conceive with the five senses but when a body part is replaced with an external machine, does that same remapping happen . That is a very good question we dont know the answer to that. One of the things thats fascinating about replacing body pas in general is that you are fine with it. You can get an artificial heart or you know a respirator to take care of your lungs or ventilator and you can lose limbs and stuff like that. Still the same person. In contrast if you damage or lose even a little chunk of brain tissue that contains you entirely and change your decisionmaking and your risk aversion, capacity to name animals or see colors o understand music or 100 other things that we see in the labs every day. 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 and yet, a little bit. It is like the body is like the greater metropolitan area b this is the urban center and you can change the stuff and replace it and there doesnt seem to be much of a differenc 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 ta over as we sleep. How do you test that in a lab . Is that sleep studies that make people not dream so how do you do that . Great question but we just published a paper on this where weid deep research on 25 different species of primates, and it turns out even across primates which are a close coin and we only split off 70 million years ago from the ones here so it turns out this very Different Levels of plasticity so, for example, a personal lemur comes out of the womb and rches out pretty rapidly and it walks pretty rapidly and stuff like that as opposed to homo sapiens which is very new look at these to figure out how plastic the brain is versus how preprogrammed it is. Then we look at how much ram asleep they get, Rapid Eye Movement which correlates dream sleep and it turns out it correlates perfectly whichs to say the left plastic the animal, the less dream sleep and needs why . The visual cortex is not in danger of getting taken over because itoesnt have that much plasticity but the more plastic you are the more dream sleeyou have because you need to protecthe brain because its inore danger of takeover of the visual corte so that is how we study itnd what youre next on is it turns out that some people on antidepressants or inhibitors have less dream sleep so now we will be looking at that and doing studies on if Everything Else is, you know, hopefully the same but youre just not getting dream sleep at night what is the effect and one of the things i noticed right away is that people on these andepressants all say their vision gets blurry and the doctors, clinicians right now, say its because ofry eyes and thatight be right but it might not be right. Thats what im looking into. Thats awesome. You talk about Different Levels of plasticy in different species buthere is a question about Different Levels of plasticity from human to human. Two human brains lose plasticity as we get older . If so, are there behavioral ramifications . Yes. Generally the brain gets left plastic as it ages. Most people view this as a bad thing but, in fact, t reason it happens is because job of the brain is to build an internal model of the world out there. And so, what the brain is trying to do is figure out how to i optimize my behavior inhis world and how do people react to me and what should i do and how do i get good at something so i can have a career . Thiss the way the brain is trying to do this at all points and what happens is youet better and better at it as you age. The reason the brain is less flexible is because youre putting together a pretty good understanding of how t operate in the world and so that is why it would become less plastic but the good new or the really important part is to always make certain that you are challging yourself with novelty sohat you can build new ways to maintain plasticity. Ill give you a one second thing. This is about a study thats been going on or many decades where people donate their brains upon death and it turns out the people who stayed cognitively active their who lives, when they die, some of it turns had alzheimers disease but no one knew it when they were alive and the reason is they did not have the cognitive deficits because they were cognitively active for the last moment and they were dealing with other people, challenging themselves in a chores and responsible these and so on so even if the brain was physically degenerating with alzheimers they were constantly building new roadways and bridges where things had fallen apart. As opposed to people who retire in their lives shrink and they dont challenge tmselves and are not dealing with other people that is the worst thing you ca do so one of the main lessons that has emerge from neuroscience is the importance of challenging yr brain all the time. Th is the thing that y can do and what that means, by the way, soon as you get good at Something Like pseudocode dont do thatnymore. If youre good at it, do something youre bad at. It is as close says very real. Most people never have it in their lives and try to get better at it but i think its a bug, not a feature. Its something that the brain puts a lot of work into doing and sleep has all these other functions like taking out the normal tsh and consolidating so what happens with lucid eaming is this accidental interface between the two. In answer to your question i dont thintheres any evolutionary purpose to it. Its just a little bug that can be found in their and then ev asks this estion about dreaming. How do we see our dreams if we are not really seeing them with our eyes. Is that our imagination or whats going on there . This is a very important fundamental concept to get which is what you consider vision is all about internal activity, whats happening in here and you dont even need your eyes to see. Thats evidenced by dreams every night. Your eyes are closed, youre having a full rich visual experience. It turns out only five percent of data is coming in through the eyes. And all the rest is all feedback loops and other things going on back here. So vision is not at all like a canvas, its all about the internal model of what you expect to be seeing out there and things like visual illusions for example which are interesting to ayearold and neuroscientists when they grow up is it demonstrates it doesnt even matter whats out there. What youre seeing is whatever your brain is putting together and telling you and others dont even exist in the world, all you have a different wavelength, your brain finds these and just proceeds to detect the fruit in the trees and ill call that dream andhave a direct perceptual experience. But vision is all about when you blast activity through the cortex, [inaudible] another color, it always freaks me out a little bit. Me to. Another person asks about the brain while its sleep deprived or brains that have insomnia, whats going on in the brain then . In one sentence its just that to make this switch over from the sleep state its a huge thing of twitching over the whole factory and making all these changes and its a transition that hopes to occur well but it often does not and there are a dozen ways that it could go wrong sopeople have narcolepsy , and so on. But thats the answer. A question about the vast you design, what was the initial feedback coming from to train the brain to understand the correct words from the vibration . What were doing, its a great question because to understand anything its having a correlation so 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. So you watched your mothers mouth and theres the visual input there and theres auditory information coming here and eventually theres a correlation there to match it up and you get things like clap your hands or not on the bars of your crib. And you realize okay, ive got motor output here and every time i do that you have spikes coming in here and thats how you learn is the correlation so with a person who is deaf, they learn the buzz by watching the world. They see the dogs mouth moved and they feel the bark here and at first they dont know what that is that it doesnt take long before they say those two things are linked and they put them together. In the case of learning words , the video you saw was training for two hours a day. Sorry, four days, two hours every day and so if he sees the word and feels the word, thats how he makes that correlation there. If that answers your question. This other question, how is live air different from reinforcement learning . The way you described an agent trying to figure out their environment, im not really sure, maybe you are. Me not go into too much detail, but reinforcement learning is a way psychologists described and folks have taken on as a way of learning which is essentially feedback with reward is what tells you strike this and begin this and so on. A lot of what happens in some fraction of what happens in the brain is actually more than that, just as an example its not just about rewardand punishment although thats a part of it. Its about relevance to you of what matters in your environment and so on but its also about attention so as i said the job is to build an internal model of the world and what the brain is good at doing is detecting something doesnt quite match, Everything Else is fine and thats what we call attention, we then Pay Attention to that and put our sensors on it to try to get more information from it and one of the things becauseyes, this is a technical question you might be interested in. I propose a new framework called info tropism and the idea is when you look at plants with tropism, what the brain says with infotropism there maximizing the amount of data theyregetting from the world. Just one example is with your retinas, the back of your eyes have all these photoreceptors. During the day, the photoreceptors have a very high Spatial Resolution and their sending it back to the brain but as it gets dark, the photoreceptors say there arent enough protons here they start linking arms with each other so that they have lower Spatial Resolution higher sensitivity. They can catch photons that way. What theyre doing is maximizing the amount of information they can take from the world at all moments and its like this with all systems though it sounds like youre very good question you might be interested in these notions of things like infotropism that go well beyond reinforcement learning. Lets take a few more questions. Theres some really great ones. About ai and we will turn it over to a component of your book, do you think theres anything about human intelligence that emerged from the saying ai will not be able to reproduce or are we on task . Thats a great question. As far as we can tell, the brain is a machine. Its an unbelievably complicatedmachine. A level of sophistication, we dont have a way of putting this into words but when we look at it and say you damage it, and so on, so because of that, theres no theoretical reason why we should be able to stimulate that on proton or any, you can build a tennis ball or whatever you want. It should work. Now, that said, were still a young science so it may be that we discover something in 100 years that says its right back but wemight be able to replicate that. So ai should be able to get there eventually. Will it happen in our lifetime mark i really doubt it. Ai right now it does these wonderful things with superhuman performance but its actually really stupid compared to a threeyearold child who can navigate the road and get food to her mouth and do all kinds of things so ai is missing what we would call agi, artificial generalizedintelligence. Ai can distinguish pictures of cats and dogs with superhuman performance but if you then say now distinguish pictures from bears from candles it will fail catastrophically because it hits on one thing indicate cant generalize other things. Where we are now its a very long way off. Another question about your book that we havent touched on yet, can you talk more about whether using different pathways to mathematics or other equations . So synesthesia is where you have a slight mixture of the senses though you might look at a letter like j or b or whatever and think of different colors in your head area a is read and to be is orange but it used to be thought of as rare and we now know 15 percent of the population has it. Its just alternative perceptual reality, its just the way people see the world and youdont see the world this way , theres a lot to say about synesthesia. If youre interested i have a book on it about synesthesia but some of them can do mathematics a bit differently because numbers have colors and sometimes personalities and shapes as well so it just helps them hold on. As an example its like telling a phone number you might forget it but if youre synesthesia you might think it has a nice audio pattern to it and that helps you to remember. Totally. So were about time to wrap up but theres another question about your opinion on brain computer interfaces and if you think that there are any nonmedical applications that are going to emerge in the future . It depends what you mean by brain computer interface. Theres the kind of stuff i build which is the noninvasion worst brand for 900 and you have it shaped in and theres other things like elon Mosques Company neurally which i did a presentation on the other day and that isabout drilling a hole in your skull and inserting electrodes into the brain. What hes doing is very cool. Its pushing forward the technology on. And that will be very useful for a particular clinical application. Will it go beyond clinical . I doubt it. Even though the technology around neurally, people can interface faster with their cell phone, neurosurgeons will not do the surgery because theres always a risk of infectionand death on the operating table. Theres no point in doing open had surgery on Somebody Just so they can send a faster test so those are the kinds of things where we are doing a whole bunch of projects where where getting information about infrared light or stock market or twitter data or drones and things like that. Were experiencing all kinds of great stuff that go beyond the clinical realm and i doubt that people will get an open had surgery from. It seems these were a great idea in the past. Thank you so much doctor eagleman. I have one last question and thats what are you reading these days. I just finished a couple books about material science which was fascinating, one called stuffmatters and another called liquid rules. I thought its terrific and i just read a book about, im forgetting the title. I totally blanked on the title now but its about being up in alaska and looking at where the bering land bridge used to be an animal that used tolive there. I love that. Again, thank you so much for spending time with us today and i everybody is out there in the audience. You all had some really amazing questions and i would encourage you to check out mister eaglemans future events. Maybe you can ask those questions and i hope that everybody out in the audience stays well and stays wellread. The link for live wired is in the chat so thank you. You so muchs great to be back here at politics and prose. Have a good one. Week not this month we are featuring book tv programs as a preview of whats available every weekend on cspan2 and tonight its a look at business and economics. Starting at eight Eastern University of virginia business professor ed freeman discusses responsibility and ethics that he says unites influential businesses and then history professor scott explores a period of black financial innovation between 1888 and 1930 and its effect on us capitals in the st. Louis bank in richmond virginia, the first and only bank run by black women and mit professor Thomas Ludlum looks at how the leaders of the 15thcentury scientific revolution applied their new ideas to people, money and markets and as a result invented modern finance. It begins at8 pm eastern and enjoy book tv every weekend on cspan2. Book tv has top nonfiction books and authors everyweekend. Coming up this weekend, saturday at 9 pm eastern, former president barack obama reflects on his life and political career in his newly released memoir promised land. Sunday at 9 pm eastern on after words, Sally Hubbard and her book monopolies suck, seven ways big corporations ruin your life and how to take back control. Shes interviewed by david gomez and former appellate judge and University Law professor uglas ginsburg in his book roses of our republic examines the constitution through the eyes of judges, legal scholars and historians. Watch book tv on cspan2 this weekend and watch indepth live sunday, december 6 at noon eastern with our guest author and chair of africanamerican studies at Princeton University any brock junior. My name is peggy clark and im the codirector of absent global innovators group. I want to thank you all for joining us here today for what will be a fascinating conversation. And while the pandemic has prevented us gathering in person, we are so excited to continue those informative and inspiring conversations for advocates, artists, scientists and innovators