with us. >> it's my great pleasure thank you very much. >> you can watch this and all of our what are you reading interviews @booktv.org. using the search bar at the top of the page. ♪ ♪ >> you're watching cspan2, your unfiltered view of government. created by america's cable television company as a public service and brought to you today by your television provider. : >> live wired by doctor treatment. during the event, you can click the link that i will put in the chat . to purchase this book on the website. you can ask the author a question after you by submitting it to the q&a box which can be

found at the bottom and rescreen prey be sure to mature question the q&a and not in chat to make sure that the author has it. and into her main event . the doctor is in your scientists new york times best-selling author. size of law and national nonprofit institute prayed in terms of the adjunct professor . is best known for his work on time perception, brain cost activity. enrolled law. live wired, is about presents new findings from his lab, from dreaming to things that revolutionized how we think. he'll discuss issues, humans using echolocation in the present and future of ai. i was so excited to hear you talk today. welcome david. the floor is all yours that will be back in a little bit can to

monitor the q&a. >> thank you . this great pressure to be here and into politics and prose in person in the past. david: i am sorry that i can be there this year. but i'm pleased that you can join me this way on today. i would like to tell you a little bit tv a brief overview about some of the main themes in the ideas in the book . then we will take questions. saws start with us what to bring how any of you have ever seen a baby zebra gift born. so can run in about 45 minutes . wobbles with his open sleep legs and the dolphins, their barnstorming and so on. any of you have ever seen others, you might notice that is a little bit different, they don't run around after 45 minutes and this is because instead of trying to hardwire everything in at birth, mother nature found a simpler and more

flexible strategy with humans which is, allow the neurons to self modify based on their experience in the world. in other words, we are half-baked. and we let the world shape us. this is a completely new sort of strategy for mother nature. but his works really well. in the sense that we homo sapiens have taken of our recorder the planet. we can entered the internet, smallpox, we've gotten to the moon and someone. it's really working for us. and this is all due to the feature the rains. the note really hardwire our software running on top of hardware. incentive was a political life where. hence the title of the book, live wired. we talk about this is brain plasticity.

the fact is this was a term that was coined a century ago by william james. because he was impressed by the way that you could teach or take something plastic and mold it into shape and it will hold that shape, that's with the word plastic means. it was impressed that when you learn something, you learned that my name was david for example, then there is a change in the critical structure of your brain and hold onto that. so that's why he use the word plastic but in fact what i argue is there is so much more than that going on . he is 86 billion neurons. the cells of the ring in each one of these is about 10000 connections with its neighbors. which means you have .2 quadrillion connections going on. in the brain and your entire life, every moment in your life, these are plugging and unplugging and finding new places and so on. it's a dynamic electric fabric

that is but instead it is changing your whole life and that is why i prefer an coined between the termed "livewired". instead of plastic. so this is incredible technology. we don't know in silicon valley, hutto film things like this aspirated we have an existence proof of this technology because were all walking around with 3 pounds of it. so what i want to be very briefly has just give you a sense of some of the principles that worked to distill from the field. there are about 30000 papers in the literature now on brain plasticity. so what i've tried to do is try to figure out what the main principles that they can point to here . so that is what i am going to try to tell you. the first principle, is that unlike computers, brains are

extraordinarily flexible. i'm to be an example. this case a few years ago, 44 -year-old man, normal iq had mildly pain she went to the doctor to try to figure out what was going on they cannot figure it out. the doctor decided to get a brain scan just in case. it turns out putting normal brain scan books like is something like this. six right in the middle tween each side of the rains. and i want you to look at is number three which points to the lateral ventricle which is this little space in your brain has filled with spinal fluid and the point is this gentlemen, is brain look like this. so is labeled l be completely filled with fluid with such pressure pushes brain up against the side of his skull. with the story illustrates the remarkable flexibility of this material because he did not hamper his neural development,

his normal cognition and behavior. and the thing is that you cannot take your laptops or your phones and smoosh like that and hope that it still going to work. as a whole different kind of beast that we are talking about. with line wear. the strange examples of this. when children get an epilepsy that affects one half of their brain, one hemisphere of the brain, they can go in for what is a hemisphere ectomy were you removed half of the brain for you take it out and originally surgeons would fill the empty space with sterile ping-pong balls but it turns out you don't need to do that. the fluid will provide enough pressure. but they just leave it empty. and the child has have a brain. my think among us, the forget. going have a real deficit. that's the part. they don't . until about the age of seven, the child has perfectly normal cognition.

and can speak enough problems and can learn history and so on. they tend to have a slight limp on the other side of the body. because the side of the brain controls the other side of the body. the little bit weaker there. otherwise they're perfectly fine. in the book is full of examples of this are the thing to sort of set the ball rolling that what we are talking about is a very different beast than what we are used to doing. with this "livewired". i can take my laptop and tear half the motherboard out still expected to function. this crystal number one just orientate you. thinumber two, brains are locken the silent in darkness in the school. they have no idea what your body looks like and yes, when we look at right, will we find is there's a map of the farm. several who into detail except to say that the part of your brain that cares about the input coming from your body, there is a map of your body in the same

with the cortex which is putting information onto your body and moving it around. so this was discovered in the 60s and there's is map . so i was in this map of the brain and the body. the obvious answer is that it must be genetically prespecified but it turns out that is not actually the correct answer. one reason is that state use norm an accident. your brains map will adjust so that it says, i have a body without an arm now that's okay. it takes over and changes his mappers on the map changing, predicated on what information is coming from the body. this is a picture, and it talks about admiral lord nelson who is a hero and cofounder of other british worse. but is actually missing his right arm. it got shut off one of his

battles. he described what it was like for him but that we understand what happens in his brain prayed and happens fast. just a quick analogy here which is how does the brain understand what the map should look like. i use the analogy of colonization. and colonization come the key thing is that it is a full-time business. so what happened with that . in the new world as they had a lot of territory in the new world. but eventually, the french were sitting over dealerships in the british in the spanish right and so they ended up losing the territory. hence exactly the same think with the brain. if admiral nelson's right arm ascending fewer ships because it is now gone, the map has changed in territory is taken over. the key is that nothing lives shallow in the brain. very competitive system there.

hardly we can see that is with for example people who are blind. if people who are born blind for example, and normally the back of your head, supernova . somebody who is blind, wait sorry. i missed the slide. here it somebody who has blind, the lobe has taken over by sounded, by touch, things like that. i like the visual system, let me put it this way, even though we learned in neuroscience 101 class. this part of the brain is the visual system. it is all individual if your eyes are working. if there ships coming in. then it becomes the visual system. but if there are no ships coming in, this is an outcome of the school, and will uses territory for the neighboring countries. which is sound and touch. so is a very fluid system.

in this one of the things to understand about the brain even though you tended to look at it the way that a child might look at a globe of the earth. and think that of the country borders are somehow predestined for that's the way it came out. we know if you're into politics and world history, you know this countries would've come out very differently and thinking had diadied or if this battle had ge display so that way. despite the fact of what we have learned about it and diagram doubt, it is clearly fluid system. then the thing that i want to emphasize here is that the takeover of territories, very rough at it. this is something that is rhino. it's a new discovery just last couple of years neuroscience. what, i mean, by that is that you take cited person you blindfold them and you stick them in this scanner. we find is that you start saying activity in the visual cortex based on sound and touch and

then happens within about an hour. this encouragement starts to happen. but this tells us is very competitive system happening under the hood. things are moving fast. and spring like a mouse trap. as soon as it says wait a minute, no vision coming back there, starts making changes. and there's this thing that begins to happen. so what we realized years ago is this leads to very know during we have now published on about why we dream. and in the chronic competition for brain real estate is visual rain in particular has been a problem to deal with because of the rotation of the planet. forecast into darkness about 12 hours every cycle. of course i'm talking about evolutionary time, not having

electricity. that's what happens is in the dark your attention your hearing and your smell and taste and work fine but your vision is the thing that suddenly. so how does the visual system deal with this unfair advantage greatest by keeping the cortex active at night . is being protective, the defensive activation theory. any ideas what what it is doing is this is the brain wave fighting takeover from the other senses cyber 90 minutes you have this very specific thing between the brain the blast activity into the cortex. and that is all that circuitry just by the way and it's extremely specific. just goes to this part of the brain. so my understanding what is going on we can really open up this whole new set of furies in

the framework about what the brain is doing under the hood and wine. i would tell you the next principal. i moving faster :-) separated is that the brain will wrap itself, rent new data streams. you probably can't hear the audio here but this is a ted talk that again a few years ago and build the best with motors motors on it. it's like little buzzers on your cell phone. it's capturing sound and turning sound into patterns of vibration on the skin so as i was speaking in my skin is feeling that going on. is the video. this 11 on the left is saying the word sounded on the right to sing or touch. if you just look at the way the motors are mapped from low to

high frequency coming can sort of see a sound and touch. if you look on her shoulders come evincing that high-frequency there. so the point is for people who are deaf see the information to an unusual channel which is the skin and incentive in her ear which is this sophisticated machine that captures some of the income, breaks into frequencies in the chipset off to the brain, in terms of spikes, the little electrical eggs, where capturing sound frequency here of the spinal cord and into the brain. the brain can figure out what to do with the information. it does not know. it is trapped in silence and darkness in your school. and also it sees ever is spikes. they don't know if it's photons are air compression waves or mixed with the molecules. the brain is really good at doing is putting together an understanding of what is

correlated and why and how to understand that data. here's an example of the very participant we have are tested with this. affecting this on the left. in my graduate the right. mike raju a student says the word. you and the gentleman is completely deaf on the left, right down on his understanding. so where, and scott says, touch. so he's feeling this on his skin and is able to translate the talk vibrations into an understanding of what is getting said. what we have done for me time is i ended up with the company on my lap called neo- sensory and wavelength is down to the size of a wrist and afraid tenant as motors vibrate and the band.

i captures sound as a whole computer board in here. and what it is doing is translating the sound into the pattern of the vibration of the wrist. here's a very first participant before this is the prototype. to give you a sense of what it's like for him to be able to field sound. [silence]. so as i said, this neo- sensory company called the bus, we've got this all of the world now. it is wonderfully satisfying to be able to take a neuroscience idea and go all of the way from a theoretical concept to a device that is saving people's lives all over. i will also mention that i'm a scientific advisor for the west

world. so we had our best making cameo appearance in west world. i don't know if any of you watch this show that this was season two episode seven. that's the best on the screen there. the gentleman in the middle is wearing the vest. and what is happening here is he feels especially where the robots of the host are located. he can react accordingly. so we are translating location of something into a spatial feeling. suddenly they feel there's a host of the room that they weren't expecting when there. okay. in any case, what we have done is taken this idea and use this with people who are blind for you this case, this gentleman feels everybody around him. there is somebody ahead of him and behind him and that you're walking up to the left and the right exactly where you are. this actually makes it better than when a sighted person has. being able to understand around

360. we can and navigation directions on the top of it. we can go right where he is going. so there's much more to say about this. if anybody is interested in the general type of income about creating new senses, please check it out it ted talks that again on this. but the book goes deep into why this works and dozens of examples about this. and then move on to next principal now. which is the brain as i mentioned, it is trapped in there. he doesn't know what your body looks like. but it's one example that i discussed the book about the dog, is born without legs. so as you do. well she figured out how to walk in her back legs like a human. what this tells us is that dogs brains do not arrive at

preprogrammed drive don't bodies. instead, like brains across the animal kingdom, what they want to do is get to food and water for you to get to the mother . get away from danger and stuff like that so they figure out how to control body that therein. that's all there is to it. we see this in humans all the time. the world's best archer is harmless. he got interested in our training holds the world record for the longest accurate shot. this is because his brain inside their can say okay cool, but it's just my legs imposing back . into like that. if anyone saw my series, the brain, one of the casing medicament is this woman janet who was completely paralyzed. she an injury to her spinal cord. so can go - she got this brain implant that allows her to control this robotic arm. very beautiful skinned robotic arm. she controls this motor cortex,

since reach she imagines moving her real arm and neck is translated into moving this robotic arm. of course she gets better and better at this. because of the brain plasticity and she's figuring out, when i think this, it does this . and i will think about a different way of any duty figures out how she can use it. and it turns out that this whole idea about how could you actually make life devices, "livewired" devices. were just starting this. in a colleague of mine at columbia makes this little robot that isn't preprogrammed to know its audience, that it figured out his audience by trying out different moves in and saying what is happened to the body. and so it actually figures out how to get to someone to get over to the right side of the table here. to use in the reward points when figures it out right is the key

is they can snap like off of this and figures out how to walk again just like humans and other animals do because it just figures it out the body by trial and error. so the next principal, actually this the last thing that moment and then will move to q&a. part of the reason that i think it is so amazing to understand what is going on and do that is because we can actually build new devices this way. we completely have new principles about how we are thinking about things. as one example that a given the book, if you look at the large, multibillion-dollar project that we got up to the red planet. it did a great job there. what would happen eventually was a god it's right front wheel stuck in a martian soil. and i cannot get out. so died there. so now it's a multi-

billion-dollar piece of space junk. but if you compare that to a wolf gets his leg caught in a trap, with willful do is to his leg off. and then figure out how to walk in three legs. that's what wolves do. that's what all animals do. the absence of relevance. they want to get safely to seek water to find food and so, its actions are undergirded by the demands of his stomach and the threat of creditors. and the wolf traffics to itself. so as brain gives information about the environment and his capabilities of that environment and then another words, what its limbs allow it to do. in the spring translates those capabilities into the most useful motor output. so wolf carries on the left because animals do not shut down with moderate damage and neither should our machines. celeste for the bucket talk about next steps of how we can

actually build a completely different kind of machine that indicates that the rover gets his will stuck so it can chew its will off and then figure out how to operate a different way. so all of this is to say that there is so much amazing stuff happening under the hood there we are just scratching the surface up. everyone especially out here in silicon valley, so impressed with what is going on with artificial intelligence and so on. that is baby stuff going on compared to what is actually here on this strange material that is living dynamic fabric that we all have under the hood. so that instruction, but i would like to do is the question-and-answer part. host: thank you so much for that spring them so call him a bunch of great questions. i will start with kind of a eight and topic. since idea the brain and acting

with its senses are deprived or just deprivation. and ask, you hear about entities having feelings of the absent limbs. is this something that happens only when the brain hasn't yet recognized. david: the way we actually think about the brain is that you have different timescales of change breaches of some things haven't really rapidly and other things change very slowly. and they're all daisychained in order. something changes fast has to certain present enough evidence to the next level for them to say okay, i'm going to change you. and that changes and so on. so what happens when the body loses a limb, system parts of the brain change and readjust right away. that's actually the picture showed you. but deeper series of the red,

still think that the information they're getting is from the hand. because a whole life they've gotten information from that and that is in the hands of the get confused. so sometimes, they think there's still has something in the hands being touched and there could be pain as a result of the interaction between these different layers. by the way, this is the whole new framework the present . and it explains so much of what happened in neuroscience, one example is that one of the actually the oldest role in urology is that older memories are more stable than our memories. as of afternoon someone at the end of their life's may be on deathbed, they don't remember what is happened last month last year maybe but they do remember the childhood just fine. which is very unusual party to their systems don't have the property were older memories are more stable than they were. but the reason it happens is because of the way that things

mark their way down and become more and more stable with time. this is like often in the deathbed people will revert to the childhood language. just one example. at work einstein last words, nobody knows what they were because he was speaking in german. the night nurse did not speak german. host: another question about this kind of thing, what is happening in the brain of people who are put on ventilators to recover from covid-19. so don't necessarily like sensory input as we can seek to the five senses but when a body part is replaced with the external machine. does that sync on remapping happened. david: that's an interesting question we don't know the answer to that. one of the things that's fascinating about replacing the jet but person general is that

you are fine with it. you can get an artificial heart, a respirator to take care of your lungs. and you can lose limbs and stuff like that you're still the same person. in contrast, he damage or lose even a little chunk of brain tissue, i continue entirely. in your decision-making, you converse in your capacity gain animals or see colors understand music or hundred of the third things we see the lives everyday . this is so we know that the rain is the densest representation of you and whole body. in other words, people often ask, what about the rest of the body. it matters little bits yes. it is like the body is like the greater metropolitan area but this is the urban center. you can change the stuff and replace it and it doesn't really seem to beat much of a difference at all but the brain is really dense. host: absolutely. i have a question.

just for me. i'm so interested in the idea the dreams are meant to make sure that the other senses the takeover as we sleep. how do you test the lab buried is in the sleep study. to make people and bring a do that. see what great question brain especially just published a paper on this . work we did research on 25 different species of primates. it turns out that even across the primates, well is split up 70 million years ago from these ones. but it turns out this very different levels of plasticity. ... ...

>> so now we look at that and doing studies if everything else is approximately the same but not getting dream sleep at night then what is the

effect? so one thing i noticed right away they all say the vision gets blurry and the doctors say it's my eyes but that might not be right so that's what we're looking into. >> talk about levels of species but talk about different levels of density if human brains lose elasticity as we get older. >> yes. it becomes less plastic as it ages most people view this as a bad thing because the job is to build the internal model of that there. so trying to figure out how do we optimize my behavior how do they react to me how do i get

good at something to have a career this is the way that the brain tries to do this so you get better and better at it as you age so the reason it is less flexible because you are putting together a pretty good understanding of how to operate and the world. so that's why they become less plastic but the good news is, the important part is to make certain you are challenging yourself with novelties so that you can build new ways something has been going on for a long time, many decades where people donate their brains upon death and this is a act of the lives when they die many had alzheimer's disease but they did not do it because

they were at the last moment before dealing with other people even if that degenerate alzheimer's they were still building new ways as opposed to people who retire and their lives shrink and they don't challenge ourselves, that is the worst thing you can do because that is the importance to challenge all the time. that is the thing that you can do is what that means is you are good at it is something that you are bad at. >> that is great so the question like memory loss a couple of other great questions would you think is

the evolutionary purpose? and why can some people do it and others take practice and can never do it? >> lucid dreaming is when you become aware you are in a dream and you can take control of the dream. it is very rare. most people never have it in their life and there's way to training get better but i think it's a bug, not a feature it's something that the brain puts a lot of work into generating consciousness that turns off in your sleep and has other actions like taking out the trash so lucid dreaming it is the accidental interface between the two that's not supposed to happen.

think there is any evolutionary purpose may be about that can be found sometimes. >> how do we see our dreams? is it our imagination? what is going on their? >> this is a very important fundamental concept what you consider vision is all about internal activity. and you don't even need your eyes to see as evidence by dreams every night. there closed you have a full and rich visual experience. looking at the circuitry carefully only 5 percent of the data comes through the eyes all of s2s feedback loops.

version is not a camera like the internal model things like visual illusions for example which are interesting it demonstrates it doesn't even matter what is out there physically and that colors don't even exist in the world and not just for speed to detect the right fruit and the trees so vision is all about the internal activity. >> it always freaks me out a little bit.

>> another person asks with the brains that have insomnia what is going on in the rain? >> in one sentence it is just that to make the switchover from the week state to the sleep state it's like switching the factory to make these changes and it it is a transition that supposed to occur well but often does not there are a dozen ways it can go wrong people have narcolepsy. >> so where does the initial feedback come from to understand the correct words from the vibration?

>> that's a great question because what you need to understand anything is having a correlation. let me back up that none of us remember this but when you were a baby you had to learn how to use your ears. you watched your mother's mouth and there is the visual input there and eventually there is a correlation there that is matched up and then clap your hands or military do that that is how you earn with correlation. person's death they were by watching the see the dog's mouth moved and they fear the bark efforts they don't know what that is but it doesn't take long that those two are linked and puts them to gather. in the case of learning words

on the fifth day train two hours a day before that. so he sees the world and feels the word that is how he makes the correlation. >> this other question how is this different from reinforcement learning? it sounds like reinforcement learning. i am not familiar with the term. >> yes. i will go into too much detail but reinforcement learning is the way psychologist and computer science rebuts and then the feedback will reward. a lot of what happens in the brain is reinforcement

learning that as an example not just about reward and punishmen punishment, it's about relevance, what matters in your environment and the attention and the internal model of the world and then detecting something doesn't quite match. that is what we call attention and we pay attention to that and then one of the things the technical question you might be interested in, with a new framework that follows where the light is. the weather is constantly changing but just one example

with a wet not bad back of the eyes with the photoreceptors, during the day the photoreceptors have a high official resolution capturing those protons and sending them back to the brain. but as it gets dark they say there are not enough photons so they start to link arms with each other a very sophisticated process so they have lower spatial resolution but higher sensitivity and catch them that way. they are maximizing the amount of information they can take from the world that all moments. >> and that just goes way beyond reinforcement learning. >> and about ai do you think

there's anything about human intelligence or consciousness that ai cannot produce? >> that's a great question as far as i can tell a complicated machine the bankruptcy language don't even have a way so when you damage it so because of that there is no theoretical reason why we shouldn't be able to simulate that it should work now that said it still young science

maybe we discover something 100 years that we discovered we could replicate that so i should be able to get there eventually in our lifetime? i doubted the reason why aai doing this thing was superhuman performance but it's released to pick up to a three -year-old child who can navigate the room and get food to her mouth so ai is missing artificial generalized intelligence that it can distinguish pictures of cats and dogs and then it will catastrophically. but they cannot generalize the other things so where we are now is a long ways off.

>> another question we haven't quite touched on yet on the brains are they using different pathways or different equations? >>. >> a mixture of the sensors they could look at a letter like j or b red is be and yellow was orange. is just an alternative perceptual reality those that don't. those a lot to say if you're interested i have a book on a cold wednesday is indigo blue

and then precisely because numbers have colors and sometimes genders and personalities and shapes as well so just as an example of what are your number get in a week from now but that have to to remember so the have a better memory. >> it's about time to wrap up with your opinion on brain interface if there are no medical applications that will emerge in the future. thanked me. >> so i told with the wristband for a couple hundred dollars but then like the elon

musk company doing a presentation on the other day and then to insert electrodes into the brain and what he is doing is pushing forward technology on that and that would be very useful for clinical applications even though the mythology they will do this faster with her cell phone because it is always risk of infection and death on the operating table vicious no point to do surgery on somebody just so they can send a faster tax. these are the kind of things are doing a bunch of projects where we feed information of infrared light and all kinds

of great stuff to go beyond the clinical well but i doubt they would get a surgery for that. >> thank you so much doctor what are you reading these days? >> i just finished a couple books one is called liquid rules i thought it was terrific i just read the book , forgetting the title but it's about being up in alaska where the land. used to be and the animals that live there is absolutely beautiful. >> thank you so much for spending time with us today

everybody in the audience asking amazing questions i would encourage you to check out the future event and asked those questions help everybody in the audience continues to stay well we can find on the politics and prose website we can find on the politics and prose website