Video, live and ondemand to follow the transition of power and President Trump and president elect biden with news conferences and events coverage at cspan. Org. Good afteron everybody and welcome to politics and prose live at lunch where we bring you our politics and prose are grammy during our lunch time hour. Im an Event Coordinator and we thank you so much for joining here to celebrate the release of livewired by doctor David Eagleman. At any time during the event today you can click the link that i will put in the chat to purchase a copy of tonights books on pnps website. Yocan ask the author a questions afternoon by setting it to the q a box the button for which can be found at the bottom of your screen and be sure to put your question in the q a and not in the chat to make sure that the author and i see it. On to our main event this afrnoon. Doctor David Eagleman is a neuroscientist and a New York Times best selling author and he has the center for science and law National Nonprofit institute and serves as an addict professor at stanford university. He is best known for his work on countr substitution, time perception, brain quest to city and neural law. Live wired, his new book, esents new findings from doctor eaglemans lab from dreaming to tech devices that revolutionize how w think about the senses. He would discuss bio hackers, humans using echolocation and the present and future of ai. Im so excited to hear doctor eagleman talk today. Welcome, david. The floor is all yours and i will be back in a little bit to moderate some q and a. Okay, great. Thank you, beth. Its a great pleasure to be here. Ive been to pitics and prose in person in the past and im sorry i cannot be there this year but im so pleased you could join me this way online today. I want to tell you andiving a brief oveiew about some ofhe main schemes and ideas in the book and then we will take questions. So lets sta with this question, how many of you have ever seen a baby zebra get born . Itan run at about 45 minut and it wobbles to its tense elite legs and runs around same as a baby giraffe and a dolphin and they are born swimming and so onnd how many of y have seen a homo sapiens and you might notice that its different the situation and they dont run around after 45 minutes and this isecause insad of trying to hardwire everything in at birth Mother Nature found a simpler and more flexibletrategy with humans whi is allowed neurons to self modify waste on their experien in the world. In other words, we drop io the world halfbaked and we let the world shape us and this is a you know, completely new sort of a rategy for Mother Nature but worked really well in the sense that we take over every corner of the planet and weve onto the internet and cured smallpox and goto the moon and itsorking for us and this is all due to the feature of brains which is that there not really hardware and you cant think of him that way but not really software but its what i call live where and that is hence the title of the book live wired and in the field we talk about this as brain plasticity and a term you may have heard but the fact is this was a term that was coined a century ago by William James because he was impressed by the way you could take and im looking for someone classic but take something plastic and mold it into shape and it will hold that shape and thats what the word plastic means and he was impressed that when you learned something for example when you learn that my name is david then there is a change in the physical structure of your brain and it hold onto that so that is why i use the word plasticity but in fact what i argue is that it is so much more than that going on and got 86 billion neurons and these are the cells of the brain and each one of these has 10000 connections with its neighbors which means you have point to quadrillion connections going on in the brain and your entire life, every moment of your life these things are plugging and unplugging and seeking and finding new places and so on and its a dynamic living, electric fabric that is not just something you mold and hold onto it shape but changes your whole life and that is why i prefer and coined in pushing the term livewired instead of plastic. And so, you know this is Incredible Technology and we dont know in Silicon Valley and we dont know how to build things like this yet but we have an existence proof of this technology because we are all Walking Around with 3 pounds of it. I want to do briefly is give you a sense of some of the principles that ive worked to distill from the field so there are about 30000 papers in the literature now on grand plasticity but what it try to do is figure out what is the main principles that we can point to hear so that is what i will try to tell you here. The first principle is that unlike computers brains are extraordinarily flexible and i will give you an example of that. There is a case a few years ago 44 yearold man normal iq, had mild leg pains we went to the doctor to try to figure out what was going on and they couldnt figure it out and the doctor sent him to get a brain scanning case there was something going on there. It turns out what a normal brain scan looks like is Something Like this. This is a section right down the middle and then the thing i want you to look at is number three and what points to this area called the lateral ventricle which is a space in your brain that is filled with cerebral spinal fluid. This german women his reign look like this. The section labeled lv, lateral ventricle, was completely filled with cerebral spinal fluid with such pressure if pushed his brain up against the sides of his goal but the thing that the story illustrates is the remarkable flex ability of this material because it didnt hamper his neurodevelopment or normal cognition and behavior and the thing is you cant take your phone or laptop and, you know, switch it like that and hope it will work and this is a whole different kinds of beast that we are talking about with life where. We have many strange samples of this when children get an epilepsy that effects one half of their brain and one hemisphere of the brain they can go in for what is called a hemisphere ectomy where you remove half of the brain and you take it out and originally surgeons would fill the empty space with sterile pingpong balls but you dont need to do that as they realize the cerebral spinal fluid provides enough pressure so they leave it empty and the child has half a brain. You might think oh my gosh, that poor kid but he will have deficits but that is the weird part. They dont. As long as you do this under the age of seven the child is perfectly normal cognition and can speak, can do math problems and can learn history and so on but they tend to have a slight limp on the other side of their body because the side of your brain controls the other side but they are a little weaker there otherwise they are perfectly fine in the book is full of examples of this thing that sets the ball rolling that what were talking about was her nine is a very different piece than what we are used to doing because i cant take my laptop and terror have the motherboard out and expect it to still function. That is principle number one just to orient us. Principle number two is that brains will,rains are locked in t silence and darkness of the skull. They dont have any idea wha your body looks like and yet we look at the brain or we fin is that there is aap of the body so i wont go into details here except to say that part of your brain the inputs coming from your body and theres a map of your body and same with your motor cortex which is putting information out to your body to move it around. This was discovered in the 60s that there is this map and so the question is how is there this map of the brain and the body and the obvious answer is that it must be genetically prespecified but it turns out thats not actually the correct answer. We know for many reasons one of them is you lose an arm in an accident in your brain map will adjust so that its a body without an arm out and takes over and changes its map so the map is always changing predicated on what information is coming from the body and so you know, this is a picture i talk about admiral lord nelson in the book who is the hero of trafalgar and other british wars but most people dont know hes missing his right arm because his right arm got shot off in one of his battles and he, you know, describes what it was like but now we understand what happens in his brain and happens fast and just a quick analogy here which is how does the brain understand what its map should look like and i use the analogy of colonization. Colonization the key thing is that its a fulltime business so what happened with the french in the new world is they had a lot of territory in the new world but eventually the french were sending over your ships than the british and the spanish and so they ended up losing the territory and it is exactly the same thing with the brain if admiral nelsons right arm is sending fewer ships because it is now gone than the maps change and territories get taken over and the key is nothing lies shallow in the brain and every thing is taken over and is very competitive system there could part of the way we can see that it is with for example people who are blind and born blind, for example, normally vision is taken care of by the back of your head, the occipital lobe. And someone who is blind the or wait sorry, i missed the slide. Here it is. Someone who is blind the occipital lobe is taken over b sound and by touch and things like that so it is not like the visual system and let me put it this way, even though we learn in neuroscience 101 class this partf the brain is a visual system and its only t visual system if your eyes are worng. If there are ships of data coming in the it becomes the visualystem but if there are no ships coming in minute oh cool, ill use ts territory for the neighboring countries which in this case are sound and touch. Its a very fluid syste and this isne of the things to really understand aut the brain even though we tend to ok at it the way that a child might look at a globe of the eah and think that all those country borders are sehow predestined or thats the way but we know i you are into politics and World History you know that those country borders couldve come out. If only if t king had died in his youth or the battl to the other way so its the same thing in the bra despite the fact that we learn about it as though its diagrammed out and its a extremely fluid system. The thing i want to emphasize is the takeover of territory is very rapid and this is something that is new and a New Discovery over the last several years and what i mean by that is lets say you take a sighted person and blind for them and stick them in the scanner but what you find is you start to see an activity in their visual cortex based on sound and touch and that happens for about an hour, this encroachment starts to happen so what this tells us is a very competitive system under the hood and things are moving fast and the whole thing is sprung like a mouse trap so as soon as a system says wait a minute, im not getting vision back there it starts making changes and there is annexations that begins to happen and so on my student and i realized years ago is this leads to a very new interesting theory that we have now published on about why we dream and it is this in the chronic competition for brain real estate the visual brain in particular has a unique problem to dl with because of t rotation of the planet so were cast into darkness about 12 hours every cycle and of course im talking about evolutionary time, not having electricity and so what happens is in theark you are searing but yr vision is a thing that suddenly is the private so how does the visual system deal with his unfair disaantage . We suggest it is by keeping the occipital cort active at night and keeping it protective and we call thi the defensive activation theory and the idea is that what it is doing is dreams of the brains way of fighting takeover from the other senses so every 90 minutesou have this very specific search tree in the brain the blast activity into the occipital cortex and that is all that circuiy does, by the way and its extremely specific andust goes to this part of the brain and that is what hpens during the night. My underanding of what is going on with brain plasticity we can really open up this whole new set of theories and the framework about wt the brain is doing under theood and why. Okay, i want to tell you the next principal and im moving fast through highlights here. The next principal is that the brain will rapid self or the brain wraps itself aroun new data streams and actually guys can hear the audio here but this is a ted talk i ge a few years ago and i built a vest with vibratory motors on it and so its like the ltle buzzers on your cell phone and the vast is capturing sound and turning souninto patterns of vibration on the skin and so what was happening is i was speaking and my skin is feeling tha going on from low to High Frequency but here is the video, by the way. This woman on the left is saying the word sound and on the right she saying the word touch and if you just look at the way the motors are mapped from low to High Frequency you can see it sound and touch and if you look on her soldiers you can see that there is a High Frequency there so the point is for people who are deaf what we can do is feed the information through an unusual channel which is the skin and instead of the inter ear which is is incredibly sophisticated little biological machine that captures sound on the eardrum and bringing frequency and shipped off to the brain in terms of spikes and electrical spikes we are capturing sound breaking frequencies here and sending it to the brain of the spinal cord and the brain can figure out what to do with the information and it doesnt know and again its trapped in silence and darkness in the vault of your skull and all it sees ever are spikes coming in and it doesnt know at the spikes are present the transition of photons or air compressed waves or mixtures of molecules but all it sees is spikes with the brain is really good at doing is putting together an understanding of what is correlated and figuring out how to understand that data. Heres an example of the very first participant we ever tested with this and is on the left, graduate student on the right in my graduate student says a word and in this case is the word you and gentleman who is completely deaf on the left writes down what is he is understanding so they say where and theudgment writes on vote word where and scott says touch and so the gentleman feeling this on his skin and able to do a complicated vibrations of what is getting saidnd what weve done in the meantime is i ended up spending a company out of my lab called neo sensory and weve shrunkhis down to the size of a wristband on the wristband has vibratory motors in the ban and it captures sound and there is a whole, you know, computer board here and what it is doing is translating the sounds into patterns of vibration on the wrist and here is our very first participant here, this was before it was a prototype but just to give you a nse of what it is like for him to be able to feel sound. [sence] as i said we spun off this Company Called the buzz and weve got this on wrists all over the world now. Its wonderfully satisfying to take a neuroscience idea and go all the way from theoretical concepts to a deve that is changing peoples lives all over. I will also mention im a scientific advisor for the show westworld and so we had our best make a cameo appearance in westworld and i dont know if any of y watched the show but this was season two, episode seven and that is the best on the screen there in the gentleman in the middle, as you can see, the gentleman in the middle is wearing the vest and he feels spatially where the robots and the host are located and he can fashion accordingly. What were doing is translating location of something into a spatial feeling here so suddenly they feel theres a host of the room that they werent expecting and okay so that vest will not save you it the robots go bad but weve taken this idea and use this with people who are blind. In this case this gentleman feels everybody around him and can feel there is someone ahead of him and someone behind him and if youre walking up to the left or right he can feel where you are which actually makes it better than what he is a sighted person has been able to understand every thing going around in 360 and we can add navigation directions on top of that so is never been here before we have navigation and go right where hes going. So, there is much more to say about this and if anyone is interested in the general type of thing about creating new senses, please check out a ted talk i gave on this but the book goes deep into why this works and dozens of examples of dous about this. Let me move onto the next prince wi now which is the brain, as i mentioned, is, you know, trapped in there and does not know what your body looks lik but figures outow to control it. When example that i just got from the book is about faith the dog born without fnt legs and what did she do . She figured out how to walk on her back legs like a human. At this tells us is dog brains doot arrive he programmed to drive dog bodies but instead, like brains across the animal kingdom, what they want to do is get t food and get to water or get to their mother and get away from danger so they figure out how to control the body that they are in. Thats all there is to it. We see this in humans all the time and turns o the worlds best archer is armss. He got interested in arche and holds the world record forhe longest accurate shot and this is because his brain inside could say cl, ill use my legs and pull this thing back and do it like that. If aone saw my intelligent series, the brain, one of the cases i carried was this woman jan who got paralyzed completely with spinal cord was damaged and so the brain waves dont go out so she got brain implants and this allows her to control this robotic arm, a very beautiful sophisticated robotic arm and controls this with the signals in her motor cortex. She imagines moving her real arm and that gets translated into moving this robotic armpit of course, she gets better and better at it because of brain plticity and because shes figuring out when i think this does this in a little wrong so think about it a different way and she figures out how to use it to connect things outside of your body. It turns out that this whole idea about how good y