>> the police have long been collecting their own data and information people they have contact with the what's happening now in the digital age police are increasing information on those that have no criminal justice contact and part of that has to do with a variety of the data they are purchasing information from privately collected companies using automated license plate readers you have to be pulled over for the data to be put into the system so that is being used.

>> a good afternoon everybody welcome to politics and prose live at lunch bringing the programming during the lunchtime our i am the coordinator we thank you for joining us to celebrate the release of life violated any time you can click the link we will let you purchase a copy tonight you can ask the author a question by submitting it to the q&a box at the bottom of your screen be sure to put your question into the q and a and not the chat to make sure we see it. on to our main event the neuroscientist new york times

best-selling author national nonprofit institute serves as an adjunct professor best known for his work of time perception live wired from anesthesia to dreaming than those that revolutionize to discuss using echolocation the present and future of ai i am so excited to hear him talk today the floor is yours and i will be back to moderate. >> thank you. that's a great question to be here i've been here to politics and prose in the past sorry i couldn't be there this

year i'm glad you can join me this way today. i will give a brief overview of the idea in the book and then we will take questions. let's start with this question. how many of you have ever seen a bb zebra get born? it can run in about 45 minutes just like a baby giraffe, dolphins are born swimming. how many have you see homo sapiens get born it's a little bit different. they don't run around after 45 minutes because instead of trying to hardwire everything in a birth, mother nature found a simpler and more flexible strategy with humans which is allowed neurons to self modify based on their experience in the world. we come into the world half-baked and we let the world shape us.

this is a completely new sort of strategy for mother nature but it has worked really well in the sense we are taking over every corner of the planet we have the internet , cured smallpox and gone to the moon and someone. it's really working for us. this is all due to the feature of brains that they are not really hardware or software but instead it is lie of where hence the title of the book and in the field we talk about brain plasticity that this is a term that was cleaned a century ago by william james he was impressed by the way you could take something plastic and mold into shape

and it will hold that shape so when you learn something if you learn that my name is david there is a change in the physical structure of your brain and holds onto that so that's why we use the word plasticity but i argue that it is so much more. 86billion neurons each has 10000 connection with its neighbors so you have.2 quadrillion connections going on in the brain. in your entire life every moment they are plugging and unplugging and is finding new places it is a dynamic living fabric you don't love it would hold that shape but it changes your life so that's why i coined and push the term

livewire instead of plastic. it is in credible technology we don't know how to build things like this yet but we have existence proof because we all walk around with 3 pounds of it. so very briefly i want to give you a sense of some of the principles i've worked to distill from the field there are 30000 papers on brain plasticity and trying to figure out what are the main principles we can point to? so the first principle is that unlike computers brains are extraordinarily flexible. there was a case of a 44 -year-old man with a normal iq mild leg pain he went to the doctor they cannot figure it out the doctor said let's get a brain scan.

it turns out what a normal brain scan looks like this right down the middle and look at number three which points to this area of the lateral ventricle the space in your brain filled with cerebral spinal fluid this gentleman his looks like this the lv section was completely filled with cerebral spinal fluid was such pressure pushing his prenup against the side of his school. but the remarkable flexibility because it didn't hamper his new role development or cognition or behavior you cannot take your phone or laptop to smash it like that and hope that it will still work. this is a whole different kind of beast we are talking about

with livewire we have many strange examples of this. when children have epilepsy affecting one hemisphere of their brain, they can go in were you remove half of the brai brain, you take it out and originally surgeons would fill it with empty ping-pong balls because the fluid provides enough pressure they just leave it empty and then the child has half a brain. you think the poor kid but that's the weird part as long as it's under the age of about seven the child has perfectly normal cognition can speak can do math and learn history. they have a slight wimp on the other side of their body and a

little bit weaker otherwise they are perfectly fine and the book is full of examples of this sort of thing to set the ball rolling what we talk about with livewire is a different beast than what we are used to because i can't take my laptop until about half the motherboard is still expected to function. that is principle number one. number two is that brains are locked into the silence and the darkness of the soul they don't know what your body looks like but yet what we find there is a map of the body but the part of the brain that cares about the input and with the motor cortex putting information out to your body , this was discovered in the sixties so how is there a map and the obvious answer is that it must be genetically

prespecified. and we know that for many reasons and if you lose an arm in an accident, your brains map will adjust so it says i have a bar one - - a body without an arm so it changes the map it is always changing predicated on what information comes from the body. this is a picture most people don't notice he is missing his right arm because it was shot off and battle and he described what it was like but now we understand what happened to his parade and it happened fast. with a quick analogy how does

the brain understand? to use the analogy of colonization if it is a full-time business so what happened with the french they had a lot of territory in the new world but eventually the french were sending over viewership stay on the british and the spanish so they ended up losing the territory and it is exactly the same thing with the brain if admiral nelson's right arm is sending fewer ships if it's gone then the maps are changed and nothing lies fallow in the brain everything is taken over it's a very competitive system we can see that with people who are blind if they are born blind normally vision is taken care of by the back of your head with the allsup the lobe somebody who is blin

blind, sorry. weight. i missed a slide. for somebody who was blind, the occipital lobe is taken over by sound and touch is not like the visual system , even though the learn in neuroscience the brain is the visual system is only the visual system of your eyes are working if there are ships of data but if there are no ships coming in then it says i can use this territory for the neighboring countries which is sound and touch. it's a very fluid system and this is something to understand about the brain even though we look at it like a child could look at a globe of the earth and think those borders somehow are predestined for that's the way

it had to come out. we know that with politics and world history those could've come out very differently if this battle tipped the other wa way. the same thing in the brain despite the fact we learn like it is diagrammed out it is extremely fluid. so the takeover of territories is very rapid and very new and what i mean by that if you blindfold them and them in the scanner to me find you see activities in the visual cortex based on sound and touch and that happens within about one hour so that tells us it's a very competitive system happening under the bed and things are moving fast it

is spreading like a mousetrap. i may not be getting vision but i'm making changes with the annexation. so when i realized years ago is this leads to a new and interesting theory we have published on about why we dream. in the chronic competition for brain real estate the visual brain has unique problem to deal with because of the rotation of the planet. we are cast into darkness about 12 hours of recycle i'm talking evolutionary time with no electricity. so in the dark your vision is suddenly deprived how does it deal with the unfair disadvantage?

so by keeping the occipital cortex active at night to keep it protected the defensive activation theory with the idea that what it is doing dreams are the brains way to take over the senses it blast activity into the occipital cortex and that's all that circuitry does by the way and it is extremely specific to just this part of the brain and that's what happens during the night. so to understand brain plasticity we can open up this whole new set of theories in the framework about what the brain is doing. i want to tell you the next principal program moving fast through some highlights the brain will wrap itself around

new data streams you probably can't hear the audio but this is a ted talk i gave a few years ago i built a vest with motors is like little buzzers on your cell phone it captures sound turning into patterns of vibration so as i was speaking my skin is feeling that between low and high frequency the woman on the left is saying sound but this is the word touch you can see the sound and touch if you look at her shoulders there is a high frequency there. the point is for people who are deaf we can see it to the

unusual challenge through the skin instead of the inner ear which is a sophisticated biological machine and then ships it off to the brain in terms of little electrical spikes, we capture the frequencies here and send it to the brain up to the spinal cord and the brain can figure out what to do with the information it doesn't now it's trapped in silence and darkness and all it sees our spikes it doesn't know if that is molecules with the brain is really good at doing is putting together and understanding how to understand that data here is an example of very first participant we tested on the left where graduate students is a word he said the word to

you and the gentleman on the left writes down what he is understanding. where. touch. he feels this on his skin and can translate into what is being said. in the meantime we shoulders down to wristband with vibratory voters in the band and it captures sound and the whole computer board and what it is doing translating the fear of vibration and here's the very first participant

through that prototype to give you a sense of what it's like for him to feel sound. so we spun off this company is called the buzz and it's wonderfully satisfying and with a theoretical concept to a device changing people's lives i am a scientific advisor for the show westworld and we had our cameo appearance i know if any of you watch the show but season two episode seven and then to

feel spatially where they are located so to translate the location of something and then expecting one there. and then to take this idea with people that are blind. and to feel exactly where you are to make it better than what is cited person has been to add navigation directions on top of that and then to go right where he is going. if anybody is interested to

create a new sense, please check out the ted talk this goes into why this works with dozens of examples. let me move on to the next principal and then the dog that was born without front legs. so she figure out how to walk on her back legs like a human. dogs brains do not arrive preprogrammed and get to water. and get away from danger so they control the body they are

in. we see this and humans all the time and then the brain can say cool. and if anyone saw the intelligence series was damage to the spinal cord and then got the brain implants allowing her to control the robotic arm. and then to get better and better at it because she is figuring out and then it turns

out the whole idea and with those devices that we are just starting this. that columbia makes this little robot that is it be programmed and then it figures out to get over to the right side of the table and then you can snap a leg off and it figures out how to walk again just like humans and other animals and then it is trial and error.

so what is so amazing to understand what is going on under the hood and to think about things. if you look at the mars rover spirit and then did a great job and then they couldn't get out now it die their multibillion-dollar so if you compare that to a wolf the leg is caught in the trap will chew off its leg and then figure out how to walk on three legs that's what they do as little animals do they have a sense of relevance to escape

danger and find food and then the world traffic in deference and then the capabilities of that environment and what the limbs allow it to do and the brain translates as capabilities in the motor outputs several wolf carries on with a limp because animals don't shut down with moderate damage and neither should our machines and then i talk about the next steps of how we can build a completely different kind of machine choose the wheel off so all of this is to say there is so much amazing

stuff happening under the heard that we're just scratching the surface everyone is so impressed but that is baby stuff compared to what is here this living dynamic that we all have under the hood

that's not supposed to happen but a little bug that can be found in their sometimes so now the question how do we see our dreams if i see them with our eyes?

is it imagination? >> this is a very important fundamental concept what you consider vision is all about internal activity what is happening in here and you don't even need your eyes to see as evidenced by dreams every night your eyes are closed you have a visual experience. it turns out look at the circuitry only 5 percent of the data comes through the eyes all the rest is feedback. vision is not like a camera but the internal model. things like visual illusions for example and neuroscientist it demonstrates it doesn't

matter what is out there physically and colors don't exist in the world you just have different wavelengths just for speed to look at the right fruit we would call that green and have an experience but anyway vision and is all about the internal activity when you pass that into the occipital cortex you see. >> the no color things always freaks me out a little bit. [laughter] >> another person asks about the brain while it is sleep deprived there is insomnia what is going on in the brain?

>> in one sentence to make the switch over from the week to the sleep state is a huge thing of sleep one - - switching over the factory making changes and it is a transition is supposed to occur well but often does not and a dozen things i can go wrong. >> a question about the vest that you designed were does that initial feedback come from to understand the vibration? that's a great question because so to understand anything is having a correlation so i will back up. we don't remember this but when you were a baby you had to learn how to use your ears. you watch your mother's mouth

there is a visual input and then there is a correlation that is matched up and then clap your hands or knock on the bars of your cribs every time i do that i get spikes that's how you learn is with correlation with a person who is deaf may watch the world and see the mouse move and my first they don't know what that is it doesn't take very long to say they are linked and put them together so the video that you saw they had been trained before that so he sees the word and feels the word to make that correlation. thank you for the question.

>> this other question how is live wire different from reinforcement learning? i am not familiar with the term maybe you are. >> i will go into too much great detail but this is a way they had taken it on as a way of learning which is feedback of risk and reward that tells you strengthen the sewer weekend this.