Complete Television Schedule vit booktv. Org. Booktv, 48 hours, and this weekend even more hours of nonfiction books and authors. Television for serious readers. Next, heres malcolm gay. His week, the brain electric. And now i am very thrilled to introduce malcolm gay to left bankbooks. Malcolm is an arts reporter for the boston globe. He priestly worked as a contributing writer at the New York Times and the critic at large for our very own river front times. His writing has also appeared in wired, the atlantic and time among other publications. In 2004 the society of professional journalists, norb norb Northern California chapter, named gay outstanding journalist. His work has since received other National Accolades including top honors in 2008 from the association of alternative news weeklies, and in 2009 from the National Association of black journalists. In 2010 gay was awarded the woodwardbernstein award for the missouri [inaudible] gay studied philosophy and art at the Colorado College where he studied narrative nonfiction. The brain electric, which details the race among top neurosurgeons to merge the mind with machines, is his first book. The author of americas great debate calls the brain electric a masterpiece of reporting and science writing at its best. Tonight malcolm will be discussing his book, answering questions from you and signing copies of his book that we have available for sale at the desk. Please help me in welcoming malcolm gay to left bankbooks. [applause] hello. I actually know many of you, so you all have heard a lot about this book, i think, over the years and months, and it seems like decades sometimes. But anyway, thank you all for coming. You know, i think weve all had conversations about the brain electric in some way or another, and one thing that people ask me again and again, you know, knowing me and knowing my history and my interests, how did somebody like me become interested in a question like this . Its the one question that people reliably ask me. A lot of people hear about the brain, and they think this is absolutely the last place id like to go. Its too complicated, too crazy, its inside the head. But there are a lott of things that contributed to my interest in this, and the first person, probably if there were one place to put it, my interest, is at the feet of a neurosurgeon, neuroscientist, expert right up the street. And hes, you know, in his 40s. I think he had more than 800 patents to his name. He had a robust neurosurgery practice. Hed written a Science Fiction novel, he was an abstract painter, he had a research lab. Hes one of these guys that makes the rest of us crazy, hes just incredible. And so i started talking to eric after hearing about his work, and the first thing i was planning to do was a magazine story. I was going to do kind of a quick thing. I was writing journalism everywhere, and it seemed like a great magazine topic. And eric brought me into he was very generous and brought me into a surgery immediately. And eric is an end lendtology, so what he works with are recessions of the brain to find the bad brain, the root of any epileptic seizure. And what he started doing and this case, actually, was not an epilepsy case, it was a tumor. And it wasnt a well defined tumor. It was one of these tumors that kind of grows throughout the brain. And so at the surgery, you know, the patient goes down, the guy goes down, and hes anesthetized. Eric opens his head. And in the middle of the surgery, eric wakes him up. And the guy is kind of, you know, dazed and wondering where he is, and then he, and then erics, the surgical assistant ising asking eric or asking e guy about the most mundane things. Hes asking him about his job and how the cardinals are doing and what they like to do on their weekends and things like this. He wanted the man to keep talking, because as eric was pulling away at the tumor, as he was taking out this cancer, he wanted to make sure that he wasnt encroaching on any of the Language Centers in the brain. And so as the guy was talking about, you know, stocking the shelves at snooks and he couldnt remember the name for peas, eric thought, no, i need to back off this section. I think i had some kind of illformed notions of what makes a personality and what makes us who we are and how we communicate. But here we was kind of working with the he was working with the biological matter of what we are, and he was able to manipulate that, talk about that. And not only was he able to work with the absolutely substance the actual substance of the brain itself, but he was able to pull, using electrodes, thoughts out of the brain. And that, to me, all of a sudden all these philosophical questions, biological questions come rushing to the fore. And i pretty quickly realized that the magazine piece had to be scrapped and that this was a much bigger piece, you know . And, i mean, one of the things that i think, you know, youre looking at Something Like the brain, and youre looking at this kind of poorly understood, mysterious object, you know, its really kind of a difficult thing to say, well, where do you get a story about this . I mean, a lot of the questions are really interesting, but how do you keep it, how do you make it into a story . How do you make it into a book that somebody like me would want to read . How do you get it to, you know, whats the narrative setting that youre really looking for here . You know, because i mean its well and good to go to surgeries and talk about these intellectualish shies, but issues, but the brain is really a black box. I started calling around and started speaking with people that were deem in this field deep in this field. Among them, ted berger, neuroscientist out of ucla. And ted all of these guys are always the smartest guy in the room, but ted works with memory, and hes building a digital prosthesis for memory. Basically, what he will do is hes disable the hippocampus which is kind of an older brain structure which is critical to the formation of memories, and hell be able to disable that, and then he will, using electrodes, read the neural signals that are coming into the hippocampus, and hell then ferry those out to a computer. And ted is a mathematician and neuroscientist, but what hell end up doing is hes crafted what he believes to be kind of a master algorithm of memory. And so what he can do is bring these incoming signals into his algorithm, and that will actually spit out outgoing signals that mimic the same signals that the hippocampus would create. And hell offload those in area ares of the brain to form networks. Other people were working in visual prosthetics, so visuals of the optics, some directly on the cortex as opposed to simply in the eye. One person was working with a pallete that youd place on the tongue, what it would basically be would be a video camera that would scan the area and send small signals to the tongue which is this warm, moist, you know, highly sensitive area, and the brain is plastic enough that it will actually take those signals and interpret them after time as visual information. And so people are able to rock climb and hike and play soccer, blind people, with this. So theres just a tremendous, you know, all of these things are wonderful and really interesting. But what you, what you come up against is, you know, how do you avoid this becoming just this, you know, huge catalog of heres this, you know, heres this interesting research, and heres this interesting research. I wanted a story, and i wanted something that really kind of brought the stakes of whats happening home. And thats about the time that i met miguel who is one of the top guys in the field. He works all over the field in terms of motor and, you know, other sensory areas. But miguel at the time was whispering about this new neural prosthetic that would bind the brains of multiple animals and create what he called a braintobrain interface. So this kind of multiorganism creation that would be a cyborg network. He was also working with bringing in infrared visual information and allowing animals to to see areas of the spectrum they otherwise would not be able to see. So, i mean, he was doing really edgy, really i mean, a lot of people would say Science Fiction crazy stuff. But he also said that everybody in the field was an amateur and that he was really the only guy really that had, you know, the straight dope on bci. [laughter] and that, to me, i mean, thats a telling moment, right . Because all of a sudden you realize, oh, its not one big, happy family. [laughter] and it was around that time that i ran into Andrew Schwartz. And Andrew Schwartz is another one of these top guys. And andrew was, at the time, working he still is working on motor. And he was working with, you know, trying to reproduce fluid, dexterous movement in a robotic arm that would mimic an approach, the grace of the human body. Hed had incredible, i wont say luck, results thus far. And andrew, you know, hes one of these guys that doesnt, hes unswayed by social charms, and hes interested in measurables, and hes interested in results, and hes interest in interested in science. So i really kind of kept quiet around andy a lot [laughter] but learned a tremendous amount from him. One of the things that he said was everybody in the field doesnt know what theyre talking about. So at this point i started to realize here are these two top guys, and they have these diametrically opposed ideas of well, at least each other, and they agreed on the field. All of a sudden this kind of narrative architecture of how i can tell this story and how i can enter into these, you know, kind of rich intellectual questions and biological questions and philosophical questions and evolutionary questions and some pretty, you know, high flying neuroscience along the way, that this would act as a real bridge to be able to talk about that, you know . And so, you know, what i wanted to kind of concentrate was on this, you know, fierce Competition Among these top neuroscientists for prestige, intellectual morals and, ultimately, fame. I think a lot of them would believe the ultimate prize, and thats the nobel. Of course, that makes a very difficult thing to report because all these guys have mull by Million Dollar labs, and if its thursday, theyre going to be in korea. So its just a hard way to get into it. Once you actually get into that upper rung, you know, youre never two, three, four questions away from talking with these top guys and then, you know, asking a question and them saying i have no 40 idea. We just dont know. And thats really where we are with the brain. Theres so many questions. We have so many titillating and exciting, minute windows on to this vast neural galaxy, and yet we still dont know basic, basic things. In the book at one point andrew says, you know, we want to do all of this, but we dont know the first thing about how a basic neuron fires, and thats how it all starts. But one of the kind of grand ironies of this and what i thought was an interesting way to go about it is, you know, you have this clash of titans, i mean, you have these incredibly ambitious men and they are mainly men who are working with, you know, the weakest among us. I mean, theyre working with paraplegics and lockedins and people who have had brain stem strokes. These people have, you know, theyre not really interested in these big, Science Fiction questions. Theyre interested in being able to feed themselves and, you know, take care of their daily business. Theyre interested in just getting to normal. And the truth is, is that most of these people will never actually benefit from this technology. I mean, were really in this beginning portion of this stuff, this race. And, you know, so theyre going into this with no real thought about how this is going to affect them, how its going to help them. Theyre really, theyre undergoing voluntary brain surgery with the expectation that it will help future generationses, you know . And so you get this kind of crazy juxtaposition of this, you know, multiMillion Dollar project, huge egos, incredible, you know, incredible science and then these incredibly fragile people. And theyre all working together. You know . In a sense theyre all working together for what i would say is, you know, this very kind of fundamentally human story, and thats, you know, harnessing technology to make us more of what we already are. Harnessing this technology to make us more human. And that, to me, you know, its this quest. And i think its, you know, it gets into some very, you know, heady issues, and theres lots of ways to kind of, you know, approach this question. But i think that, ultimately, you know, where this goes is this kind of quest for, you know, betterment and for bettering who we are because, i mean, its very easy to get into kind of, you know, Science Fictional questions of where, you know, where were going to have google in our brain, and were going to have neurallyimplanted cars and things like that. And that may happen. [laughter] that absolutely may happen. But, you know, one of the researchers i was speaking with said, you know, we know weve arrived when were doing the most normal, mundane things with this; brushing our teeth, combing our hair, being able to call people. Thats really what a lot of peez people are working with. And so i think that was kind of where, thats really what the storys about. Its about neuroscience, and its about all of these other questions, but its also about, you know, kind of, you know, the people that are engaged, you know, deeply, deeply engaged in these questions, you know, out of this fundamental human need. So in any case, thats kind of a little bit about what my thinking in terms of how i put the book together and what i wanted the book to be. You know, theres a lot of, you know, theres a lot of, you know, neuroscience in it, but what i wanted to be able to do was to write a book that, you know, that somebody like me would be able to read and want to read. And so i think ill end with that, but ill read a little bit x then we can maybe talk about the book some, and i hope you enjoy it. So im going to read the beginning, chapter six, its called the backup plan. I dont have any water. Andrew schwartz knew that if he wanted to stay relevant, he needed to sink his electrodes into the cortex. Darpa had opted to go with the applied Physics Laboratory at johns hopkins. They have tons and tons of military contracts, so theyre used to dealing with these guys, he said. They have a comfort. They like to do all these 3d charts which darpa seemed to like. When darpa announces a project, it releases a list of Research Laboratories the agency is willing to fund as part of the project. Any researcher or lab that competes to administer a project can choose from that list, building a team across institutions. For schwartz, that meant working with a project manager and a select group of robotics experts to build an arm before linking it to the brain. There are less than six people in the world that really know how to build a robotic arm, and they all come from mit. All these other yahoos said, oh, we can build a robot arm, we know what theyre doing. He added both hopkins and dean caymans team talked with him about joining their proposals. So youre going to be my boss, he said . Needless to say, i didnt want get on any of those i didnt get on any of those teams. Darpa funders were far from cutting him off. They wanted him to keep working with monkeys and awarded him a 2 Million Contract for a study that would not only catapult schwartzs research onto 60 minutes and into the pages of the New York Times, but would eventually give him a shot at the human motor cortex. They had people doing the same kind of thing i was doing, a lot more people with a lot more money, and they didnt great anywhere, he said. They kept me as a backup plan. Other researchers were circling around the problem of how to link the brain to a prosthetic limb, but few researchers closed the loop with a robot arm. Earlier work had taken place in either virtual environment or a computer screen or at a safe distance as with matthew neigh el. Nagel. Mental control of a cursor would be a boon to quadriplegics, but darpa wants a limb you could use wanted a limb you could use to brush your teeth or comb your hair. Elegant neural control of a dexterous, multijointed limb. It turned out to be great, he said. I didnt have to report to apl or anybody, i just did my own work. With electrodes in happened, schwartz and his colleagues began to work with two monkeys and a pair of robot arms. Training the Research Monkey palls somewhere between art falls somewhere between art and science. Researchers must devise ingenious ways to familiarize the animals with the physical essence of a task. Schwartz began by training his monkeys to control the arms using a joystick. The animals learned they could extend their limb to a various fixed point in space, grab a marshmallow from a skewer and pull back on the joystick to bring it to their mouth. As the monkey brought the marshmallow back, researchers impaled the next food reward in one of four positions for the animal to grab. Once the monkeys were familiar with the task, researchers removed the joystick, immobilizing the animals arms. Mean while, they recorded their neural activity while placing the arm under automatic control, giving researchers command over the arm as they brought the food to the monkeys mouth. One of the great discoveries of the 20th century happened at a lab where a scientist had implanted electrodes on monkeys hoping to listen in on neurons he believed associated with hand and mouth movements. A monkey reached for a peanut, tracing the cells firing pattern before, during and after the movement. By that measure, his experiment did not differ tremendously from the neural recordings his fellow researchers were making in other labs. What set his work apart, however, occurred by accident. During a break between tasks, the monkey sat idly in its chair. The monkey wasnt moving at all, but when one of the researchers snatched a spare peanut and popped it in his mouth, the neuron erupted as if the monkey had grabbed the peanut itself. The brain, or at least a specific class of cells, seemed not only to seemed not to distinguish between an action performed and an action observed. Here was a class of neurons that was involved in motor planning but that was also interested in the physical actions of others. Much has been wri