Public health and more. And professor and writer christopher rabbani discusses how she was denied reproductive choice andhealth care for her children. Find a complete Television Schedule booktv. Org or on your program guide. Good afternoon everybody and welcome to politics and prose live lunch where we bring you our politics and prose programming during the lunchtime hour. My name is beth long, im an Event Coordinator and we thank you so much for joining us to celebrate the release of my required by doctor David Eagleman. At any time you can click the link that will put you in the chat to purchase a copy of tonights book on p and ps website. Ask the author questions by submitting it to the q and a box, the button for which can be found at the bottom of your screen. Be sure to put your question in the q and a and not in the chat to make sure the author and i see it. On to our main event this afternoon. Doctor David Eagleman is a neuroscientist and New York Times bestselling author. He heads the center for science and law, a National Nonprofit institute andserves as a professor at stanford university. Hes known for his work on sensory substitution, time perspective and, blame brain plasticity. Livewired presents new findings from doctor eaglemans lab from synesthesia to dreaming two devices to that revolutionized how we think about the brain. Bio hackers, echolocation and the present and future ofai. Im so excited to heardoctor eagleman talk today. Welcome david. The floor is all yours and ill be back in a little bit for some q a. Thank you beth, its a great pleasure to be here. Ive been to politics and prose inperson in the past and im sorry i couldnt be there this year but im so pleased you could join me on this way online today. I want to tell you a little bit, a brief overview about some of the main schemes and the ideas of the book and then we will take questions. So lets start with this question, how many of you have ever seen a baby zebra gets born . So it can run about 45 minutes. It wobbles to its little legs and runs around, same thing with baby giraffes. Dolphins are born swimming and so on and how many of you have seen homo sapiens get born, you might notice its a differentsituation. 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 allowed 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 completely new sort of strategy for Mother Nature but it worked really well in the sense that we homo sapiens have taken over every corner of the planet. We invented the your internet, cured smallpox, going to the moon and so on so its really working for us. And this is all due to this feature of brains which is that theyre not really hardware, you cant think of them that way. Theyre not software, instead its what i call live where is the title of the book and in the field we talk about this as brain plasticity in terms you may have heard but the fact is this is a term that was coined centuries ago by william jane. He was impressed by the way you could take something plastic and mold it into a shape and it will hold that shape. Thats what the word plastic means and he wasimpressed that when you learn something , when you learnthat my name is david , theres a change in the structure of your brain andhold onto that. Thats why i use the word plasticity but in fact what i argue is that it is so much more than that going on. Youve got 86 billion neurons. Each one of these has about 10,000 connections with its neighbors which means you have. 2 quadrillion connections going on. And your entire life, every moment of your life these things are plugging and unplugging andseeking and finding new places and so on. Its a Dynamic Living electric fabric that is not just something that you mold and hold onto an shape but instead exchanging your whole lifeand thats why i prefer , i coined the term livewired instead ofplastic. This is incredible technology. We dont know how to build things like this yet but we have an existence proof of this technology because were all Walking Around with three pounds of so what i want to do very briefly is just give you a sense of some of the principles that ive worked to distill from the field. There are about 30,000 papers of literature now on brain plasticity and when i tried to do is figure out what are the main principles that we can point to hear . Thats what im going to try to tell you here. The first principle is that unlike computers, brains are extraordinarily flexible. Ill give you an example of that. There was a case a few years ago, a 44yearold man, normal iq, he went to the doctor to try to figure out what was going on and they couldntfigure it out and the doctor said to get a brain scan. So it turns out what a normal brain scan looks like is Something Like this. This is a section right down the middle and the thing i want you to look at is numbers three which points to this little area call the lateral ventricle which is a little space in your brain thats filled with cerebral spinal fluid. The point is this gentleman his brain look like this so the section labeled lv, thats the lateral ventricle was completely filled with cerebrospinal fluid with such pressure that it pushed his brain up against the side of his goal. But the thing the story illustrates is the remarkable flexibility of this material because it didnt hamper his normal development, formal cognition and behavior and the thing is you cannot take your phone or your laptop and smoke it like that and hope that its still going to work. This is a whole different kind of beast that were talking about with live where , with liveware and we have strange examples of this. When children get an epilepsy that affects one half of the rain, onehemisphere of their brain , they can go into whats called a hemispherectomy and originally surgeons would fill the space with pingpong balls but they realize that fluid provides enough pressure, they just leave it empty and as the child had half a brain, you might think my gosh that poor kid he can have a real deficit. As the weird part, they dont. As long as you do this under the age of seven the child has perfectly normal cognition and can speak and do math problems and can learn history and so on. They tend to have a slight limp on the other side of their body because this side of the brain controls the other side of the body and there a little weaker but otherwise they are perfectly fine and the book is full of examples of this sort of thing that sets theball rolling. What were talking about with liveware is a different beast. I cant take my laptop and tear half the motherboard out and expected to function. That principle number one just to orient us. Principle number two is that brains will, brains are locked in to the spiraling darkness of the skull. They have no idea what your body looks like and yet when we look in the brain what we find is there a map of the body so i wont go into detail here except to say that the part of your brain that cares about the inputs comingfrom your body , theres a map of your body and the same with your motor cortex which is putting information out to your body and moving it around. This was discovered in the 60s that theres this so the question is how is there a map of the brain to the body the obvious answer is that it must be genetically prespecialized but it turns out thats not actually the correct answer. We know that for many reasons, one of them is lets say you lose an arm in an accident. Your brains map will adjust so that it says i see, im a body without an arm now so thats cool and it takes over and changes its map so the math is always changing predicated on what information is coming from the body. So this is a picture, i talked about admiral lord nelson in the book with the hero of other british wars but most people dont notice hes missing his rightarm because his arm got shot off in one of his battles. He described what it was like for him but now he understands what happens to his brain and happenstance. Just a quick analogy here which is how does the brain understand what its map should look like . I use the analogy of colonization and colonization , the key thing 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 shifts than the british and the spanish and so they ended up losing territory. And it is exactly the same thing the brain. If admiral nelson rightarm is sending fewer ships because it now gone , then a map changes territory gets taken over. Thing live shallow in the brain and everything is taken over, its a very competitive system and part of the way we can see that is for example people who are blind, people born blind for example normally the vision is taken care of by the back of your head. And in somebody who is blind, the sorry. I miss the slide. Somebody who is blind, the occipital lobe is taken over by sound, by touch, my things like that so its not like the visual system, let me put it this way. Even though we learn in neuroscience that this part of the brain is the visual system, its only the visual system if your eyes work and if there are ships of data coming in, then it becomes a visual system but if there are no ships coming in and says thats cool, im going to use this territory for the neighboring country which is in this case sound or touch. So its a very fluid system and this is one of the things to understand about the brain even though we tend to look at it the way that a child might look at a global leader. It thinks all those country borders are somehow predestined or thats the way it happens from now. We know if youre into politics and world history, you know that those country borders come out very differently ifthis king had died or if thisbattle had went the other way or so on. Same thing in the brain. Its the fact that we learn aboutit as though its all diagrammed out. Its an extremely fluid system and the thing i want to emphasize here is that the takeover of territory is very rapid. We see something that is very new, a New Discovery for the last several years in neuroscience and what i mean by that is you take a sighted person as you blindfold them and you stick them in the scanner, what you find is that you start seeing activity in their visual cortex based on sound and touch and that happens within about an hour. This encroachment starts to happen. So what this tells us is very competitive system happening under the hood. Things are moving fast, the whole thing is sprung like a mousetrap so as soon as the system says im not getting vision coming back it starts making changes and theres this annexation that begins to happen so 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 its this. In the chronic competition for brain real estate the visual rain in particular has a unique problem to deal with because of the rotation of the planets so we are cast into darkness about 12 hours every cycle and of course im talkingabout evolutionary time, not having electricity. So what happens is in the dark your touch and your hearing and your smell and your taste work just fine but your vision is the thing thats suddenly deprived so how is the visual system dealing with this unfair advantage and we suggest its bykeeping the occipital cortex active at night. We call this the defensive activation theory. The idea is that what it is doing is dreams are the brains way of fighting takeover from the other senses so every 90 minutes you have this very specific circuitry in the brain that blasts activity into the occipital cortex and thats all that circuitry does by the way. And its extremely specific. It just goes to this part of the brain. Thats what happens during the night. So my understanding whats going on with brain plasticity we can open up this whole new set of theories and frameworks about what brain is doing under the hood and why. Okay, i want to tell you the next principal. Im just moving fast through some highlights here. The next principal is that the brain will wrap itself, the brain wraps itself around new data streams and you guys probably cant hear the audio here but this is a 10 talk i gave a few years ago. I built a vest with vibratory motors on it. So its like those little buzzers on your cell phone. The vest is capturing sound and turning sound into patterns of vibration on the skin so whats happening is i was speaking and my skin is feeling that going on from low to High Frequency. Heres a video of it by the way. This woman on the left is saying the word sound and on the right shes in the word touch and if you look at the way the motors are math from low to High Frequency you can see its sound and then touch. If you look on the shoulders you can see the highfrequency 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 instead of the inner ear which is this incredibly sophisticated biological machine that captures sound on the eardrum and breaking frequencies and ships it off to the brain in terms of spikes, the little electrical spikes. We are capturing sound breaking frequencies here and sending it to the brain of the spinal cord and into the brain. Your brain can figure out what to do with the information. It doesnt know. Its trapped in silence and darkness in the vault of your skull and hes ever are spikes coming in. Dont it doesnt know if those are mixtures of molecules, all it seizes spikes and what the brain is really good at doing is putting together and understanding whats correlated and figuring out how to understand that data. Heres an example of the first one we ever tested with this. My graduate student sends a word and in this case he sends the word you and the gentleman who is completely deaf on the left writes down what hes understanding. So my grad student says where and this gentleman writes down the word where and then the guy says touch. And so the death gentleman is feeling this on his skin and hes able to translatethis complicated pattern of vibration into an understanding of what is getting said. What weve done in the meantime is i ended up finding a company out of my lab called neosensory and we shrunk this to the size of a wristband and the wristband has vibratory motors in the band and it captures sound and theres a whole computer board in here and what its doing is translating the sound into patterns of vibration on thewrist. Heres our very first, before this was a prototype. This gives you a sense ofwhat its like for him to be able to feel sound. So as i said, weve spun off this company neocentury, its called the buzz and we got this on wrists all over the world now and its satisfying to be able to take a neuroscience idea and go all the way from theoretical concepts to a device thats saving peoples lives. Ill also mention im a scientific advisor for the show westworld. So we had our vest make a cameo appearance in westworld, i now call it vest world as a result. I dont know if any of you watch the show but this was season two episode seven, thats the best on the screen. The gentleman in the middle is wearing the vest and whats happening here is he feels spatially where the robot hosts are located and he can touch them accordingly. So what were doing is translating location of something into a spatial feeling. They feel theres a host in the room and they werent expecting one there. The vest wont save you if the robots go bad but in any case weve taken this idea and used this with people who are blind. There is much more to say about this. If anyone is interested in this about creating nuisances, please check out a ted talk i gave on this. But the book goes deep into why this works in dozens of examples about this. Let me move on to the next principle now, which is the brain as i mentioned, its trapped in their pick a dozen of which a body looks like but it figures out how to control it. One example i i discussed in te book is about the dog who was born without front legs. What did she do . She figured out how to walk on her back legs like a human. What this tells us is that dogs brains do not arrive preprogrammed to drive dog bodies. Instead, like range across the animal kingdom, what they want to do is get to food, get to water, get to the mother, get away from danger. They think about how to control the body they are in. Thats all there is to it. We see this in humans all the time in terms of the worlds best archer is our most. You get interested in archery, holds the world record for the longest accurate shot because his brain inside can say cool, ill use my legs, pull this back and do it like that. If anyone saw my television series, when the case of a covered businesswoman was completely paralyzed. She got damage to her spinal cord. The signals get go from a brain at with body so she got these implants and this allows her to control this robotic arm, a very beautiful robotic arm. She controls of this with the signals in her motor cortex. She imagines moving a real arm and that gets translated into moving this robotic arm. She gets better and better at it because of brain plasticity, because she figure out when i think this it does this but all the wrong side think about it a different way and she figures out to use it. You can have things outside of your body. It turns out this whole idea about how could you actually make life wired devices if they got the body the way the brain does, were just starting this. One colleague of mine that columbia makes this little robot called starfish robot that is a preprogrammed to know its body. It figures out its body i try and get different moods and then seeing what happens to the body. It figures out how to get to somewhere, to get over to the right side of the table, to get to reward. It figures it out but the key is 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 just figures out its body by trial and error. The next principle, actually this is the last thing i will mention and then moved to q a. Part of the reason i think its so amazing to understand what is going on under the hood is because we can build a new devices. We can completely have new principles of our thinking about things. As one example i gave in the book, if you look at the mars rover spirit, it was a multibillion dollar project. We got it after up to the red t and it did great job. But what happened is a got its right front wheel stuck in the martian soil and couldnt get out and so it died there. Now its a multibillion dollars piece of space junk. If you compare that to a wolf that get its leg caught in in a trap. With the willful do is to its leg off and then forget how to walk in three legs. Thats what wolf walls do. Thats what all animals do. They have since a relevance. They want to get to safety to seek water to escape danger come to find food. Its actions are undergirded by the demands of its stomach and the threat of predators, and the wolf traffics in deference to its goal so its brain drinks up information about the environment and its capability in that environment, and in other words, what its limbs allow it to do. Its brain translates those capabilities into the most useful motor output. A wolf turns on with a lamp because animals dont shut down with moderate damage lamp and neither should our machines. And the last part of the book i talk about and make steps of how we can build a completely different kind of machine that in the case of the mars rover gets its real stock, so it chooses will often figures that operate in in a different way h different body parts. All of this is to say theres so much amazing stuff happening under the hood that were just scratching the surface of. Especially out in Silicon Valley is so impressed with whats going on with artificial intelligence. That is baby stuff going on compared to what is actually here, this strange material, this living dynamic electric fabric we all have under that. Now what i would like to do is answer questions about anything. Thank you so much for that. That was so cool. With a bunch of great questions. I will start with a kind of a broader topic people seem to have a lot of questions about. Its this idea of the brain remapping itself when senses are deprived based on like amputation or just deprivation. Add asks, you hear about amputees having feelings on the absent limb. This is something only happens until the brain has remapped to recognize it doesnt have that limb . Thats a good question and that whole chapter on that. Heres the thing. The right way to think about the brain is your different timescales of change. Some things are changing really rapidly and other things are changing very slowly, and they are all daisychained in order. Thinks a change fast have to present enough evidence to the next level for them to say okay i i believe that come uncoated change, and that changes and so on. What happens when somebody loses a mammoth is that some parts of the brain change and readjust right away. That was the picture i showed you of this area called the cortex. But deeper areas of the great still think information they getting it from the hand because their whole life theyve gotten information from that and thats been the hand and so the get confused. So sometimes they think theyre still getting signals from handpicked if you touch the face they say that must be the hand that is being touched and so on. There can be paid as result of the interaction between these different layers. By the way this is a whole new framework that i present, and it explains so much of what happens in neuroscience. Ill give you one example. The oldest rule in neurology is called ribose law which is older memories are more stable than newer memories. If youve ever known someone at the end of their life as maybe on her deathbed, they dont member whats happened the last month come in the lecture maybe that they remember their childhood just like which is unusual. Other systems dont have that properly where older memories are more stable than newer memories. But the recent it happens is because of the way that things work that we got in the system, they become more and more and more stable with time. This is why buy the what often under deathbeds people will refer to the childhood language just as one example, Albert Einstein said last words nobody knows what they were because he was speaking in german on his deathbed and the night nurse didnt speak german. Totally. Thats 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 think of the five senses when a body part is replaced with like an external machine. Does that same kind of remapping happen . Thats a very interesting question. We dont know the answer to that. One of the things that is fasting about replacing body parts in general is that you are fine with that. You get an artificial heart, you can get a respirator to take care of your lungs come up in a later. 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 entirely. That can change your decisionmaking, risk aversion, your capacity to name animals or see colors for understand music or a hundred other things we see in the last 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 weight what about the rest of the body, doesnt have something to do with it . A little bit. 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 seem to be much of a difference at all, but the brain is really dense. Absolutely. I have a question just from me. I am so, so interested in the idea that dreams are meant to make sure that the other senses dont take over as asleep. How do you test that in a lab next visit sleep study . To make people not dream . How do you do that . Great question. We just published a paper on this we did deep research on 25 different species of primate. 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 your and c30 million ago from from these and so on. Theres very Different Levels of plasticity. So, for example, a lemur, comes out of the womb, reaches adolescence pretty rapidly. Walks pretty rapidly come stuff like that. As opposed to homo sapiens which is very slow to all these things. You can look at all the behavioral measures to think about plastic the brain is versus how preprogrammed it is. Then we look at how much rem sleep, Rapid Eye Movement sleep which correlates with dream sleep. It turns out it a correlates perfectly which is to say the less plastic the and animal fos dream sleep it needs. Why . The visual cortex is not in danger of getting taken over because of the net that much less this city, with 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 study it. What we are next on is it turns out some people on antidepressants or inhibitors have less dream sleep. Now we will be looking at that and doing studies on if Everything Else is hopefully approximate the same but youre just not getting dream sleep at night, what is the effect, one of the things i noticed right away as people on these antidepressants all say the vision gets blurry and the doctors, clinicians also is because of dry eyes that might be right but it might not be so thats what i will be looking to. Thats awesome. You talk about Different Levels of plasticity in different species but theres a a questin about Different Levels of plasticity from human to human. To human brains lose plasticity as we get older . If so, are there behavioral ramifications . Yes. Generally, the brain gets less plastic as it ages, and most people view this as a bad thing but, in fact, a recent it happens is because the job of the brain is to build an internal model of the world out there. What the brain to try and do is figure out how to optimize my behavior in this world, how do people react to me . What should i do . How do i get good at something so i i can have a career . This is the way the brain is trying to do this at all points, and what happens is you get better and better at it as you age. The reason the brain is less flexible is because you are putting together a pretty good understanding of how to operate in the world. And so thats why we become less plastic, but the good news the really important part is to always make certain you are challenging yourself with novelty so that you can build new roadways and maintain plasticity. I will give you one thing about a study thats been going on for a long time, many decades, what people donate the brains upon death and in terms of people who stay cognitively active their whole lives, when they die some of that turns out that alzheimers these but nobody knew it when to apply. The reason is they didnt have any of the cognitive deficits. Because there are cognitive active to the last moment, they were dealing with other people and challenging themselves and it responsibilities and so on, even if the brain was physically degenerated with alzheimers in consulate building new bridges with things have fallen apart. As opposed to people who retire and allies shrink of the dont challenge themselves. They are not even with other people, that is the worst thing you can do. Really one of the main lessons that has emerged from neuroscience is important to challenge your brain with novelty all the time. So that is the thing you can do. What that means by the way is as soon as you get good at Something Like sudoku or something dont do that anymore. Do something youre bad at. Thats great and that answers the question in our chat about aging with that kind 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 . Why can some people do it and others take practice and cant ever do it . Yeah, for anyone who doesnt know come , lucid dreaming is wu become aware that youre in a dream and you can essentially take control of the dream. It is very rare. Most people never have it in the lives are maybe once and theres ways to train up on it 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 off when youre sleeping, sleep as all these of the functions like taking out the neural trash and consolidating things you learned during the day and so on. It happens with lucid dream is sort of this accidental interface between the two thats not typically supposed to happen. In answer to your question i dont think theres any evolutionary purpose. I think its just a little bug that can be found in their sometimes. Totally. And then this question about dreaming. How do we see our dreams if we are not really seen with our eyes . Is it our imagination . Whats going on . This is a very important, a very important fundamental concept to get, which is that what you consider vision is all about integral activity come whats happening in here. You dont even need your eyes to see, as evidenced by dreams every night. Your eyes are closed. You are having full rich visual experience. Turns out its a look at the circuitry carefully only 5 of the data back year, only 5 is coming in through the eyes. All the rest is feedback loops and other things going on back year. Vision is not at all like a camera. Its all about the integral model of what you expect to be seeing out there. Things like visual illusions complex of which are interesting to like eightyearold a neuroscientist when they grow up is the issue of it demonstrates it doesnt matter whats out there physically. What you think that what of your brain is putting together a delegate. You may know that covers dont exist in a row. All you have is different wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation and your brain finds these and for speed to detect the right for in the trees and says i will call that read, call the cream and have perception of it. But anyway, vision is all about an integral activity, and winter blast activity into the occipital cortex, you see. All right. Then no color thing is just always, it always freaks me out a little bit. Me, too. Another person asks about the brain, like while it is sleep deprived brains that have insomnia, whats going on in the brain then . In one sentence its just to make this switch over from the wake to sleep is a huge thing like switching of the whole factory making all the big changes and its transition that is supposed to occur well but it often does not. There are a dozen ways they can go wrong. People of narcolepsy sleep too much, insomnia, sleep too lite and so on. But thats the answer. A question about the best you designed. Where did the initial feedback come from to train the brain to understand the correct words on the vibration . So what were doing is, great 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, right . You watched your mothers mouth and theres the visual input coming and and theres a auditory come here and eventually put together theres a correlation there, they are matched up and you do things like clap your hands or knock on the bars of your crib and you realize im doing a motor up with your enemy, do that i get spikes coming in here. Thats how you learn is with correlation. 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 part here. First they dont know what that is but it doesnt take very long for the brain to say those two things are linked and puts them together indicates a learning words, with the bitter you saw that was the fifth day he been trained for two hours a day and four hours before that. Sorry, or mac of the day two hours a day. So we seize the word four hours a day. Thats what makes the correlation. Thank you for the question. This of the question, how is liveware different from reinforcement learning . The way you described an agent try if they got 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 detail on that but reinforcement learning is a way the psychologist originally described in Computer Science robot assists and i folks have taken on as we learning which is essentially with feedback with punishment and reward is what tells you strengthen this, we can this and so on. A lot of what happens come some fraction what happens in the brain is reinforcement learning but its more than that. Just as 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 one but also about attention. As i said the job of the brain is to build an integral model of the world and with the brain is good at doing is detecting, wait come something doesnt quite match up. Everything else is fine but that doesnt and thats what we call attention. We didnt Pay Attention to that and put her highresolution sensors on to get information from it and so on. One of the things because he just this technical question you might be interested in is in Chapter Eight of the book, i propose a new framework called info tropism and the idea is when to look at plants doing photo tropism, they followed with a light is, if you move the light the plants will come what brains do is info tropism we are constantly changing what they do to maximize amount an affidavit the getting from the world. Just one example is with your retina, the back of your eye, all these photoreceptors. During the day the photoreceptors have very High Resolution images capturing photons and say i photons and send them back to the brain. As it gets dark the photoreceptors say there are not enough photons, so they start linking arms with each other, very sophisticated process that happens. They link arms together so that lower Spatial Resolution but 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. It sounds like from your very good question you might be interested in these notions of things like info tropism that go well beyond reinforcement learning. We will take a few more questions. There are some really great ones. About ai which i know is part of your book. Is anything but she went intelligence, emotion, consciousness, et cetera that emerge from our brains that ai will not be able to reproduce or are we, you know, ontrack of maybe all of it . Thats a great question. As far as we can tell the brain is a machine. Its an unbelievably complicated machine. Its the level of sophistication is something that bankrupt or language. We dont have with putting this into words. But when we look at it with the physical machine and went to damage it and you get damaged in ways you 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 you could build a beer cans and tennis balls for whatever you want. It should work. Now that said, we are still a young science and so it may be that we discussed something 100 usually safe we didnt realize that. If we discover we might be able to replicate that new thing, too. Ai should be able to get there eventually. Happen in our lifetimes . I really doubt it. The reason is i is extremely, its done these wonderful things with superhuman performance but its really stupid compared to a threeyearold child who can navigate the room to manipulate adults and get through food toh and all kinds of things. Ai is missing what we call agi, artificial generalized intelligence which is to say an antiicing can distinguish pictures of cats from docs with superhuman performance but you say now distinguish pictures of bears from camels and will fail because it can get trained in one thing but it cant generalize to other things. When we are now i think its a very long ways off. I know the question about different component of your book that we have quite touched on yet. Can you talk a bit more about the brains i be using different to perform mathematics or other equation . Suffering of the dozen a slight make sure of the census of the might look at the letter like jay or be and that triggers a color experience in their head. For them a is read np is orange orange and so on. Used to be thought of everywhere. We know its a 3 of population acid. Its not considered a disorder or disease. Its an alternative perceptual reality, just what some people see the world and of the people dont see the world this way. Theres a lot to say about synesthesia. If your interest at the book on it called wednesdays go blue about synesthesia. Some of them can do mathematics differently precisely because numbers have colors and sometimes genders and personalities and shapes as well. It just helps in to hold onto it. It. Just as his appetite my phone number you might forget it in aa week for now but if youre a stinnett c it had this nice modern pattern and helps you remember. They have better memory. Totally. So were about a time to wrap up like 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 on what you buy brain computer interface. Theres a kind of stuff i built which is noninvasive wristband you put up a couple hundred dollars and java new stream of data. On the other end of the spectrum theres things like Elon Musk Company which he did a presentation on the other day, that is about trolling all in your skull and inserting electrodes into the brain. What hes doing is very cool and is pushing for the technology on that. That will be very useful for particular clinical applications. Will it go beyond clinical . I doubt it. Even though the mythology around neural link is consumers will do this so they can interface faster 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, during an open had surgery and Somebody Just so that they can send a faster text. Text. Thats the answer. I think brain computer interface, what a bunch of projects where we are feeding information about infrared light or stock market or twitter data or drones with things like that. Experimenting with all kinds of great suffolk open on the clinical realm but i doubt people will get an open had surgery for the. If pingpong balls were not acquainted in the past come maybe computers still another great idea today. Thank you so much, dr. Eagleman. I do have one last question, that is what are you reading these days . I just finished a couple books about material science. One is called stuff matters and have called liquid rules. I thought it was terrific. I just read a book about i am forgetting the title come Something Like travel in the ice age or something by craig childs. Its about being up in alaska looking at where the bering land bridge is to be usually depict this absolutely beautiful. Love that. Again thanks so much for spending time with us today and i think everybody was out there in the audience. You are also really amazing questions. I would encourage you to check out future events. Maybe you can ask questions at one of those. And and i hope everybody out ine audience continues to stay welcome to stay well read. The link for livewired is in the chat and you can find it on our website. So hankie. Thank you so much. Great to be back at politics and prose. Take care. Thank you, guys. Tonight on booktv in prime time mit professor and tech investor explores the impact of social media algorithms have on Public Discourse on elections, Public Health and more. That all starts tonight at 6 25 p. M. Eastern and you can find more Schedule Information at booktv. Org or your program