>> good afternoon, everybody and welcome to politics and prose live at lunch where we bring you are politics and prose programming during a lunchtime hour. my name is beth wang, i'm an event courtney at p&p and we thank you for joining here to lebrate the release of your "livewired" by dr. david eagleman. at any time during that you can click a link to what i will put a check to purchase a copy of tonight spoke on our website. you can ask the author a question afternoon by submitting it to the q&a box, the button for which can be found at the bottom of your screen. be sure to put your question in the q&a and not in the chat to

make sure the author and i see it. ono our main event. dr. david eagleman is a neuroscientist in york times best-selling author. he has the center for science and law, national nonprofit institute inserts as an adjunct professor at stanford university. he is best known for his work on century perception, time perception, and narrow law. "livewired", his new book come presents new findings from his lab from dreaming to wearing devices of revolutionize how we think about the senses. he will discuss while hacke, humans using echolocation and the present and future of an eye. i am so excited to hear him talk today. welcome, david. the floor is all yours and i will be back in a little bit to moderate some q&a. >> great, thank you. it's a great pleasure to be here. i have been to politics and

prose in person in the past and since couldn't be there this year but i am so pleased you can join me this way online today. i want to tell you a little bit, give a brief overview aut some of the main themes in the ideas in the book and then we will take questions. let's startith ts question, how many of you have ever seen a baby zebra get born? april ryan in about 45 minutes. it wobbles and then run to been seen as baby giraffes, dolphins are born swimming and so on. w many of your you noticing aoo sapiens get born? you might nice it's different, the situation. they don't run around aer 45 minus and this is because instead ofrying to hardwire everything in at birth, mother nature found a simpler and more flexible strategy with human which is allow neurons to self

modify based on their expernce in the wor. in other words, we drop into t world half-baked and we let the world shape us. this i a completely new sort of strategy for mother natur but it has worked really well in the sense that we come homo sapiens, had ten over every corner of the planet. we've done the internet, church smallpox, got to the moon and so on. it's really working for us, and this is all due to this feature of brains which is that they are not really hardware. you can think of in that way. you're not really softer. it's what i called life where hence the title of the book united states. this is brain plasticity, a term you may have heard. the fact is this is a term coined a century ago by william

james because he was impressed by the way that you could take something plastic and molded into shape and it will hold that shape that's what the word plastic means. he was impressed when you learn something come when you learn that my name is david, then there's a change in in the phyl structure of your brain and it holds onto that. that's what he used the word plasticity but, in fact, would argue is that it is so much more than that going on. he has 86 billion neurons, these are the cells of the brain and each one has about 10,000 connection with its neighbors which means you have have .2 quadrillion connections going on in the brain. your entire life every moment of your life these things are plugging and unplugging and seeking and finding new places and so on. it's a dynamic living electric fabric that is not just something you mold and hold on to shape but instead it is changing your whole life, and

that's why i prefer, i coined pushing the term "livewired" instead of plastic. i want to give you a sense of some of the principles that i've worked to distill from the few. there are about 30,000 papers in the literature on brain plasticity and what i i try too is figure out what is the main principles that we can point to he? that's what i'm going to try to tell you. the first principle is that unlike computer sprint are extraordinarily flexible. i'll give you an example. there was a case a few years ago a 44-year-old man, normal iq had

mild like paint over to the doctor to try to figure out was going on. they couldn't pick up so the doctor tending to get a brain scan. it turns out what a normal brain scan looks like is something like this. this is a section right down the middle and the thing and what you to look at is number three which points to the area called a lateral ventricle which is this space in your brain that is filled with spinal fluid. the point is this gentleman who went into his brain look like this. the section labeled lv was completely filled with spinal fluid with such pressure pushed his brain up against the sides of his school. the thing come the street elicits remarkable flexible of the special because it didn't hamper his neurodevelopment, his normal cognition and behavior. the thing is you cannot take your laptop or phone and smoosh

it like that and hope that it still is going to work. this is a whole different kind of beast that we're talking about with liveware with strange examples of this. when children get an epilepsy that affects one half of the brain, one hemisphere of the rank them they can go in for what is called a hemisphere ectomy where you remove half of the brain. you take it out and originally surgeons would fill the empty space with still ping-pong balls returned that you don't need to do that they realize because the spinal fluid provides enough pressure so we just leave it empty and the child has half a brain picky might think that poor kid he could have real deficits. that's the weird part. they don't. as long as you do the under the about seven the child has typically normal cognition and can speak and can do math problems and can learn history and so on. they tend to have a slight limp

on the other side of the body because this side of the brain controls the other side of the body. they are a little weaker their otherwise they're perfectly fine. the book is full of examples of this sort of thing to sort set the ball rolling that what we talked about with united states is a different beast than what we're used to doing because i can't take my laptop and to have the motherboard out that's principle number one principle number two is brain are locked in the silence and darkness of the tragedy they hav no idea what your body looks like and get when you lookt the brain what we find i there's a map of the body. i won't go into detail except to say that the part of your brain that cares about the inputs coming from your body, , there'a map of your body and the same with your motor cortex which is putting information out to your body to move it around.

discovered in the 60s this is that and so the question is how is through this map in the brain of the body? the answer is that must be genetically specified but it turns out that's not the correct answer. we know that for many reasons. one of them though is let's say you lose an arm in an accident. your brains map what i just so that it says i see, i have bought it without an arm and it takes over and changes its map. the map is always changing predicated on what information is coming from the body. this is a picture i talked about admiral lord nelson in the book who is the of some british wars. most people don't notice he's missing his right arm because it got shot off in one of his battles. he described what was like but now we understand what happened

in his brain, 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 the key thing is it is a full-time business. what happened with the french in the new world is they had a lot of territory in the new world but eventually the french were sending over fewer ships and the british and the spanish and so they ended up losing the territory, and it is exactly the same thing with the brain if his right arm is sending fewer ships because it is now gone, then the map has changed and territory gets taken over. they key is that nothing lies child in the brain. it's a very competitive system part of the way we can see that is with people who are blind. people who are born blind,

normally patients taking care of by the back of your head, the occipital lobe. somebody who is blind, wait, sorry. i missed a slide. for somebody whos blind the occipital lobe is taken over by sound, attach, things like that. it's not like the visual system -- let me put ithis way. even though we learned in neuroscien 101 class this part of the brain i visual system, it's onlyhe visual system if your eyes are working and if there are ships of data coming in, then it becomes the visual. if there are no ships come in and says that's cool i i woulde this for the neighboring countries, which in this case are sound and touch we tend to look at the way a

child might look at a globe of the earth and think all those untry borders are someh predestined or that' the way it had to come out. wenow if you are into politics and world history, you know those countryorders could have come out very diffently if this can had died or if this battlead tipped the other way or someone. me thing in the brain. despite the fact we learn about as thought is all diagrammed outcome it's extremely fluid system. the thing i want to emphasize is about the takeover of territory is very rapid this is something that is very new, i knew discovery within the last several years in neuroscience. what i mean by that is glitzy take somebody aside person and you blindfolded and stick them in his skin to get what find is you start seeing activity in the visual cortex-based on sound and touch and that happens within about an hour, this encroachment start to happen.

what this tells us it's a very competitive system happening under the hood there. things are moving fast. the whole thing is sprung like a mousetrap as soon as the sentences i'm not getting vision coming back, it starts making changes and there's this annexation begins to happen. what my student and i realize some years ago is this leads to a very new, interesting theory that with no published on about why we dream. it's this. in the chronic competition for brain real estate, the vual brain in particula has a unique oblem to deal with because of the rotation of the planet. so we are cast int darkness about 12 hours every cycle, and, of course, i'm talking about evolutionary time, not havin electricity. what happens is in the dark your touch and your heang and smell and taste can work just fine but

your vision is the thing that settlor is depved. how does the visual system deal with thi unfair disadvantage? we suggested by keeping the occipital cortex active at night, keeping i protected can we call this the defenses activation theory and the idea is that what it is doing is dreams of the brains wayf fighting take over from the other senses. so every 90 minutes you have three specic circuitry in the brn tha blasts activity into the occipital cortex. that's all that circuitry does by the weight and it is extremely specific. it just goes to this part of the brain, and that's what happens during the night. my understanding what's going on with brain plasticity, we can really open up this whole new set of theories and the framewor about what the brain is doing under the hood and why.

i want to tell you the next principle. i am moving fast to some highlights here. the next principle is the brain will wrap itself -- the brain wraps itself around new data streams, and actually you probably canear the audio but this is a ted talk i gave a few years ago. i built a vt with motors on it, and so it's likeittle buzz is on your cell phone, and it's capting sound and turning sound into patterns of vibration on the skin. what was happening was i was speaking and my skin is feeling th going on from low to high frequency. here's the video by the way. this woman on the left is saying the word sound and on the right she sang the word touch. if you just look at the way the motors are met from low to high frequency you can see sound and then touch. if you look on her shoulder to can see that there's high

frequencies there. so the point is for people who are deaf, what we can do is feed information to an unusual channel which is the skin or instead of the inner ear which is sophisticated biological machine to capture sound on the interim and breaks into frequency and the ship set off to the brain in terms of spikes, little electrical spikes, we are capturing sound breaking into frequencies here and sending it to the brain of the spinal cord and into the brain. the brain can figure out what to do with information. it doesn't know. again it is trapped in silence and darkness in the fall of your skull and policies of our spikes come in. it doesn't know if those represent make sure it's a molecule to policies our spikes. brain is good at doing is putting together an understanding of what's correlated with what and figure out how to understand that data. here's an example of the very first participant we ever tested

with this. he's on the left. my graduate student is on the right. my graduate student says a word, he says the word you and the gentleman who i completely deaf on the left writes down what he's understanding my graduate student says where. and this gentleman writes down the word where. scott says touch. and so he is feeling this on his skin and is able to translate this complicatedattern of vibration into an understanding of what is getting said. what we've done in the meantime is i ended up being a company out of my lab called neo-century and we shrunk this down to the size of a wristband and the wristband has vibratory motors in the band at that capture sound and there's a whole computer board in here. what it's doing is translate

that into patterns of vibration on the wrist. here's our very first participant. this is before, a prototype. to give y a sense of what it's like for him to be able toeel sound. so as i said, we spun on this company neo-century it's called the buzz and we have this on wrists all over the world never it's wonderfully satisfying to take a neuroscience idea and go l the way from the radical concept to a dice that is changing people's lives all over. i will also mention i'm a a scientific advisor for the show westworld and so we had our best make a cameo appearance in westworld.

i don't looking if any of you watch the show but this was seeking to episode seven, that is the best on the screen. the gem in the middle as you can see, the general in the middle is when the best. he feels spatially where the robot, the host are located and he can -- what were doing is translating location of something into a spatial feeling. so suddenly they feel there's a host in the room they were not expecting. okay, in any case what we've done is taken this idea and use this with people who are blind. in this case this gentleman feels everybody around you. he can feel there's some ahead of him, someone behind it. if you walk up to the left or right you can feel exactly where you are which makes it better than what a sighted person has, being able to understand everything going around you in 360. we can add navigation direction on top of that so he's never been to before but we add

navigation directions and he can go right where he is going. there's much more to say about this. if anyone is interested in the general type of thing about creating nuisances, please check it out at ted talks that he gave on this. the book goes deep into why this works, and dozens of examples abt this year let me move on to next principle now, which is the brain as i mentioned is trapped in there. it doesn't know what your body looks like but it figures out how to control it. one example that i discuss in the book is a dog who was born without front legs. what did she do? she figured out how to walk on her back legs like a human. what this tells us is that dog brains do not arrive preprogrammed to drive dog bodies. instead, like brains across the animal kingdom come what they want to do is get the food, get

water, get to the mother, get away from danger. so they figure out how to control the body they are in. that's all there is to it. we see this in humans all the time. in terms of the world best archer is armless. you got interested in archie. he holds the world's record f the longest accurate shot. this is because his brain inse can say application of my legs, boldest back into like that. if anyone saw my television series, the brain, i covered this woman chen was completely paralyzed. she got damage to her spinal cord and so the signals can go from her brain out to her body so she got these brain implants and this allows her to control this robotic arm, a very beautiful sophisticated robotic arm. she controls is with the signals in a mortar cortex. she imagines using her -- moving a requirement that gets

translate into moving this robotic arm. she gets better and better at it because of brain plasticity because she figured out okay, wh i think this is does this but aittle while so think about in a different way. she figures out how to use this service she could have things outside of her body. it turns out this whole idea about how could you make live wired devices that the drought body the way the brain does? we are just turning this in colleague of mine at columbia makes this little robot called starfish robot that isn't preprogrammed to know its body. instead it figures out its body by trying a different moods and then seeing what happens to the body. it figures out how to get somewhere, get over to the right side of the table, to get to reward. it figures it out but the key is you can snap a leg off of this and figures out how to walk again, just like humans and

other animals do because it just figures out the body by trial and err. the next principle, actually this is a lasting i will mention and then want to move to q&a. part of the reason i think it's so amazing to understand what is going on under the hood is because we can build new devices this way. we completely have new principles of how we are think about things. as one example i given the book, if you look at the mars rover, spirit, it was a multibillion-dollar project regarded up to the red planet and he did a great job of what happened the venture is a got it right front wheel stuck in the martian soil and couldn't get out and so it died there. now it's a multibillion-dollar piece of space junk sitting there. you compare that to a will that get its laycock in a trap, what the wolf will do is choose

its leg off and then figure out how to walk on tee ls. that's what all animals do. they have a sense of elegance. they want to get to safety to seek water, to escape danger, to find foo its actions are undergirded by e demands of its stomach and thehreat of predators, and the wolf traffics in deference to its goal. it's brain drinks of information about the environment and its capabilities in that environment, and then, knowi what it's lames allow it to do. the brain translates those capability into the most useful motor output. able to respond with a limp because animals don't shut down moderate damage and neither should our machines. in the last part of the book i talk about the next steps how we can build a a completely diffet kind of machine that any case of the ms rover gets its wheel stuc in says i got my wheel

stuck, choose the real often figure out how to operate i a different way. all of this is to say there's so much amazing stuff happening under the hood that we're just scratching the surface. as you and especially here in silicon valley suppressed with what's going on with artificial intelligence but that is baby stuff going on compared to what is actually here, this strange computational mature, is living dynamic electrical fabric we all have under our food. what i would like to do is answer instructions about -- questions about anything. thank you so much for that, dr. eagleman. with a bunch of great questions that i will start with kind of a broader topic that people seem to have a lot of questions about. it's this idea of the brain remapping itself when senses are deprived based on like a vacation or just deprivation --

amputation. you hear about amputees having feelings of the absent limpet is is something only happens until the brain has remapped to recognize it doesn't have that limp. >> that's a great question. here's the thing. the right way to think about the brain is that you a different time scales of change. some things are changing rapidly and other things are changing very slowly and they are all daisychained in order. the thing that changed fast has to present enough evidence to the next level for the new say i believe that, i'm going to change, to at that changes and so on. what happens when somebody loses a limb is at some part of their brain change and we just right away. that was the picture i showed you. deeper areas in the brain still think that information they're t giving is from the hand because their whole life been gone information from the hand and so

the get confused. sometimes they think they are still getting signals from hand-picked touch the face they say that must be the hand that is being touched. there can be painted as a result of the interaction between these different layers. by the way this is a whole new framework that i present and it explains so much of what happens in your spite -- neuroscience. the oldest rule in neurology is called ribose law which is older memories are more stable than newer members. if you've ever known someone at the end of their life who is maybe on her deathbed, i don't remember what happened in the last month, the last few maybe but they remember their childhood is just fine. which is unusual. other systems don't have property. the reason it happens is because of the way that things work the way down in the system. they become more and more and more stable with time. this is why often undercut its people will revert to their

childhood language, just as one example, , albert einstein last words come nobody knows what to wear because you speaking in german on his deathbed. the night nurse didn't speak german. so thanks. >> totally. another question about this kind of same concept. .. >> replaced with a machine does at that remapping happen? >> that's an interesting question. one of the things fascinating about replacing body parts in general is that you're fine with it. i mean, you can get an artificial heart, a respirator to take care of your lungs or a ventilator or anything like

that. you can lose limbs and you're still the same person. in contrast, if you damage or lose even a little chunk of brain tissue, that can change you entirely. that can change your decision making, your risk aversion, your capacity to name animals or see colors or understand music or hundreds of things in the lab every day. and this is how we know that the brain is the densest representation of you in the whole body. in other words, people often ask, wait, what about the rest of the body? doesn't that-- >> yeah, a little bit. it's like the body is like the greater metropolitan area, but this is the urban center and you can change the stuff and replace it and there doesn't really seem to be much of a difference at all, but the brain is really dense. >> absolutely. i have a question just from me. i'm so, so interested in the

idea that dreams are meant to make sure that the other senses don't take over as we sleep. who you do you test that in a lab? is it sleep studies? do you make people not dream? how do you do that? >> yeah, great question. we actually just published a paper on this where we did deep research on 25 different species of primate. homosapien being one of them. and even primates which is are close cousin, you know, we only split off 70 million years ago from the one here and-- it appears there's different plasticity. a particular kind of lemur, you know, it comes out of the womb, reaches adolescence pretty rapidly and walks pretty rapidly, which is compared to homosapiens. you can look at the how plastic the brain is, versus how pre

programed it is. and how much rem sleep, rapid eye movement sleep they get. and the less plastic the animal, the less dream sleep it needs. why? because the visual cortex is not in danger of getting taken over because it doesn't have that much plasticity. but the more plastic you are, the more dream sleep you have because you need to protect the brain because it's in more danger of takeover of the visual cortex. and that's how we study. what we're next on, turns out that some people on try cyclical anti-depressants and if-- if everything is approximately the same or you're just not getting dream sleep at night, what is the effect and one of the things i noticed right away. people on the anti-depressants say that their vision gets blurry. and the doctors, the clinicians

say it's because of dry eyes and that might be right, but it might not be right and so that's what i'm looking into. >> that's awesome. you talked about different levels of plasticity in different species, but there's a question about different levels of plasticity from human to human. do humans lose plasticity as we get older and if so, are there ramifications? >> yes, generally the brain gets less plastic as it ages and most people view this as a bad thing, but, in fact, the reason it happens is because the job of the brain is to build an internal model of the world out there. and so, what the brain's trying to do is how do i look at the world. how do people react to me, how do i get good at something so i can have a career. this is the way that the brain

is trying to do this at all points and what happens is you get better and better at it as you age, and so the reason the brain is less flexible is because you're putting together a pretty good understanding of how to operate in the world. and so, that's why we became less plastic, but the good news, the really important part is to always make certain that you are challenging yourself with novelty so that you can build new roadways and maintain plasticity. i'll give you a one second thing about a study that's been going on for a long time, many decades, where people donate their brains upon death and in terms of that, people who stay kag cognitivelily active all their lives, some of them had alzheimer's and nobody knew it and the reason they didn't have cognizant deficits. because they cognitively active

and had chores and responsibility and so on. even if their brain was physically degenerating with alzheimer's, they were building new roadways, as opposed to people who retire and their lives shrink and they're not challenging themselves, not dealing with other people, that's the worst thing you can do. one of the main lessons in neuroscience, challenge your brain with novelty all the time. that's the thing that you can do. and what that means, by the way, as soon as you get good at something like pseudo -- sudoku, don't do it anymore, do something you're bad at. >> challenging, with memory loss and cognitive decline. a couple of other great questions about dreams, asked what do you think is the evolutionary of lucid dreaming.

why can some people do it and others take practice and can't do it. >> for anyone who doesn't know, lucid dreaming is when you're aware you're in a dream and you can take control of the dream. it's rare and most people never have it in their lives and there's ways to train up at it and try to get better at it, but i actually think it's a bug not a feature. it's something that, you know, the brain puts a lot of work into generating consciousness and that turns off when you're sleeping and sleep takes up the neural trash and what you've learned in the day and what happens lucid dreaming is an accidental interface between the two that's typically not supposed to happen. in answer to your question, i don't think there's any evolutionary purpose to it, but i think it's a bug that can be find there sometimes. >> totally.

and then evie asked this question about dreaming. how do we see our dreams if we're not really seeing with our eyes? is it our imagination? what's going on there? >> this is a very important fundamental concept to get, which is that your-- what you consider vision is all about internal activity. what's happening in here. and you don't even need your eyes to see, as evidenced by dreams every night. your eyes are closed, you're having full rich visual experience. it turns out if you look at the circuitry carefully, only 5% of the data back here, only 5% is coming in through the eyes and all the rest is all feedback loops and other things going on back here. so vision is not at all like a camera, it's all about the internal model of what you expect to be seeing out there. and things like the visual

illusions, for example, which are very interesting to, you know, like eight years old and then neuro scientists when they grow up. demonstrates, wow, it doesn't matter what's out there physically. what you're seeing is whatever your brain is putting together and telling you. and colors don't even exist in the world all you have is different wave lengths of electromagnetic radiation and for speed to see the ripe fruit in the frees trees, i'll call that red, i'll call that green. when you blast activity into the occipital cortex, you see. >> all right. the no color thing is just always-- it always freaks me out a little bit. >> me, too. >> and another person asked about the brain activate -- or like while it's sleep deprived

or brains that have insomnia, what's going on in the brain then? then? >> in one sentence, it's just that to make switchover to the wake state to the sleep state, it's a huge thing like switching over the factory and making the big changes and it's a transition that is supposed to occur well, but it often does not. and there are a dozen ways that it can go wrong, so people have narcolepsy and too little sleep and so on. but that's the answer. >> question about the vest you designed. where does the initial feedback come from for the brain to train. >> what you need to sawn anything is having a correlation, let me back up for one step, which is none of us remember this, but when you were a baby you had to learn

how to use your ears. right? so you watched your mother's mouth and there's the visual input coming in there and there's the auditory input here and put together, okay, there's a correlation there and they're matched up and you do things like clap your hands and knock on the bars of your crib and you realize, okay, i'm doing a motor output here and every time i do that i get spikes coming in here. and that's how you learn is with correlation, so, with a person who is deaf, they learn the buzz or the vest by watching the world. they see the dogs mouth move and they feel the bark here and at first they don't know what that is, but it doesn't take very long for the brain to say i got it, those two things are linked and puts it together. in the case of learning words, what the video you saw, that was his fifth day, he had been trained for two hours a day and four hours before that--

sorry, four days two hours a day. and so he sees the word and feels the world, but that's how he makes the correlation there. thank you for the questions. >> yeah. this other question, how is the live different from reenforcement learning? the way you described an agent trying to figure out its body, reenforcement learning? i'm not familiar with the word, but maybe you are. >> let no not get into too much detail, but reenforcement, and the robotics and taken on with learning. which is essentially feedback, punishment reward is what tells you, okay, strengthen this, weaken this, and so on. a lot of what happens in the-- some fraction of what happens in the brain is reinforced in learning, but it's actually more than that, it's just as an example, it's not just about reward and punishment although

that's an important part of it. it's about relevance to you, what matters in your environment, and so on. but also, about the tension, so as i said, the job of the brain is to build an internal model of the world and what the brain is good at doing. everything attaches with the model and that's what we call attention, we call attention to that and put our high resolutions on that. and one of the things, you asked this technical question that you might be interested in. in chapter 8 of the book, info tropism, when you look at plants doing phototropism, when they follow the light. and what the brains do is info-tropism, what they do to maximize the data they're getting from the world. one example is the retina. at the back of your eye you've

got the photo receptors. during the day the photo receptors have a high spacial resolution and they say i've got photons. and as it's dark, the receptors say there aren't enough photons here and link arms with each other, and the process that they have. link arms with others so they have lower spacial, and they maximize what they can take from the world at all moments. it's like this from all systems. it sounds like from your question that you might be interested in notions like info-tropism that goes well beyond the spacial learning. >> we'll have a few more questions. there are really great ones about ai, which i know is a, you know, component of your book. do you think there's anything about human intelligence,

emotions, consciousness, et cetera, that emerge from our brains that ai will not be able to reproduce or are we, you know, on track maybe all of it? >> well, it's a great question. as far as we can tell, the brain is a machine. it's an unbelievably complicated machine, it's the level is something that ba bankrupts our language. it's a physical machine and when you get damaged, damage it in ways you expect. and because of that there's no theoretical reason why we shouldn't be able to simulate that on silicon or anything, build it out of beer cans and tennis balls, whatever you want. it should work. now, you know, that said, you know, we're still a young science so it may be that we discover something in a hundred years, wow, gee, we didn't realize that. if we discovered it we might be able to replicate that thing,

too. ai should be able to get there eventually. will it happen in our lifetimes? i really doubt it. the reason is ai right now is extremely-- it does these wonderful things with super human performance, but it's stupid compared to a three-year-old child who can navigate the room and manipulate adults and get food to her mouth and do all kinds of things. so ai is missing what we call agi, artificial generalized intelligence, which is to say ai thing can distinguish pictures of cats from dogs with superhuman performance, but if you say distinguish pictures of bears from camels, it will fail because it can get trained on one thing, but it can't generallylize to other things. where we are now i think is a very long ways off. >> another question about different component of your book that we haven't quite touched on yet. can you talk a bit more of the

brain's synapses? >> for anybody who doesn't know. k kinesthsia, when they look at a letter, that triggers a color in their head. a is red and b an orange, so on. it used to be rare and now we know about three percent of the population have it, it's not considered a disorder or a disease. is perception reality the way na some people see the world and others don't see the world this way. there's a lot to say about kinesth kinesth kinesthesia. some of them can do them differently because numbers

have colors and generally personalities and shapes as well. so it helps to old on. for a for example, if i tell you my phone number you might forget it a week from now. but if you have this, it has an autumn pattern to it and helps you to remember, so they have a better memory. >> totally. so, we're about at time to wrap up, but there's another question about your opinion on brain computer interfaces, and if you think that there are any nonmedical applications that are going to emerge in the future? >> so, it depends what you mean by brain-computer interfaces. there's the kind of stuff that i build, which is a noninvasive wristband you put on for a couple hundred dollars and you have a new stream of data. on other inspection, there's elon musk, he did a

presentation the other day, drilling a hole in your skull and inserting electrodes into the brain. what he's doing is pushing forward the technology on that and that will be very useful for particular clinical application. will it go beyond clinical? i doubt it. even though the mythology around neural link, they'll do that. but doing an open head surgery just so they can send a faster text, that's the answer. i think computer-brain interface of this sort, we're doing a bunch of projects where we're feeding in information about infrared light about the stock market, twitter data and drones, things like that. experimenting with all kinds of great stuff that go beyond the clinical realm, but i doubt that people will get an open head surgery for that.

>> all right. if ping-pong balls weren't a great idea in the past, maybe that's not a great idea today. one last question, what are you reading these days? >> oh, i just finished a couple of books about material science. it was fascinating. one is called "stuff matters", and the other is called "liquid rules" by the same author. terrific and i just read a book, i forget the title. something like travel of the ice age, i blanked on the title, but it's about being up in alaska and looking at where the baring -- the berhing land bridge used to be and animals. >> i thank you for your time today and for all of you in the audience, you asked amazing questions, i would encourage you to check out dr.

eagleman's future events and maybe you can ask the questions at one of those and i hope that everybody out in the audience continues to stay well, to stay well-read. the link for live wire is in the chat and you can find it on politics and prose's website. >> thank you, great to be back here at politics and prose. >> great. have a good one. >> you're watching book tv on c-spa c-span2, every weekend with the latest nonfiction books and authors. c-span # created by america's cable companies as a public service and brought to you toy by your television provider. >> today, live on c-span2, a live conversation with former president barack obama and his newly blished memoir, "a promised land" reflecting on

his life and political career. he's interviewed by washington post's reporter and elizabeth alexander. former president barack obam live tod at 11:30 eastern. on c-span2. ♪ ♪ >> hi, i'm katherine eban. my book is