them and have a large following and we got three times as many viewers from sending an e-mail to those 100 people than sending an e-mail to 1.3 million people so don't underestimate the power of you and everyone in this room to tackle networks across the country and make a difference. [applause] next on booktv prime-time, michio kaku in his book "the future of the mind." after that author james mcpherson on his biography of jefferson davis. [inaudible conversations]

[applause] >> wow. the science room is rocking today at the convention center. unbelievable. we are here to hear dr. michio kaku who is just amazing. i love this guy. [applause] just a footnote i am joe from the "washington post." it i assume you knew that i love the big cosmic questions and there is no one better than asking the cosmic amazing questions than dr. kaku. he is a genius at it. he is the co-founder of the strings. has written multiple bestsellers. he refers to them as "new york times" bestsellers but i don't use that term.

[laughter] this book begins the first, his new book is "the future of the mind" is the name of the book and a first line is the two greatest mysteries and all of nature are the mind and the universe. we start from that and he asks the questions do we have a soul? what happens to us after we die? who am i anyway? where do we fit into this great cosmic scheme? that's just on the first page. [laughter] this is the stuff that when you're in college at 3:00 in the morning when you're in your dorm room you know and you are staying up all night drinking healthy carriages or whatever, right? this is what you talk about and anyway he is an amazing man and let's hear from him. [applause]

>> after such a great introduction i can't wait to hear the speaker myself. [laughter] first of all i have a confession to make. sometimes all these accolades can backfire. recently new york magazine voted me as one of the 100 smartest people in new york. [applause] so i thought, what an honor. however in all fairness, in all fairness i have to admit that madonna also made that same list. and next year, i think lady gaga is going to push me off the list entirely. today i'm going to talk about the future, the future of your mind however making predictions is dangerous. let me quote from the great

philosopher of the western world. yogi berra. yogi berra once said quote predictions. it's awfully hard to do, especially if it's about the future. [laughter] well i am a physicist. we can talk about the future of the universe billions of years from now so let me quote from that other great philosopher, woodwoody allen.woodywoody alle, eternity is an awful long time especially for the end. [laughter] you may say to yourselves, what does a physicist do anyway? what has he done for me lately? well, we have physicist invented the transistor. we invented the laser. we also constructed the first computers and the internet. we wrote the world wide web and along the way don't forget, we invented television.

we invented radio, radar, microwaves, x-ray machines. don't forget, we created the space program and the gps system and we physicists love to make predictions. we assembled the internet one physicists predicted that the internet would become a forum of high culture, anti-society. [laughter] we know that 5% of internet is pornography but that's because teenage boys log onto the internet. just wait until the grandma's and grandpa's log onto the internet. then 50% of the internet will be pornography. [laughter] so before i begin giving you a guided tour of the incredible sensational development in

neuroscience let me tell you a cautionary story about a physicist. over 200 years ago we had the great french revolution and one day there were three gentlemen about to lose their heads to the guillotine. it was a priest, a lawyer and a theoretical physicist just like me. about to lose their heads at the guillotine. they put the priests head on the chopping block and they asked him do you have any last words before your slicer head off and he said yes. he said, god from above shall set me free. all eyes were on the blade. he raised the blade. the blade came down and stopped right before. the crowd gasped. they had never seen this before and so they said that the priests go. galaxy about the lawyer.

they put the lawyers had on the chopping block and they asked him do you have any last words? he said yes, maybe the spirit of justice and mercy shall set me free. all eyes were on the blade. they raise the blade. the blade came down, swish and stopped right before it hit the neck of the lawyer. this time the mob went crazy. dancing in the streets of paris people were saying god has spoken. justice and mercy have spoken today and now that say about the physicist. they put the physicist had on the chopping block and they asked him, do you have any last words? and he said yeah, hymn i have got some last words and he said you know i don't know too much about god and i know even less about the law but i do know one thing. if you look up you will see that the rope is stuck on the pulley.

[laughter] [applause] and then the physicist that if you remove the rope the blade should come down real good. big mistake. big mistake. well the blade came down and the physicist had came down and that just goes to show you that sometimes we physicists have to know when to keep our mouths shut. nonetheless today 300 of the world's top scientists that i interview for bbc television the discovery channel about what fits on your shoulder. afterwards i will be signing books. i will be signing yearbooks and then afterwards you can go to ebay and auction it off. for money. you can actually make money today, okay? today we are going to talk about the future of your mind and a

previous book i wrote if i can bring that up was physics of the future talking about the next 50 to 100 years. well you know, it's often said that in the book buying world the word physics would never enter "the new york times" bestseller list. well i did it twice. physics talks about teleporter starships and even time travel. what happens if you go backwards in time and you meet your teenage mother before you are born and she falls in love with you? [laughter] if your teenage mother falls in love with you before you are born you are in deep doo doo at that happens. today let's talk about the greatest of all mysteries. what is on your shoulders? believe it or not we have learned more about the brain and the last 10 to 15 years than in

all of human history combined. that's the power of physics. radio allows us to penetrate right into the thinking mind and then we look for echoes. echoes of radios ricocheting off of oxygen molecules in an mri machine that gives us gorgeous pictures. ricocheted like a ping-pong ball inside the human mind and believe it or not your brain only uses 20 watts of power and yet it's simulated with the digital computer it would require a computer a city block by a city block for you would consume the energy of a nuclear power plant in would have to be cooled by a river. your brain does it with 20 watts. when someone calls you a dim bulb that's a complement. [laughter] so how is it possible and what

is consciousness anyway? in the history of science there have been 20,000 papers written about consciousness. never in the history of science have so many devoted so much to produce so little. however in my book i actually give you a definition. a metric by which you can measure numerically levels of consciousness. we are so eloquent and philosophical. we define it. we quantify it and it's all in my book. [laughter] so the two great mysteries are the universe and the mind. some people think well, i work in what's called string theory. what's so strange about strings? look at nature. at the fundamental level dna is a string. string allows you vast amounts of information in the dna

molecule and the units in the brain are ben-aron which is also a string. so we think that string theory lies at the fundamental of all biological and physical knowledge. so let's talk about the movies. the movies are always a little bit ahead of us and they talk about telepathy, reading minds. did you know that we can now do that in the laboratory? they talk about telekinesis, moving objects with the mind and not only that but in hollywood movies they talk about not just telepathy but also uploading memories. we cannot do that for the first time in history. just last year at wake forest university the first memory was uploaded into a mouse brain and we put comments or to the memory back into the mouse and the mouse remembered it perfectly.

last week, last week the united states pentagon announced a 40 million-dollar initiative to record memories for g.i.s from iraq and afghanistan. recording memories is going to happen in our lifetime. this is like a matrix. uploading reality. have you ever thought to yourself late at night, late at night when you're all by yourself, have you ever had that weird thought that maybe you are the only one. that life is like a matrix, just a movie uploaded into your mind. and maybe someone is trying to tested to see whether you are smart enough to figure out that you really are the only one. let me ask you a question. have you ever had that bought? raise your hand if you ever had that weird thought. well, you are crazy. [laughter]

you think you are the only one in the world's? that's ridiculous. you see, i'm the only one in the world. i'm actually in bed right now. i'm actually imagining i'm here in washington d.c. at the convention center speaking to an audience. realize that this is now possible. the first primary was uploaded into a mouse brain and the short string deals with monkeys and alzheimer's patients. the short-term goal, not the long-term, the short-term goal is to create a brain pacemaker. that's why the military is dumping $40 million into this, to create a pacemaker for alzheimer's patients. president barack obama has announced a 1 billion-dollar initiative, the brain initiative to create a new genome project. in the future you will have three discs.

one disc is your genome with all your themes on it and the other disc issue or your connect dome, a billion dollars now being put into creating a second disc. connecting them with all your sensations and all your memories and basically all of your thoughts on the second disc. when you die, when you die your genome and your connect dome live on. in substance you are immortal but is it really you? to quote president bill clinton it all depends on how you define you. [laughter] nonetheless, let's think about what happens when you upload memory. this is the former governor of california. [laughter] having the memory of being married to sharon stone suddenly uploaded into his mind. in the movie total recall so yes

there are consequences if you upload memories of an entire marriage. in the future is conceivable that we will upload the memory of a vacation that you never had. or the mathematics course that you never pass. this is something that is actually potentially real. money is now being dumped into it. the first results coming out of wake forest university and the university of southern california. and exoskeletons. if you follow the world cup -- how many follow the world cup soccer games this summer? did you see the open ceremony? in the opening ceremony a man who is totally paralyzed quadriplegic, quadriplegic goes up and kicks the ball and start the soccer games in front of a billion people. that person was paralyzed. he was wearing an exoskeleton designed at duke university, controlled by his brain alone.

christopher reeves the handsome actor who played superman in the movies, he died but before he died he dreamed of the day when his mind would allow him to bypass the spinal cord so he could walk again. unfortunately he died to sin. we can now do it. we can now create exoskeletons in the military has dumped over $150 million to create exoskeletons like this for our wounded warriors. and controlling a robot mentally. this is from the movie circuit starring bruce willis. this is the future perhaps of the space program. it's too dangerous to put humans into outer space overtime. wineapple robots and have the robots guide its mentally. imagine sitting in a hot tub in his living room rate so you could explore the universe

mentally and that's the thesis between avatar, the movie avatar and also the movie circuit. mentally controlling a robot and we can do that today. and then telekinesis, the ability to control objects with the mind. we will talk about this in a moment. this is from the movie carrie were a high school kid who has been picked on all these years has her final revenge by destroying the whole high school class at the senior prom. this is a lesson here. [laughter] the lesson here is never bring a telekinetic to the senior prom. so even superman movies have gotten wind of this revolution. every high school, every kid knows that superman's father died.

every kid knows this but in the latest superman movie his father lives on as a hologram whose memory is inside a computer. a memory that lives on. a personality memories all played by russell crowe. so here is russell crowe the father of superman living and this could be the future of the library of congress. when you go to the library of congress you may have a wonderful conversation with somebody like einstein, somebody like winston churchill, george washington because all of their memories have been recorded. there you are talking to a hologram having a great afternoon tea with abraham lincoln. this is possible. and the question of mind without body, science fiction writers love the concept and believe it or not if you have to discs one with your genome and one with your connect dome and they live

on after you die some say the mind is living beyond the body. this is the dream of the ancient, the trade of science fiction writers and this is now believable. let's talk about the brain. first of all blood flows on mri scans. on the left is your brain. not much happens but on the bright is when you tell a lie. when you tell a lie first you have to create the lie and then you have to create the cover-up in the consistency with the lynn with all the previous lies you have been telling all these years. that's a lot of brain power. your brain would light up like a christmas tree. this is your brain on the right telling a lie. what have we learned from these brain scans quickly have learned the most ancient part of the brain is the back of your brain the so-called reptilian brain.

the brain has evolved from the back to the front. when infants are born to back of the brain is the most developed. when you have a car accident and you have to flash your balance your sense of territoriality, aggression and simple things in the back of the brain are affected. as the brain grows from infancy into adolescence the center part of the brain develops. the monkey brain. the brain of emotions, the brain of etiquette, politeness, social norm at the center of the brain and then finally when you become an adult the pre-frontal cortex at the front of the brain develops. so we can now test old wives tales and looking at the living brain. with the old wives tale says their teenage kid suffers from brain damage. it's true. you can actually show us the brain develops from the back to

the front teenagers do not have a well formed prefrontal cortex. another old wives tale that when a man talks to a pretty girl he starts to ask stupid. it's true. when a man talks with pretty girl blood literally brains dashed dreams from the pre-frontal cortex. you can measure this. it's absolutely true. all these old wives tales can now be systematically idolize idolized -- analyze looking at brain scans. we have to brain scans come one on the left one honoré. normally the two hemispheres talk to each other but in epileptics it gets out of control. they have seizures so scientists have to cut the connectivity between the left in and the right hemispheres and then something bizarre, something weird happens. the two brains that are now cut

begin to create two different personalities. it's amazing, documented data. one man comes home and greets his wife and with one arm he embraces her and with the other arm he pops her in the face. a documented case. another documented case, one man come as a left brain was an atheist and his right brain was a believer. can you imagine dying and going to heaven and only half of your brain goes to heaven? sooner or later i'm sure we will find some person who has a left brain that is republican and a right brain that is democrat. all inside the same school. he is controlling two different arms. can you imagine going to the polling booth and the two of them fight over which lever to pull? that's going to happen. that will happen. and this is the 1950s. in the 1950s we had these really horrible looking gadgets

placed over the brain that measured brain impulses, electromagnetic signals from the brain. now we do it with implants and headbands. as you can now play video games mentally. it's deciphered by a chip and you can play video games by thinking about it. in japan on the upper right, you can buy a headbands with two ears on it and at a party when you meet someone who is interesting in two ears go like that. then when you talk to someone who is really boring the two ears go like that. so in japan you always know if you are going to go home alone after party. and did my class i'm going to make sure that my students wear these helmets so i know exactly who is going to fail and who is

going to pass my course. on the lower left they realize that we can now by putting the sensors on your head, when you walk into a grammy can turn on the light. you can turn on the internet, surf the web. you can write e-mail. you can read e-mails. you can play video games. you can operate household appliances and in the future you will be able to drive a car mentally. this is today in silicon valley is saying well maybe in the future when we perfect this technology the mouse will disappear. and madison avenue is getting wind of this and they want to make this fashionable at some point. and even my colleague steven hawking's. steven has no lost control of this -- he can only blink. that is his sole means of communication is blinking.

so my friends relative to this we hooked them up to a computer mentally. the next time you see him on tv look at his right glass. his right glass has a chip in it and that right chip picks up radio messages in his brain and allows them to type on a laptop computer mentally, bypassing his fingers, bypassing any mechanical modes by thinking he is able to type. and we can now even do this with paraplegics. the military is very interested. $150 million the pentagon has pledged to put a chip right on top of the brain and next to mechanical arms and legs. this man is totally paralyzed. he cannot scratch his nose. he cannot communicate with his loved ones. he is a prisoner just like steven, a prisoner in his own body.

at brown university they put a chip in his brain and with his laptop computer he can control his wheelchair, operate kitchen appliances and surf the web and play video games. and this person can now operate mechanical arms. mechanical arms. she is totally paralyzed. she took communicates what -- by blinking like steven does and for the first time in history she can now feed herself mentally. the pentagon as i said has put $150 million into the resolution prosthetic programs and injured soldiers can bypass the spinal cord and control exoskeletons. and at the soccer games as i mentioned a billion people witnessed a historic event with the power of the mind. a person setting off the world soccer game just this past summer. and then realize that even

beyond this lies the capability of controlling robots mentally. this is japan and in japan this worker puts on a helmet, anthony controls the robot shown here on the right. mentally controlling a robot. this could be the future of firemen. firemen, ambulance workers, emergency room workers may eventually control robots that can walk right into a dangerous environment and do the work they have to do. for example at fukushima and japan we have a nuclear meltdown three of them simultaneously going on as we speak, even as we speak. they still have not yet gotten control of three melted cores. they put in robots. every robot has failed because they are simply not sophisticated enough so why not

put a robot into control mentally and this could be the future of your classroom. remember when we were kids? we use used to play hooky all the time? you would ask your mother, mom can you write a note saying little johnny is sick today? this is the future. in the future you will have a surrogate. a surrogate will have a video image on it. you will be sick in bed and the teacher will see your image and a surrogate sitting in a chair and you will see the teacher in your surrogate. this is the future of education. isn't the future wonderful? we will never be able to play hooky ever again. you will never miss a day of class because you or your surrogate is sitting in your chair diligently taking notes just like we all did when they were little, right? yeah. and this could be the future of the internet. and it today -- the internet

today is in your classes. google classes you can recognize people's faces and a biography appears. we can now create the internet so that translations occur as someone speaks chinese to you. you will see their biography and their translation underneath their image. how many times have you been at a conference like this and you tell yourself who is this person? i know this person. in the future your friends will say it's jim, stupid. you see them every year at the national book festival. here's his complete biography even if he speaks chinese to you. let's say afterwards you are shooting the ball at a cocktail party, a to party with important people there but you don't know who they are. in the future you will know

exactly who to up to at any cocktail party. so these contact lenses will change everything. who were the first people to buy into the contact lenses? college students taking final examinations. they will blink and see all the answers to the final exam or contact lens. and who is the next person to buy internet contact lenses? president barack obama said he doesn't have to have these teleprompters in front of him giving his speech. and the third person to buy internet contact lenses, vice president joe biden so that he's always on message as they say. so you see that the potential of this technology is like living in the matrix. when you walk into a room you will see identification of all the objects. if you are never many see nothing but the ruins of the

roman empire you will see the roman empire resurrected right in your contact lens as you walk through the ruins of rome. you will see subtitles translating italian into english. so in the future everyone will be connected. these are emergency workers of the future are surrogate control mentally idle mind. so this is the prospects of exoskeletons, the prospect of surrogates,, but prospect of literally in a matrix. and then this is the possibility of retrieving memories. last year for the first time in history scientists at wake forest university recorded the world's first memory. they took a mouth. the mouse had a hippocampus that was wired up. memories are made to the hippocampus. they tape-recorded impulses

across the hippocampus and then later when the mouse forgot the task they reinserted the memory into the mouse. bingo on the first try the mouse remember the task. and at m.i.t. a few months later they duplicated the experiment and uploaded a false memory into a mouse. last week, last week the united states pentagon announced a 40 million-dollar project to create in four years, four years a memory chip, a memory chip for veterans of iraq and afghanistan to enhance their memories. i can tell you in the future you will be able to read live the vacation you never had. and beyond that at berkeley where i got my ph.d. years ago you can now photograph they thought. this was considered way into science fiction and now we do everyday.

here is how we do it. this picture here shows a brain scan using an mri. you can push blood flow into 30,000 -- as you look at a picture and then using mris we are able to massage this picture analyze the dogs and create an image. from the brain from all the 30,000 dots we create a picture of what you are looking at. look at this picture very carefully. you are looking at some of the first photographs of human thoughts ever photographed in history. you see a picture of steve martin and next to it as is a picture reconstructed from the human mind. amazing. if you are looking at the mona lisa the computer will reconstruct a picture of the mona lisa from your blood flow inside the brain. then when you fall asleep it records your memories of your dream. in the future you may wake up hit a button and see that jamie

had the previous night. we can also begin to understand things like lucid dreaming. lucid dreaming is something right out of science fiction. it's when you are conscious while you are dreaming. it was once considered a state and with blood flow experiments in germany we have proven it's real. you can now control your dreams while you are dreaming and prove it using mri flow. how many people by many people that we have ever had an episode of lucid dreaming where you knew you were dreaming while you were dreaming? raise your hand. hundreds of people have done it. you can train yourself on the internet the way you train yourself to become a lucid dreamer and it's true. these are pictures of an elephant, pictures of the human and then on the right it's the computer reconstruction of what you are looking at. and the big one, mental illness.

why is president barack obama and the european union dumping a billion dollars into the great initiative to solve one of our most ancient disease -- diseases mental illness? millions of americans at some point in their life will suffer some episode of depression, mental illness, anxiety. what is mental illness? for example schizophrenia is when you hear voices. that's called madness when you hear voices however when you give this person an mri scan you find something interesting to the left side of the brain lights up because that part of the brain talks to itself. when you talk to yourself the left part of the brain generates voices and that's why you talk to yourself at the front part of your brain is your private brain and it knows the left brain is talking to itself. and these people when they have an episode of schizophrenia to let part of their brain lights up without their permission.

they are unaware that they are literally talking to themselves and you see that now for the first time in history looking at the blood flow of the schizophrenic mind. and we can now look at joan of arc and many historical figures. turns out that a certain fraction of people with epileptic lesions also suffer from hyperreligiosity. they think they are talking god. everything that happens is because it was meant to be that way. if somebody falls it's because it was meant to be that way. we think joan of arc suffered from hyperreligiosity. we can actually induce this with a helmet. we can actually put a helmet that shoots radio into the central cortex of the brain and induce the feeling of being in the presence of god or this is called a god helmet and we can actually induce this feeling. the scientists of course who

like to experiment, we put an atheist inside the god helmet. that atheist was richard dawki dawkins. we put richard dawkins in the god helmet and afterwards we often do you feel the presence of god and he said no, no god. they put a catholic nun and the god helmet and the catholic nun were her believe shaken inducing the feeling of god with this which? she said no. she said god made us with the telephone system so we can communicate with god. you cannot win. anyway let me wind up. super geniuses are one of many things we talk about the book. some people have had a bullet go through the left temporal lobe. one person had an accident where he injured the left temporal lobe hitting the bottom of the pool. afterwards posted -- both of

them emerged a super mathematical geniuses. tonight when you go home do not pick up a hammer. do not hit the left part of your brain thinking you're going to become the next einstein. this individual can take one helicopter ride over the harbor of new york and draw the entire skyline of new york city. down to every window and you can see it at jfk airport. the next time you land at jfk looked up and you'll see this huge mural drawn from memory by this individual. and of course einstein is the greatest genius of modern times. his brain is still with us today. we have it. it is different, not by much but it is different. it's at princeton hospital. i am sort of running out of time so let me wind up on one now. if you have further questions you can read my book. [laughter] when i was a kid growing up my

role model was albert einstein and my favorite einstein story is this. when i sat with an old man he was tired of getting the same -- over and over again so one time his chauffeur came up to him and said professor i'm really a part-time actor. i have heard your speech so many times i've i have memorized it so why do we switch places. i will put on a mustache. i will put on awake. i will be the great einstein giving the speech that you have given so many times and you can put on my hat. you can put on my uniform and become my chauffeur. this went along famously until one day the mathematician in the back asked a very difficult question. einstein thought the game is up but then the chauffeur said that question is so elementary that even my chauffeur here can answer for you.

[laughter] [applause] >> thank you very much. you have been a great audience. thank you very much. [applause] >> i listened to the debate campaign 2014. there was between demaio and representative scott peters and it's just politics as usual. what we really need is for the politicians to quit making decisions based on power, money and votes and start working together at a higher level seeking the best decisions for the american people. i am to the point that when there is any type of political event, both republicans and democrats and any other party that wants to get involved should organize it