We'll have a chance in just 4 weeks to read to your verdict on the Democrats' conduct at the ballot box earlier on Air Force One a reporter asked trouble if he had a message for the women who were devastated by Kavanagh's confirmation after he was accused of sexual assault Trump said he doesn't think they are Tamara Keith n.p.r. News opponents of Kavanagh's confirmations say they're also emboldened n.p.r. Shannon Van Sant spoke with many protesters on Capitol Hill yesterday who now say they're going to energize voters seems like for the most part the mood is one of determination there were a few protesters I spoke with who seemed a bit depressed a bit resigned about the confirmation vote but the majority of the people I spoke with both upsets but also very impassioned and said that they felt that they needed to take back the country as some people put it and really take back the courts and they said that they wanted to fire up voters for their for the midterm election Shannon Van Sant on Capitol Hill Secretary of State Mike Pompei o has stopped in Seoul to brief South Korean president in on his 3 and a half hour meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong un is providing no public details but Moon told him Well done it's now been days since an earthquake and tsunami flattened parts of central Indonesia the death toll has risen to more than 7800 N.P.R.'s Lauren Frayer reports from the search for bodies continues. Workers shovel away the rubble of one wall of the Polish airport part of the ceiling is collapsed too but commercial flights are landing on the damaged runway this airport is the bottleneck through which some aid supplies are trickling in. Coordinator somewhere. Says he set up a makeshift kitchen on the airport. Grounds to feed evacuees 3 whole neighborhoods of pallu are mostly buried under mud the government is considering declaring them giant memorials where an unknown number of bodies remain Lauren Frayer n.p.r. News Indonesia this is n.p.r. News Turkish president tie a pair to one says he's personally following the investigation of a prominent Saudi journalist who disappeared last week after entering the Saudi Council it in Istanbul some Turkish officials say Jamal Khashoggi was killed because a sharp critic of the Saudi regime has been a contributor to The Washington Post the international police agency Interpol is calling on China to divulge the whereabouts of its president N.P.R.'s Rob Schmitz reports Interpol chief left France for his native China late last month and has been missing ever since Interpol president waives the 1st Chinese national to head the police agency he also serves as China's Vice Minister of Public Security that's why his disappearance has surprised international observers the South China Morning Post has reported the 64 year old Communist Party official is under investigation in China citing anonymous sources police in France have launched their own investigation into monks disappearance after being contacted by his wife in Leone where the couple lives in where Interpol has its headquarters man was last seen in France on September 29th before he left for a trip to his own country he was appointed head of Interpol in 2016 and is expected to serve until 2020 Rob Schmitz n.p.r. News Shanghai the private aerospace company Space x. Is going for another 1st tonight after launching a satellite atop a Falcon 9 rocket it plans to end the rockets 1st stage back at California's Vandenberg Air Force Base 9 minutes later. In Washington. Support for n.p.r. Comes from Capital One committed to reimagine in banking offering savings and checking accounts that can be opened from anywhere Capital One what's in your wallet Capital One and a and that John b. And Catherine T.-Mac are their foundation and Mack founded dot org. This is. A member station. This coming Monday morning. It's our only chance to hear Gabba news. And the only chance to hear California public radio listeners respond this California dream public media collaboration. With a debate. In follows. It's the Ted Radio Hour from n.p.r. I'm Guy Raz So imagine a big thick book about the size of a dictionary and inside that book each and every page filled with just 4 letters just 4 letters. Printed over and over. See. It's right for letters of the. D.n.a. The same 4 letters that every species on the planet has is made up of 4 letters each representing a chemical compound arranged in such a way to make you you this is really where the information comes from is not the 4 letters but exactly how they're connected to each other so is that a g.c.t. Or a g. C t or. This by the way is. Gene editing technology and Sam says if you printed out all of the A's G.'s and C's and T.'s it takes to complete your entire genetic code which by the way is a lot of letters the genome is 3.2 or so. You would have a lot of pages if you had every pitch filled with. 800 dictionaries worth of genetic code something like that for one person for one person so could you say that everything about. Our physical traits the. Our eyes are characteristics our personality traits come from for chemical I would say that wound and essentially all the information to turn a single fertilised eggs into an adult human contained within that singular genome. Here's what's really crazy 60 years ago we didn't even know what the genome was the answer to the question What is life was a mystery and that of course had been questioned I want to know when they explained life after it got started what was the essence of life what was the essence of life that was the question answered by James Watson who spoke about it on the Ted stage . And Watson along with his partner Francis Crick discovered the essence of who we are we got 20th of 53 that was when Watson and Crick discovered the hidden language of d.n.a. You know if you just put a. Piece next to see you have a right. So we saw genetic information carried for base Watson and Crick discovery helped us eventually to figure out how those 4 letters added up to $800.00 dictionaries for one human which led to another huge milestone on the journey to understanding who we are earlier today at the White House President Clinton announced the completion of the mapping of the human genome This was in June of 2000 more than a 1000 researches across 6 nations every veal nearly all 3000000000 letters of our miraculous genetic code I congratulate all of you on the stunning and humbling and with the mapping of the human genome we now have our greatest understanding yet of those 800 dictionaries and how all of the information in them adds up to a person with this profound new knowledge humankind is on the verge of gaining. Immense new power to heal Genome Science will have a real impact on all of us and even more on the lives of others and so now years on the next big thing is almost here back then when we know if the government spent $3000000000.00 to get that 1st genome sequenced and now we're talking about companies that are offering you complete genome for just a few hours and dollars Wow And so I think we're going to continue to see our knowledge relating those 4 letters back to various traits increase in the coming years. What this means is that scientists are now closing in on the day when they'll be able to easily access the 3000000000 letters of code that make you know you and then isolate even change a particular chain of letters responsible for certain diseases or even certain physical or personality traits there are many diseases whose genetic causes have been pinpointed precisely. The most common genetic diseases cystic fibrosis sickle cell anemia Huntington's disease we've known about those you know since the eighty's and ninety's and presumably we can pinpoint things that aren't diseases at all sure to the shape of our noses there was a recent paper that was published 23 and Me just released a study defining the associations between gene variants and whether or not you're a morning person while we're talking about the kinds of things that wow chat about at the water cooler or on your way to get a coffee and we're beginning to understand the d.n.a. Sequences that can explain those behaviors it's pretty mind boggling. Who we are what makes us it's one of the oldest questions out there but new technology means we've never been closer to answering it in all kinds of ways that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago so today on a show ideas from science. And philosophy about why we are who we are. So Sam Sternberg worked in the lab that developed one of the most groundbreaking innovations in gene editing you may have heard of it it's called crisper and Sam described why it's such a big deal on the Ted stage we've known for over half a century that d.n.a. Contains the blueprints to make all living things the genome can tell us a lot about ourselves better ancestry or traits and our disease susceptibilities there are things in the genome that you might not want to find out for example with 2 misspelled versions of a gene called. Your chance of developing all Simers disease is more than 10 times above average and with a single disease copy of the Huntington Gene you're virtually guaranteed Huntington's disease a devastating form of nerve the generation and in both of these cases there aren't currently any effective prevention or treatment options and so this leaves many wondering is this information even worth knowing well what if we could do more than just learn that information by reading the genome but actually rewrite the genome to cure genetic diseases at their source what if editing the letters of d.n.a. Simple and easy as fixing typos in Microsoft Word this is no longer science fiction thanks to a new tool called crisper Cass 9 in the last 3 years scientists have delivered crisper cast 9 to human cells and precisely fixed the genetic mutations that cause cystic fibrosis sickle cell anemia muscular dystrophy and Huntington's disease genome editing in animals and cells is teaching us more about how cancers progress and revealing promising new drug targets and companies already raised almost a $1000000000.00 to apply crisper cast 9 as a therapy and patients the crisper Cason technology was co-invented in my ph d. Lab at the University of California Berkeley and many consider to be one of the biggest breakthroughs of the last couple decades. But 5 years ago when I started my Ph d. With Jennifer down a crisper wasn't a technology at all. So you're saying this technology didn't even exist 5 years ago I mean how fast has this become a huge deal so when I started my Ph d. In Jennifer's lab that was 210 you wouldn't find a single mention of crisper in you know the lay media in less was talking about a vegetable crisper. But in the science of really talking a few dozen articles so it was about maybe one a month was coming out we now are at a point today where every day we have around 5 or 10 articles being published I think you won't boom not find a biologist in the world that doesn't know about crisper and you probably won't find many left that aren't actively using crisper how to study whatever biological question they go after in their laboratories because ultimately we're interested in understanding how life works and if we know that d.n.a. Encodes life then what better than a tool to rewrite that d.n.a. And study what the effects are. Ok the technical details of how crisper cast 9 works are complicated crisper for instance is an acronym for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats and Cas 9 is the key protein that makes it all work but what you need to know is that crisper cast 9 makes it easy in a relatively inexpensive to edit genes in precise ways any genes in any living thing from bacteria to people you know coming back to the 4 letters of d.n.a. Think about those $800.00 dictionaries filled with the same 4 letters and now imagine that you have to search for a single page and not just single page but a single letter on that page and mark that site for a change and maybe not any change but an aide to a t. Not an a.t.g. Or an a to c. So. For decades this was the kind of pine the sky science fiction idea that we could dream about doing but no one was going to be able to do it because it just seemed like it would never be possible. So that now with with crisper basically you can just go into the body find that chain of letters causing a disease or something and then just cut out one or 2 letters and replace it with with the right letter Absolutely that's exactly what it does and I'll just add one comment it's not been demonstrated yet in human patients so if you had just said the same thing for human cells in a petri dish absolutely with human patients comes the additional challenge of getting to the right cells and that's the same challenge that every drug has to contend with this and this issue of delivery and now it's just a matter of figuring out how to do that inside patients now the next frontier will be really using this tool to improve human health can we achieve this automated goal of curing a genetic disease at its source at the level of d.n.a. Instead of just treating the downstream symptoms imagine a future in which we use stem cell technology together with Chris precast 9 to remove disease cells from patient repair them in the lab and then transplant those corrected cells back into the body clinical trials are already underway that offer a cure for HIV Aids by editing the d.n.a. In blood cells taken from HIV positive patients and I expect we're going to see more and more clinical trials with crisper entering the pipeline in the next few years what really got folks speaking this past year was the report in May that for the 1st time ever scientists used crisper cast line to edit the d.n.a. In human embryos and unlike therapy in adult patients this would introduce heritable changes that could be passed on to subsequent generations you can imagine the controversy that this has provoked. And many fear that this technology could be abused. And. Select Few could pick and choose the best. That could ease. Disease it would be. On the show today. The Ted radio. Interview. Is raising hard questions about politics privilege and. So we are going to. The country. That's next. Katie b.s. Is supported by Torrey Pines bank offering business banking solutions to small and mid-sized companies through its 7 offices in the greater San Diego area Torrey Pines bank is a division of Western Alliance Bank member f.d.i.c Torrey Pines bank bank on accountability Jackson designing remodelling inviting you to their design in remodelling seminar Saturday October 13th 10 am to 1 pm in their Kearney Mesa showroom meet j.d. Are designers and architects and explore materials and trends in living spaces r.s.v.p. At Jackson design and remodelling dot com support for the Ted Radio Hour comes from the University of Florida where solving for next is powered by its land grant heritage from renewable energy to global health u.s. Students and researchers are working to solve challenges at next dot u.f.o. Dot edu from Elijah Craig family owned makers of small batch Kentucky straight bourbon whiskey you lies to Craig Bardstown Kentucky 47 percent alcohol by volume Elijah Craig promotes responsible drinking and from the Annie e. Casey Foundation. It's that Ted Radio Hour from n.p.r. I'm Guy rise and I'll show today ideas about who we are what makes us us and we've been talking to a biochemist Sam Sternberg who's been explaining how a new gene editing technology called crisper cast 9 could make it cheap and easy to create humans who are you're basically talking like super heroes right like perfect vision super human strength perfect safety scores right. I think that's that's the science fictionalization of what crisper could allow. We have long lists of gene variants associated with certain traits and some of those are silly like whether or not your morning person but we also have long lists of gene variants that are so seated with things that might be desirable like having extra strong bones or leaner muscles or lower sensitivity to pain or lower risk of coronary heart disease and as those lists continue to grow we now have a technology that could in theory allow an individual to upgrade their genome but why would that be the science fiction version if it seems like the technologies are promising like if there was a you know way to make a child more resilient to painter or give us a higher i.q. Use you can imagine that people would want to take advantage of all those things right I think they will I think the challenge then is to is to think about how we can ensure that that technology if it becomes available is used safely because recently not there yet but also I think equitably there's a great example in the world of each other be aids so it turns out one to 2 percent of all humans have a specific genetic mutation that is associated with HIV immunity because this gene variant they have essentially masks their cells and that each of the virus can't get inside so what if and you know it delivered it into a fertilized egg cell into a hugh. An embryo so that that future child even though neither of his or her parents have that mutation will still have a chubby immunity we might assume of course they would want that but it's still a game changing idea that we would be able to make those decisions and not just selected traits they'll inherit from their parents something we can already do with I.V.'s and genetic testing but kind of installing new variants into their genome that they would never have gotten from their parents it's like a preemptive solution for something that may never come come to fruition like that like we're just saying hey just in case we're going to give you immunity against this thing that you may or may not ever need absolutely So do you consider that an enhancement or is that disease prevention and as you know many people see they divide the d.n.a. Rewriting or Gene editing into kind of 2 different categories one being disease prevention and one being genetic enhancement but I think there are many that fall right smack dab in the middle so yet with the with the HIV and unity Gene c.c.r. 5 that's disease prevention but it's preventing a disease that you may never get so and a way it's kind of conferring a genetic advantage and I'll just state again that's a gene variant that exists naturally but only one to 2 percent of humans have Yeah so it's clearly giving you an advantage above what we might call normal human species functioning but I mean I mean a part of me wonders to be doing that you know you know I mean like there's a process that just kind of has sort of happens in some beginning of human evolution and we would completely be up ending that that's certainly one way of looking at it. And yet evolution is inherently cruel for someone that has a genetic disease that's kind of a crummy hand that they've been dealt so I think this comes down to the question of how sacred is the genome and is it something that should remain untouched untainted left alone of course what we do in any one patient that's a life saver for that patient but when you think about human evolution over the course of hundreds or thousands of years now we're talking about a technology that will not only affect that individual but that individual's children and their children and their children and their children and so that's where I think you have this very radius you of directing future evolution. You know even saying that sounds hyperbolic It sounds like science fiction but I think the technology will get to a point where you could use in embryos to install things like each have immunity or stronger muscles and maybe someday gene variants associated with higher i.q. Who are being a morning person if that's what you'd like to be that's where things really take off. Sternberg is working on a book about all this it's called a crack in creation. And the unthinkable power to control evolution you can check out his Ted talk at ted dot com. On today's show we're asking a very important question which is Who are we Ok by the way do you have the answer do you know who we are you know who I am. Have to have to have your I have. Including of who we are this is Steven Pinker I am a professor of psychology at Harvard University and I write books on language mind and human nature. So what what is it that makes us who we are. Well. There are some intricately complex circuitry in the brain fabricated over millions of years by natural selection that equips us with a set of motives and emotions and mechanisms for learning and thinking that make us who we are Ok there's a lot to unpack here so to begin to understand what Steven Pinker just said and to understand what accounts for the differences between us we kind of need to understand how far we've actually come in trying to figure this all out so Stephen can you can you help us with this Ok I'll do my best. Ok just to get us started human beings have debated nature versus nurture for hundreds even thousands of years that is whether who we are personalities are behaviors are either entirely inherited from our parents or whether it all comes from the environment around us that when we're born our minds are basically like a blank slate and that all of its structure comes from socialization culture parenting experience that was Steven Pinker on the Ted stage back in 2002 and this idea of the blank slate it was especially popular in the 2nd half of the 20th century and it meant that a lot of us went through high school biology hearing stuff like this man has no nature from the historian who say Ortega that man has no instincts in the anthropologist actually Montagu the human brain is capable of a full range of behaviors and predisposed to none from the late scientist Stephen Jay Gould Now why should it have been such an appealing notion Well there are a number of political reasons why people have found congenial foremost is that if we're blank slates then by definition we are equal because they are all equal 0 equals 0 but if something is written on the slate then some people could have more of it and others and according to this line. Thinking that would justify discrimination and inequality another political fear human nature is that if we were blank slates we can perfect mankind the age old dream of the perfectibility of our species through social engineering whereas if we're born with certain instincts then perhaps some of them might condemn us to selfishness prejudice and violence 1st of all there a number of reasons to doubt that the human mind is a blank slate and some of them just come from common sense as many people have told me over the years anyone who's had more than one child knows that kids come into the world with certain temperaments and talents it doesn't all come from the outside. Oh and anyone who has both a child and a house pet has surely noticed that the child exposed to speech will acquire a human language whereas the house at one presumably because of some innate difference between them and anyone who's ever been in a heterosexual relationship knows that the minds of men in the minds of women are not indistinguishable. So for years the debate about nature vs nurture has been just that debate it's one or the other but Steven Pinker has mainly argued that this shouldn't be a debate that who we are comes down to both our genes and our environment it's a mistake to think that if there is an effect of the environment that shows that we're blanks weights or conversely if there is such a thing as human nature then we are robots and we're programmed to walk into walls and be completely insensitive to our environment. Just the wrong way to think about it the right way to think about it he says starts with our genome Well the fact that we behave like humans are not like tens or chimpanzee use or squirrels is very much determined by our genome so. Genome sets us apart from animals but it also sets us apart from each other the differences between 2 individuals shows a pretty strong statistical effect of our genes but then here's where environment comes in aside from the fact that we have he needs you know we have a unique history of development that is the process by which our brain gets wired up. In Utero in the 1st few years of life is not dictated down to the last sentence by the genes. But there's space for random twists and turns in the wiring up of the brain that make even identical twins somewhat different and of course we have a unique lifelines we have a unique trajectory of experience as we make our way through the world and make decisions and the decisions affect the way the world treats us including other people and we take away lessons from how we've been treated and so we set off with a combination of our unique genome and our chain of experiences Ok just to clarify our environment is helping mold our genes Oh obviously that is if I was brought up as an Apache or as a. You know a Japanese samurai or as a remaining peasant in the 14th century there would be differences undoubtedly compared to who I am now so I just have to Sam Sternberg about you know like how being a morning person is possibly embedded in our genetic code so so what else are we probably born with so we know that intelligence has a big heritable component which doesn't mean that it is completely determined by our genes but it does mean that some of the differences among people can be attributed to differences among their genes we know that differences in personality how conscientious how agreeable how erotic how extroverted are influenced by genome and even behavioral traits such as how likely are you to be a smoker or an alcoholic all of them. Show some influence of our genetic and development. And even though we can now probe our genomes to actually test some of these things out Steven Pinker's says there's another slightly bizarre old fashioned method such as looking at similarities between identical twins who are separated at birth because identical twins separated at birth share all of their genes but of course not their environments and they show that there is a pretty hefty statistical influence of the genes that is if you know what one identical twin is like you can make a lot of predictions about the other one who he or she may never have met who may have grown up an ocean and a culture away my favorite example is a pair of twins one of whom was brought up as a Catholic in a Nazi family in Germany the other was brought up in a Jewish family in Trinidad when they walked into the lab in Minnesota they were wearing identical navy blue shirts with Apple let's both of them like to dip buttered toast and coffee both of them kept rubber bands around their wrists both of them flushed the toilet before using it as well as after and both of them like to surprise people by sneezing in crowded elevators to watch them jump. Now. This story might seem too good to be true but when you would administer. Batteries of psychological tests you get the same results namely identical twins separated at birth show quite astonishing similarities. That's just unbelievable so then like even things like like habits or personality quirks are more or less assigned at birth Well they're they're influenced at birth I wouldn't say they're a sign because there are probably some unpredictable changes that occur as the brain and it gels in the 1st couple of years of life. There are changes that unfold over. The lifespan whether they are a response to outside forces or if they're just the way that the brain spontaneously develops we don't really know yeah there are certainly ways in which anyone can be damaged if you if you undergo. Trauma or abuse that can leave lasting scars but I think there is certainly a there are statistical forces there is there's definitely pressure that makes one person different from another across the board Yeah I mean when when you think about like who you are I mean do you think you're the same person that you were when when you were a child or teenager or in your twenty's as is you are now I do see myself as basically the same kind of person I like the same music I like same foods I like the same past times have I have similar kinds of interests and research on personality shows that there is a substantial amount of continuity in a person's character as they go through life but there are certain changes that I see in myself that probably occur in most people as they as they get older Yeah we get less neurotic we get nicer we get less anxious as we get older all of us but still if one person is more anxious than another at the age of 20 though he'll probably be more anxious than the other person at the age of 70 as well even if both of them are less anxious across the board so I mean if we are more or less the same right at 20 or at 70 is it even possible to make big changes to it to who we are I think we have the capacity to change our behavior which is really what counts I don't think that there's a lot of room to change who we are in the sense of a fundamentally nervous person becoming. Constitutionally calm and and easygoing but certainly there are methods of say cognitive behavior therapy that are provably effective at reducing anxiety and phobias and treating depression Yeah and the thing is that those don't appeal to see. If you're eel immaterial soul they are ways of acting on our neural circuitry we have to keep in mind that our narrow circuitry is so intricately complex and has been shaped by evolution to interact with the world through our social. Mechanisms of interacting through language through facial expression through body language that there are ways of changing our feelings and thoughts by the old fashioned route of conversation and example and and art and evidence based psychotherapy so there is scope for for a range of behavior within the on full open a given personality type and we can probe the outside of the on of loped that the genes make available to us do you when you think about what what animates a person do you think that it can be figured out pretty logically or do you think that huge parts of it are just mysterious. Huge parts of it are certainly mysterious because the interactions are so unfathomably complex Yeah there are 10 to 100000000000 cells in the brain connected by 100 trillion synapses and no one can keep track of all of them even occur in a computer simulation we also know that chance plays an enormous role above and beyond the role of either genes or environments we can see this in identical twins who are brought up together not not the exotic cases of the twins separated at birth but just the kind of twins that all of us know if you know it's a pair of twins you know that they're they're they're they're more similar than 2 people plucked off the street at random but they're unique individuals they're you don't you don't confuse them when once you know them and sometimes they're not friends and sometimes they're not friends and indeed now how do you counter those differences it's not their genes at least not the ones they inherited from their parents there could be some a few mutations that each one idiosyncratically acquired It's not there by and large their environments because they grew up in the same parents the same school the same house the same older sibs seen younger sibs. Really forced to the conclusion that there's an enormous role for for chance for the roll of the dice in who we become because. 2 people who have everything in common both in the genes and the environment a level nonetheless don't turn out to be indistinguishable. Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker has given several Ted talks including this one about the blank slight You can find all of them at ted dot com More ideas about what makes us us that's in just a minute I'm Guy Raz And you're listening to the Ted Radio Hour from n.p.r. I'm Peter say Brett Kavanaugh friends are coming forward to say used to drink so much he got a blue ribbon. To join us with a news quiz that sober as a judge from n.p.r. 9 am Saturday 10 am Sunday on p.b.s. Public Radio. Is supported by sun powered by stellar solar who would like to remind San Diego homeowners who have not installed solar power that investing in solar energy for your home today can help minimize rising utility bills tomorrow learn more at stellar solar dot net museum arts briefs are supported by the San Diego museum Council and the Veterans Museum at Balboa Park presenting prisoners of war from World War 2 to Vietnam updated to include new photos audio visual material momentos and artifacts through November 30th details at veteran museum dot org You're listening to member supported public radio Ok p.b.s. F.m. Where news matters you can listen online and search for k b b s news stories and podcasts p.b.s. Dot org Support for the Ted Radio Hour comes from the University of Florida where solving for next is powered by its land grant heritage from renewable energy to global health u.s. Students and researchers are working to solve challenges at next dot u.f.o. Dot edu from Elijah Craig family owned makers of small batch Kentucky straight bourbon whiskey you guys are Craig Bardstown Kentucky 47 percent alcohol by volume Eliza Kreg promotes responsible drinking and from the Annie e. Casey Foundation it's the Ted Radio Hour from n.p.r. I'm Guy Raz And on the show today ideas about who we are what makes us us and according to humorist is a frank in this short talk it's not that complicated here he is on the Ted stage this is the human terrorist at dance to see if you are a human. Please raise your hand if something applies to you Are we agreed. Yes Then let's begin. Have you ever eaten a book or long past your childhood. It's Ok it's safe here. Have you ever made a small weird sound when you remembered something embarrassing. Have you ever purposely lowercase the 1st letter of a text in order to come across as sad or disappointed. Ok. Have you ever ended a text with a period as a sign of aggression. Ok period. Have you ever laughed or smiled when someone said something to you and then spent the rest of the day wondering why you would be acted that way. Yes. Have you ever seemed to lose your airplane ticket a 1000 times as you walked from the check in to the gate. Yes Have you ever put on a pair of pants and then much later realize that there was a loose socks smushed up against your thighs. Good. At you ever tried to guess someone else's password so many times that it locked their account. Have you ever had a nagging feeling that one day you will be discovered as a fraud. It's safe here. Have you ever hoped that there was some ability you hadn't discovered yet that you were just naturally great ask. Have you ever broken something in real life and then found yourself looking for an undo button in real life. Have you ever marveled at how someone you thought was so ordinary could suddenly becomes so beautiful. Have you ever stared at your phone smiling like an idiot while texting with someone. Have you ever subsequently texted that person the phrase I'm staring at the phones. Smiling like an idiot. Have you ever been tempted to and then gave in to the temptation of looking through someone else's phone. Have you ever had a conversation with yourself and then suddenly realized you're. Yourself. Has your phone never run out of the battery in the middle of an argument and it sort of felt like the phone was breaking up with both of you. Have you ever thought that working on an issue between you was futile because it should just be easier than this or this is supposed to happen just naturally. Have you ever realize that very little in the long run just happens naturally. Have you ever woken up blissfully and suddenly been flooded by the awful remembrance that someone had left you. Have you ever lost the ability to imagine a future without a person that no longer was in your life. Have you ever look back on that event with the sad smile of autumn and the realisation that futures will happen regardless. Congratulations you have now completed the test you are all human. That's writer and humorist say Frank got a couple other great talks at ted dot com show today what makes us us. Can you explain. Consciousness is the most familiar thing for any of us and we all know the difference between being conscious and not being conscious this is an l. Seth He's a professor of neuroscience at the University of Sussex in the u.k. Consciousness is any kind of experience at all whether it's a visual experience of the world around us whether it's an emotional experience of . A happy or excited from experiences of intending to do something or of being the cause of something that happens consciousness is the word that we use to circumscribe. The different kinds of experiences that we can have I think to put it most simply for a conscious system there is something it is like to be that system something that isn't conscious. And how consciousness even happens and if we can recreate it artificially is a question that still trying to figure out because what's more fundamental about being a human then knowing we exist. And explains more from the stage . During this question is so important because consciousness for each of us is all there is without that there's no world. There's no self there's nothing at all and when we suffer we suffer consciously whether it's through mental illness or pain and if we can experience joy in suffering what about other animals might they be conscious too they also have a sense of self and as computers get faster and smarter maybe they'll come a point maybe not too far away when my iphone develops a sense of its own existence now I actually think the prospects for a conscious ai a pretty remote and the story I'm going to tell you are conscious experiences of the world around us and of a 1000 within our kinds of control to loosen nations that happen with through and because of our living bodies. I love this idea of a controlled hallucination is is that is that what we experience is that how we experience the world that it's it's a controlled hallucination we're just essentially hallucinating all the time. I love this phrase I wish I could take credit for it but I can't but I love the phrase because it points out that everything that we perceive consciously or unconsciously but let's talk about consciousness for now is a construction of the bright I mean it's easy to think that we open our eyes and objective reality is revealed to us through the windows of our eyes again what contraception is basically just somebody sitting inside our skull looking out there and they see a red table or they see a person was a baseball game there's the actor writers the hit is going to destroy that's real that's reality. That's right but the truth is that all perceptions are acts of interpretation that act of informed guesswork that the brain applies when it encounters sensory data I think that the way I can think of this is that you know that there is no light in the sky and there's no sound. Is going on in the brain are electrical impulses whizzing around and complex patterns and out of all this all this pattern matching in the brain a world appears. And in some sense we know this for a long time so since. It's been pretty clear that colors red yellow or green colors and no objective properties of objects in the world they are actually deeds of reflected light and the brain the visual system will make inferences based on wavelengths of light about what color something is. Something as basic as color is not something that we just passively receive from the world we actually attribute it to things out there in the world. And the idea of controlled hallucination is is just that well this applies to everything and this applies to everything that we perceive and not just perceptions of things out there in the world but also to prize to our perceptions of ourself body of our memories of our sense of agency of our sense of elation that every thing that we perceive is a construction but it is not a random construction it's construction it's a best guess that is rain then by the sensory data at all times which is why most of us agree when we look at a table that we will say yeah I see a table you see a table and we both see the same thing and that's because these are just random constructions that constrained by the sensory data that we get and that's why I think the term controlled hallucination is very appropriate Here's one more example which shows just how quickly the brain can use new predictions to change what we consciously experience Have a listen to this. Sounded strange right have a listen again and see if you can get anything. Still strange Now listen to this. Which I did you heard some words there right now listen to the 1st sound again it's going to replay it. Yeah so you can now hear words that once more for luck. Ok so what's going on here is the remarkable thing is the sensory information coming into the brain hasn't changed at all all this changed is your brain's best guess of the causes of that sensory information and that changes what she consciously hit. Now all this puts the brain basis of perception in a bit of a different light instead of perception depending largely on signals coming into the brain from the outside world it depends as much if not more on perceptual predictions flowing in the opposite direction. We don't just passively perceive the world we actively generates it the world we experience comes as much if not more from the inside out as from the outside in. How much agency do we have over our consciousness like is it is it a fixed thing or or are we able to shape it can we actively shape it I think this gets really at the heart of what people think about when they think about the essence of themselves Yeah so you know I find this when talking about consciousness to people in general you can give them an explanation of you know the fact that colors constructions and people are happy with that you show them optical illusions and so on they're happy with that then you can tell them that your experience of what is your body is also a construction and give some evidence for that and people are Ok fair enough but then if you try to make the argument that their experience of dilution of in scare quotes free will is also a construction of the brain and it's not the thing that is pulling the strings inside your head making you do this or that that's when we start to feel very uncomfortable and I must admit I do too because I still experience myself as in control of my actions yeah least of some of them and of course that's what the experience of elation is useful for it's useful for this thing that is my organism to distinguish those actions that are relatively internally caused from those that are relatively externally cause everything that I do know one extreme is I put my hand on a hot stove and I retract my arm without even realizing it that's a reflex that's next only driven action it would be wrong to experience that as relational but my experience of coming to the studio this morning to record this was was highly evolutionary You know I. I decided to do it and I go in the cabin I came here yeah and that's very useful to distinguish these different kinds of actions but it doesn't mean that the experience of delicious cause the action and this doesn't mean that volitional behavior doesn't exist of course it's a thing and every action that we experience is voluntary is shaped by a whole history of previous voluntary actions that we executed during our lifetimes of our social and cultural context of developmental and even our evolutionary heritage indeed there are all of these factors play in to every action that we do whether we experience it as volitional or not so I mean the thing about consciousness is that's what makes us us right like that's what makes us human but there are a lot of people in the world who who believe that we are not that far off from light Ai becoming conscious right in behaving and responding in thinking as we do that's right I mean but I think that belief is driven by a couple of factors one factor is just this this cultural phenomenon we've had this throughout culture of robots developing intelligence and then becoming conscious we see this yes right we see this Prometheus with this with Terminator we see this is Blade Runner you know in very different ways and I love Blade Runner on the bit frustrated by the Terminator view of future technology and robots we see this in the beautiful film x. Mackinaw which I think really interrogates the philosophical issues behind this in a hugely interesting way but yeah there's this cultural trope that intelligence and consciousness go together and that Ai will develop awareness at some point. The other factor that's playing into it and this is the one I think is perhaps a bit more damaging is what I come to call upon issues anthropocentrism and this is the idea that you know we humans we think well what's special about as we were trying to find out what's special about us maybe. Not that we have a soul and other animals don't well maybe it's that we're intelligent maybe we have minds that is somehow different an order of magnitude different from the minds of other creatures or of or of objects it's intelligence that sets as apart and makes us special and we're also conscious so there's this tendency we have to associate these 2 things together well you know we're intelligent and we're conscious so intelligence and consciousness should go together but actually that really doesn't have to be the case you certainly don't have to be very intelligent in order to experience pain and suffering and so we can imagine that that plenty of other animals that may not score very highly on our very human centric measure of intelligence that nonetheless have vivid conscious experiences. So to me these things weigh against the idea that is headed on an inevitable trajectory towards being conscious but yet it's certainly possible that the near future will see you as being able to build facts that give the impression of being conscious and that to me picks out a very interesting space of the future. What will happen to our interactions with each other and with other animals when our environment support he lighted by things that give the appearance of being conscious and of being intelligent but for which we have no way really of knowing whether they are all not so sunny no confidence in saying that they are conscious is not going to change the way we behave to things that are actually conscious. I think that's definitely a worry. And I'll Seth He's a professor of neuroscience at the University of Sussex you can see his full talk at ted dot com. 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Dot org As we take a look at Area freeways here they cleared that accident nor 5 of Palomar poured road their work in to get no one was 70 to college Boulevard in the final clearing will be on their way home soon also the oneself 15 year old North a park way 2 cars off on the right shoulder other area freeways look good up to speed no major problems or delays you know another way to support the k p b s mission is through corporate support for more info call 619-594-5715 or e-mail corporate support at k P.B.'s dot org John Monte Burkett p.b.s. . From n.p.r. . This is Wait Wait Don't Tell me. And I'm Peter Sagal this week the f.b.i. Began an important no holds barred inquiry that would leave no stone unturned as a way. That was quick We'll ask about an f.b.i. Probe that caters to today's short attention span plus unbreakable Kimmie. Tries to survive being locked in our bunker and Bill Kurtis warns the people of Orlando prior to our visit there next month in the neighbors that were allowed obnoxious drunks with prolific. Who really should have seen coming on our quiz coming up right after this hour's news. Live from n.p.r. News in Washington I'm Barbara Kline President Trump is calling yesterday Senate confirmation and swearing in of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh a tremendous victory no mean Ngugi a dean of member station k.c. You are reports the president celebrated at a packed political rally in Topeka Kansas last night the president praised the recent appointment of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court Trump criticized Democrats and their supporters for trying to delay the process they threw away and threw aside every notion of fairness of justice of decency and of due process nobody seen anything like it earlier in the day people waiting in line outside the rally cheered at Cavanaugh's confirmation a few dozen protested the news in a designated area away from the venue for n.p.r. News I'm no mean Dean in Topeka shortly after yesterday's Senate vote Democrat Cory Booker flew to Iowa to headline a Democratic fundraiser Booker who serves on the Senate Judiciary Committee says the process for confirming Kavanagh to the u.s. Supreme Court was a sham He also says it's no time to be discouraged it is not a time to give up hard to get up tomorrow to speak go. It's hard for you not to wait for hope what to go home this Senate confirmed Kavanaugh by a vote of 58 to 48 the narrowest margin of victory for Supreme Court nominee since 1881 a top Vatican official has released an open letter that accuses a vocal critic of Pope Francis of blasphemy and defamation and p.r. Sylvia Poggioli reports it's the 1st official response to a former Vatican diplomat who accused the Pope of covering up sexual misconduct. By former cardinal and Archbishop Theodore McCarrick the Vatican has issued a scathing 3 page rebuke from Cardinal Marc will let head of the powerful bishops congregation to Archbishop Cardinal might he have got all this bombshell claims in August began all had accused Francis and other church officials of having turned a blind eye for years to McCarrick Smith's conduct and called for the pope's resignation in a detailed rebuttal of claims well let accuses the former diplomat of mounting a political frame job devoid of real foundation and calls the claims of blasphemous on Saturday Francis also rise to a thorough study of church archives to determine how McCarrick advance through church ranks despite persistent rumors of misconduct Sylvia Poggioli n.p.r. News Rome the Israeli army says it's searching for a Palestinian who shot and killed 2 Israelis in the occupied West Bank Israel calls it terrorism this is n.p.r. .