>> good afternoon, everybody and welcome to politics and prose life at lunch when we bring you are politics and prose programming during your lunchtime hour. i name is beth wang, i'm an event cornered at p&p and we thank you so much for joining here to celebrate the release of "livewired" by dr. david eagleman. at any country that today you can click the link that i will put a check to purchase a copy of two nights book on our website. you can ask the author question afternoon by submitting to the q&a box come 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 that the author and i see it. onto a main event. dr. david eagleman is a neuroscientist and "new york times" best-selling author. he has the city for us science

and law, national nonprofit exits an adjunct professor at stanford. he's best known for his work on sensory substitution, time perception, brain plasticity, and neural law. "livewired" his new book presents new standings in his lab, from dreaming to wearing devices that revolutionize how we think about the senses. he will discuss by packers, humans using echolocation and the present and future of ai. i am so excited to hear dr. eagleman talk today. welcome, david. the floor is all yours and i will be back in a bit to modera some q&a. >> great, thank you, beth. it's a great pleasure to be here. i have been to politics and prose in the past and so i couldn't be there this year but i'm pleased you can join me this way online today. i want to tell you a little bit give a brief oveiew about some of the main themes and ideas in

the book and then we are going to take questions. let's start with this question. how many of you have ever seen a baby zebra get born? so it can run in about 45 nutes. it wobbles and it runs around, same with baby giraffes. dolphins aborts when insulin. how many of you have received a homo sapiens get born? you might notice it's different, the situation. theyon't run around after 455 minutes and this is because it is trying too hard wire everything at, mother nature found a simple and more flexible strategy wh humans which is allow neurons toelf modify based on theirxperience in the world. in other words, we drop into the world half-baked, and will let the world shape us. this is a completely new sort of

strategy for mother nature but it has worked really well in the sens that we homo sapiens had ken over every corner of the planet we invented the internet. the church smallpox, have gotten tohe and so on. it's really working for us, and this is all due to this feature of brains, which is they are not really hardware. you can think of them that way. they are not software. instead it's is what i call lie and hence the title of the book "livewired" and in the field we talk about this as brain elasticity, a term you may have heard. the fact is this was a term that was quite 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, when you log want me is david, then there's a change in the physical structure of your brain and his hold on to that. that's when used the word elasticity. but, in fact, what i argue is it is so much more than that going on. you have 86 billion neurons, and each one of these has about 10,000 connections with its neighbors. which means we have .2 quadrillion connections going on in the brain. your entire life company 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 shape but instead it is changing your whole life and that's why i have coined pushing the term "livewired" instead of plastic.

this is incredible technology. we don't know in silicon valley we don't know how to build things like this yet but we have an existence of this technology because were walking around with three pounds of it. what i want to be very briefly is just keep a sense of some of the principles that i have worked to distill from the field. there are about 30,000 papers in the literature now on brain plasticity of what i try to do is to drought what is, what are the main principles that we can point to hear. that's what i'm going to try to tell you. the first principle is that unlike computers come brains are extraordinarily flexible. i will give an example of that. there was a case a few years ago, a 44-year-old man, normal iq have mild like ainslie went to the doctor to try to figure out what was going on. they couldn't figure out the doctor soon to get a brain scan just in case.

this is a normal brain scan. look at number three which points to this little area called the latter calendrical which is the most base in your brain that is filled with cerebral spinal fluid. the point is this gentleman who went in his brain look like this. the section labeled lv, it was completely filled with cerebral spinal fluid with such pressure that pushed his bring up against the sides of his skull. the remarkable flexibility of this material because it didn't hamper his neurodevelopment, his normal cognition and behavior. the thing is you cannot take your phone or laptop and smoosh it like that and hope it is still going to work. this is a whole different kind of the beast that we're talking about with liveware. we have strange examples of

this. when children get an epilepsy that affects one half of the brain, one hemisphere of the brain, they can go into for what is called a hemispherectomy where you remove half of the brain. you take it out. originally surgeons would fill the empty space with sterile ping-pong balls but it turns out you don't need to do that they realize because the cerebral spinal fluid provides enough pressure so they just leave it empty and the child has half a brain pick you might think oh, my gosh that poor kid come he's going to real deficits. that's the weird part. they don't. as long as you do the under -- users under the age of about seven the kid can speak into 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 and trolls the other side of the body. they are a little bit weaker there, otherwise they are perfectly fine. the book is full of examples of this sort of thing to sort of set the ball rolling of what we

are talking about with liveware is a different beast than what we're used to doing because i can't take my laptop answer half the motherboard out and expected to still function. that's principle number one, just two or yet us. principle number two ishat brains are locked in the silence and darkness of thekull. they have no idea what your body looks like and yet when you look at the brain what we find is there is a map of the body. i won't go into details except to say that the part of your brain that cares about inputs coming from your body, there's a map of your body and sang with your motor cortex which is putting information out to your body, to move it around. this was discovered in the '60s that there is this map and so the question is how is there this map of the brain in the body? the answer is it must be genetically prespecified but it turns out that's not actually

the correct answer. we know that for many reasons. one of them know is that say you lose an arm in an accident. so that it says i see, i am a body without an arm so changes its maps of the map is always changing dedicated on what information is coming from the body. -- predicated. this is a picture i talk about admiral lord nelson in the book was a hero of trafalgar and other british wars but most people don't notice he he's mig his right arm because it got shot off in one of his battles and he described what it was like. but now he understands what happens in his brain. it happens fast. just a quick analogy, which is how does the brain understand

what the map should look like? i use the analogy of colonization. colonization, the key thing 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 than a british and the spanish, and so it ended up losing the territory, and it is exactly the same thing with the brain if admiral nelson said right arm is sending fewer ships because it is now gone, then the maps change in territory gets taken over. the key is nothing lies fallow in the brain. it's a competitive system. part of the reason we can see that is with people who are blind, , people who are born bld normalizations taken care of by the back of your head, the occipital lobe. somebody who is blind, -- wait,

sorry. i missed a. here it is. for somebody who is bnd, the occipital lobe is taken over by sound, touch, things like that. it's not like the visual system -- l me put it this week. even thoug we learn and neuroscience 101 class as part of the brain is the visual system, it' only the visual system if your eyes are working and if there are shifts of data coming in. if there are no ships coming in, and h says that's cool, i would us this territory for the neighboring couries, which in this case are sound and touch. we tend to look at the witch hunt might look at a globe of the earth and think all those country borders are somehow predestined or that's the way it had to have come out. we know if you are into politics

and world history, you know those country borders could have, very differently if this king had died or is this battl had died the other way. the same way in the brain. it's a extremely fluid system. the thing i want to emphasize is that the takeover of territory is very rapid. this is something that is new, a new discovery just within the last several years in neuroscience. what i mean by that is let's say you take someone come a sighted person injured blindfold them and stick them in this scanner. what you find is you start seeing activity in their visual cortex-based on sound and touch, as it happens within about an hour. this encroachment starts to happen. what this tells us it's a very competitive system happening under the hood. things are moving fast. the whole thing is sprung like a mouse trap. as soon as assistances i'm not

getting vision back there, it starts making changes and there's this annexation that begins to happen. what my student and i realized some years ago is this leads to a very new, interesting theory that we have now published on about why we dream. it's this. in the chronic comtition for brain real estate, the vual brain in particular has a unique problem to do with because of the rotation of the planet. we are cast into darkness about 12 hours every cycle. and, of course, i'm talking about evolutionary time, not having electricity. what happens is in the dark your touch and are hearing under spell and your case can work just fine but your vision is the thing that segment is deprived. how does the visual system deal with this unfair disadvantage for we suggested by keeping the occipital cortex active at

night, keeping it protected y if we call this the defensive acvation theory, and the idea is that what it is doing is, dreams are the brains weight of fighting takeover from the other senses. every 90 minutes you have this very spefic circuitry in the brain that last activitynto the occipital cortex and that's all that circuitry doe it's extremely specific. it just goes to this part of the brain. that's what hpens during the night. i understand what's going on with bra plasticity we can real open up -- why understanding -- we can open up this whole new set of theories and framework 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. the next principle is the brain will wrap ielf -- the brain wrap itself around new data

streams and actually you probly can hear the audio but this i a ted talk i gave aew years ago. i built a vest with vibratory tor on it and so it's like little buzzers on your cell phone. the vest is capturing sound and turning sound into pattes of vibration on the ski what was happening was i was speaking and my skin is feeling that going on from low to high frequency. here's the video. 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 to motors are mapped from low to high frequency you can see sound and then touch. if you look on her shoulder and you can see there's a high-frequency there. so the point is for people who are deaf come what we can do is feed information to an unusual channel which is the scan. instead of the interview which

is this sophisticated biological machine that capture sound on the instrument breaks into frequencies and schiff set off to the brain in terms of spikes, electrical spikes, we are capturing sound breaking into frequencies here and send it to the brain of the spinal cord into the brain. the brain can figure 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 ever are spikes coming in. it doesn't know if those spikes are photons or her compression waves or mixtures of molecules. what the brain is good at doing is putting together an understanding of what is correlate with what and figure out how to understand that did it. here's an example of the very first participant we have tested with us. he is on the left. my graduate students on the right. my graduate students as a word, in this case he says the word you and the general mythos completely deaf on the left

writes down what he's understanding. my graduate students as where. and this german writes down the word where and then scott says touc -- gentleman. so the he's doing this on his skin and is able to translate this complicated pattern of vibrations in an understanding of what is getting said. .. >> what it's doing is the patterns of vibration onto the wrist and ts is our very first paicipant, this is before, when it was a clunky prototype, but just to give you a sense of what it's like for him to be able to feel sound.

so as i said, we spun off this company, neo sentry, it's called the buzz and it's on wrists all over the world. taking a neuroscience idea to a device that's changing. and i'm a scientific advisor for the show "west world", and our vest made an appearance. i don't know if any of you watch the show about you this was season two, episo seven. that's the vest on the screen there. the gentleman in the middle is wearing the vest and what's happening here is he feels

spacially where the robot, the hosts are located and he can fashion accordingly. what we're doing is translating location of something into a spacial feeling here. so suddenly they feel there's a host in the room and they weren't expecting one there. okay, so my vests won't save you if the robots go bad, but taking this idea and using this with people who are blind. in this case, this gentleman feels everybody around him and feels there's somebody ahead of him, behind him, left and right, he can feel exactly where you are and which makes it better than what a sighted person has. being able to understand everything going around you 360 and navigation directions. he's never been here before and we have navigation directions and he can go right where he's going. so there's much more to say about this. if anyone is interested in this general type of thing, creating new senses, please check out

the ted talks that i gave on this, but the book goes deep into why this works and dozens of examples about this. so, let me move on to the next principl now, which is the brain, as i mentioned, is, you know, it's trapped in there. it doesn't know what your body looks like, but it figures out how to control it. so one example i discussed in the book is about faith the dog who was born without front legs and so what did she do? well, she figured out how to walk on her back legs like a human. what this tells us, dogsrains do not arrive pre-programed to drive dog bodies. instead like brains across the animal kingdom, what they want to do, get to food, get to water, get to player mother and away from danger and they figure out the body they're in. that's all there is to it and we see this in humans all the

time. it turns out the world'sest archer is armless. he got this archery holds t record for the long eest accurae shotment and his brain says, okay i'll pull this thing back. if anybody saw my television series, the woman her she had a spinal cord injury and this controls the robotic arm with the signals in her motor cortex. and she imagines using her real arm and she gets better and better at it it because of brain plasticity and figuring out. when i think this, it does this, a little bit wrong and i'm think about it a different way and figures out how to use

it and you can have things outside of your body. and it turns out the whole idea how can you like livewired things to at that big out what the brain does. and a colleague of mine has the starfish that doesn't know its body and then it figures out trying different moves and seeing what happens to the body. so it actually figures out how to get where it's trying to get to the right side of the table here, to get to reward. and so it figures it out, but the key is then, you can snap a leg off of this and it figures out how to walk again, just like humans and other animals do because it figures out its body by trial and error. >> okay. so the next principle, actually this is the last thing i will

mention and then i want to get to q & a. part of the reason that i think it's so amazing to understand what is going on under the hood is because we can actually build new devices this way, with completely new principles, how we're thinking about things. one example i give in the book, you know, if you look at the mars rover spirit, it was a multi-billion dollar project, we got it up to the red planet and it did a great job there. but what happened eventually, it got i.t. right front wheel stuck in the martian soil and couldn't get out and died there and now it's a multi-billion dollar piece ofpace junk sitting there. if you compare that to a wolf, the leg caught in the trap. what the wolf will do, chew his leg off and figure out how to walk on three legs. that's what all animals do. they have relevae, they want to get to safety, seek water,

escape danger and get food. and its aions are undergirded by its stomach and its predators and the wolf tracks ineference to gome. the brain drinks up information about the environment and its capabilities inhat environment. in otherords, what its limbs allow it to do and its brain translates capabilities into e most useful mot output. so the wolf carries o with the li because animals don't shut down with moderate damage and neithe should our machines. and so, in the last part of the book, i talk about the next steps, how we can actually bud a completely different kind of machine that in the case of the mars rover got its wheel stuck. so it chews its wheel off and operates in a different way with a differentody plan. all ofhis is to say that there's so much amazing stuff happening under the hood there that we're just scratching the

surface, everyone especially out here in silicon valley is so impressed with artificial intelligence and so on, you know what? that's baby stuff going on compared to what is actually here, this strange material, this living dynamic electric fabric that we have under the hood. what i'd like to do is answer questions about anything. >> thank you so much for that. that was so cool and we have a bump much of -- a bunch of great questions. and a broader topic that people have questions about, this idea of the brain remapping itself when senses are deprived based on amputation or you know, just deprivation. ed asked, you hear about amputees having feelings from the absent limb. is this something that happens only until the brain remaps to

recognize it doesn't have that limb? >> that's a great question. i have a whole chapter on that. the way you think about the brain, dinner time scales. some things are changing rapidly and others are slowly and they're daisy-chained in order. and they have to present enough level of evidence for them to say, okay, i believe that and then that changes and so on. what happens when somebody loses a limb, some parts of their brain, change and readjust right away. and that was actually the picture i showed you of the area called the somatocentric cortez. and others think the information they're getting is from the hand because their whole life it was from the hand. and they get confused. and sometimes if you touch the face, they think oh, that is the hand and there could be pain because of the interaction

between the layers. and by the way, this is a whole new framework that i present and it explains so much of what happens in neuroscience. one example, one of the -- actually the oldest rule in neurology is called rybo's law. older memories are more stable than the new memories. you know somebody on their death bed. they don't remember the last month, but they remember their childhood just fine. and we don't have those properties where older memories are more stable. the way it happens, it go more and more stable with time and by the way, often on their death beds people will revert to their childhood language. just one example, albert einstein's last words, nobody knows what they were because he was speaking in german on his

death bed and the nurse didn't speak german. >> and this same concept, what is happening in the brains of people who are put on ventilators to recover from covid? not necessarily sensory input and we can conceive of the five senses, but when a body part is kind of replaceed with an external machine? does at that same kind of remapping happen? >> that's a very interesting question. we don't know the answer to that. i mean, one of the things that is fascinating about replacing body parts in general is that you're fine with it. you can get an artificial heart, a respirator to take care of your lungs or anything like that. you can lose limbs or anything like that, and you're still the same person n contrast, if you damage or lose even a little chunk of brain tissue, that can change you entirely, your

decision making, your risk aversion, to name animals or see colors or music or a hundred other things that we see in the labs 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 ask 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 for 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. how 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 just published a paper on this where we did deep research on 25 different species of primates, homosapien being one of them and even on primates, which is a close cousin, 70 million from this one and 30 million from these and so on. it turns out there are different levels of plasticity. so for example, a particular kind of lemur, you know, it comes out of the womb, it reaches adolescence pretty rapidly, it walks pretty rapidly, stuff like that, as opposed to homosapiens that's very slow at all of these things and you can look at these behavioral messages to see how plastic the brain is and pre-programed it is. and then we have rapid eye movement and correlates perfectly, which is to say 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. 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 taking over the visual cortex. so that's how we study it and what we're next on, it turns out that some people on tri cyclical anti-depressants and inhibitors, a study on it, if everything is approximate mri the same and you're not getting dream sleep at night. one of the things i noticed people on anti-depressants say that their vision gets blurry ap the doctors, clinicians say it's because of dry eyes and that might be right, but it might not be right and that's what i'm going to be looking into. >> that's awesome. you talk about different levels of plasticity in different species, but there's a question

about different levels of plasticity from human to human. do human brains lose plasticity as we get older? if so, are there behavioral ramifications? >> yes, so 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 figure out how do i optimize my behavior in this world, and what should i do so that i can have a career and so 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. 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 become less plastic, but 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 just 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 it turns out that people who say cognitively active their whole lives when they die, some of them turned out they had alzheimer's disease and nobody knew it. they didn't have the cognitive deficits because they were cognitively active at every moments, they interacted with people, chores, responsibilities. even though with alzheimer's, they were building new bridges where things were falling apart. as opposed to people who retire

and lives shrink and don't challenge themselves and not dealing with other people, that is the worst thing you can do. so really one of the main lessons that has emerged from neuroscience is challenging your brain with novelty all the time. that's the thing you can do. as soon as you're good at something like sudoku, do continue, do something you're bad at. >> that's great. and the question, aging without the effects of memory loss and, you know, cognitive decline. a couple of other great questions about dreams. asked what do you think is the evolutionary purpose of lucid dreaming and why can some people do it and others take practice and can't ever do it? >> yeah, lucid dreaming is when you become aware you're in a

dream and you essentially take control of the dream. it is very rare. most people never have it in their life or maybe once and there's ways to train up on it and try to get better at it. i actually think it's had a bug not a feature. it's something that, you know, the brain puts a lot of work into generating consciousness and then that turns off when you're sleeping and sleep has these other functions like taking out the neural trash and consolidating things you learned during the day and so on. what happens, lucid dreaming is an accidental interface between the two that's not typically supposed to happen. so, in answer to your question, i don't think there's any evolutionary purpose to it, i think it's a little bug that can be found in 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?

>> so, this is a very important-- 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 and you're having full, rich visual experience. turns out if you look at the circuitry perfectly, only 5% of the data back here, only 5% is coming back through the eyes and the rest is feedback loops and things going on here. vision is not at all like a camera. it's all about the internal model of what you expect to be seeing there. things like visual illusions, for example, which are interesting to, like eight years old and neuro scientists growing up. it doesn't matter physically,

what matters is what your brain is telling you. and colors don't exist, all you have is different waves of electro radiation and your brain finds these to test the ripe fruit in the trees, okay, i'm going to call that red, call that green and have a direct perceptual experience of it. visual is about internal activity and when you blast activity into the occipital cortex, then you'll see. >> all right. the no colors thing always freaks me out a little bit. >> me, too. >> another person asked about the brain activate-- or like while it is sleep deprived or brains that have insomnia, what's going on in the brain then. >> i mean, in one sentence, it's just that to make this switchover from the wake state

to the sleep state is like this huge thing switching over the factory and making the changes and it's a transition that's supposed to occur well, but often does not and there are a dozen ways that it can go wrong. so people have narcolepsy. sleep too much, insomnia and sleep too little, but that's the answer. >> a question about the vest you designed. where did the initial feedback come from to train the brain to understand the collect words from the vibration? >> what you need to always understand. anything is having a correlation, so, let me back up for one step, 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 ap there's the visual input coming in there and there's the auditory input coming here and put together, okay, there's a correlation in

there and they're matched up and do things like clap your hands or knock on the bars of the your crib and you realize, okay, i'm doing motor output here and every time i do that, i've got the spikes here, that's how you learn with correlation. so, with a person who is deaf, they learn the buzz or the vest by watching the world. they see the dog's 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, oh, i've 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 for four hours before that. sorry, four hours, two hours a day. and so he sees the word and feels the word, but that's how he makes the correlation there. thank you for the question. >> yeah. this other question, how is

learning from reinforced learn. trying to learn its body, reenforcement learning, i'm not familiar with the term, maybe you are. >> let me not go into too much detail on that, reenforcement learning is the way that psychologists described and computer scientists have taken on, essentially with feedback, you know, punishment, reward is what tells you, okay, strengthen this and weaken this, 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 and just as an example. it's not all about reward and punishment. that's a part of it. it's about relevance to you. what matters in your environment and so on. and also about the tension. the job of the brain is to build an internal model of the

world and what the brain is good at doing, detecting, oh, wait, something don't quite match with the model and that's what we call attention and we then pay attention to that and put our high resolution sensors on it to try to get information on it and so on. you asked a technical question you might be interested in in chapter 8 of the book. i proposed a new frame work called infra tropism. when you look at plants, phototropism. when you have the light the plants will follow them. what they're doing, constantly changing the maximum amount of data they're getting from the world. just one example is with your retina. the back of your eye, you've got the photo receptors. during the day, the photo receptors have a very high spacial resolution and they're just capturing photons, saying, i have photons, and they're going back to the brain.

as it gets dark, they say there's not enough and they start linking arms with each other and they link arms with each other so they have lower spacial resolution and higher sensitivity and catch photons that way. they're maximizing the amount of information they can take from the world in all moments and it's like this with all systems. so, it sound like from your very good question that you might be interested in the notions of things like info tropism that go well beyond learning. >> yeah, well, we'll take a few more questions, there are some really great ones. about ai. which i know is a-- you know, a component of your book. do you think there's anything about human intelligence, emotions, consciousness, et cetera, that emerge in our brains that ai will not be an i believe to reproduce or are we, you know, on track, maybe all of that. >> yeah, well, that's a great

question. as far as we can tell, the brain is a machine. it's an unbelievably complicated machine and it's the level of cessation is something that bankrupts our language. it's a physical machine and when it gets damaged in ways and so on. because of that there's no theoretical reason why we shouldn't be able to simulate that on silicon or any, you know, build it out of beer cans or tennis balls, whatever you want. it should work. now, you know, that said, you know, we're still a young science and so it may be that we discover something in a hundred years and didn't realize that. if we discover that, we might replicate that new thing, too, and ai should be able to get there eventually. will it map in our lifetime? i really doubt it. the reason is ai, it does these wonderful things with super

human performance, but it's actually really stupid compared to a three-year-old child who can navigate a room and manipulate adults and get food to her mouth and do all kinds of things. so, ai is missing what we call agi, you know, artificial generalized intelligence, which is to say an ai can distinguish pictures of cats from dogs with super human performance. if you say distinguish bears from camels or something, it will fail catastrophically. it can get trained on one thing, but can't generalize to other things and where we are now i think is a long ways off. another question about different component of your book that we haven't quite touched on yet. can we talk more about the brains of centipedes. are they using different pathways for mathematics or equations? >> okay, for anybody who doesn't know, with the mixture

of the senses, they might look at a letter,j, b, or whatever and triggers a color experience in their head. for them a is red, b is orange and so on and it used to be thought of as rare. now we know it's about 3% of the population has it. it's not considered a disorder or a disease. it's the way that some people see the world and others don't see the world this way. there's a lot to say about it. and if you're interested i have a book on it called "wednesday is indigo blue" about this and some of them can do mathematics differently precisely because numbers have colors and sometimes genders and personalities and shapes as well and so it just helps them to hold onto it. as an example if i tell you my phone number, you might forget it a week from now, but they

might remember it has an autumn pattern to it and makes you remember better and have a better memory. >> totally. okay. we're about at time to wrap up, but there's another question about your opinion on brain-computer interfaces and if you think 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 i build, a noninvasive wristband for a couple hundred dollars and computer. and then the other thing, elon musk's company neurolink he did a presentation the other way, that's about drilling a hole in your skill and inserting electrodes in your brain. what he's doing is cool and pushing the technology on that

and that will be useful for clinical application. will it go beyond clinical? i doubt it. even though the mythology, oh, yeah, consumers will do that so they can interface faster with their cell phone. in fact, neuro surgeons will not do the surgery because there's risk of infection and death on the operating table. there's no reason to do open surgery so they can have a faster text. we're doing a whole bunch of projects about infrared light or stock market or twitter data or drones. we're experimenting with all kind of great stuff beyond the clinical realm, but i doubt that people will get an open head surgery with that. >> if ping-pong balls weren't a great idea in the past maybe that isn't today. and i have one last question,

what are you reading these days? >> oh, i just finished a couple of books about material science, i thought was fascinating. "stuff matters", and by the same author, forget the title. travelling the ace age by craig chiles. on the ice age. it's about being up in alaska and where the behring land bridge used to be. >> oh, thank you for taking time with us today and i think that everybody out there in the audience, you asked amazing questions. i would encourage you to check out dr. eagleman's future events, maybe you can ask those 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 livewired you can find it on politics and prose's website, thank you. >> thank you, great to be back here at politics and prose, thank you guys. >> you're watching book tv on c-span2. created by america's television cable companies as a public service and brought to you today by your television provider. >> today it's a look at the future of the transatlantic alliance and nato's role in securing ukraine and georgia. our live coverage begins at 11 on c-span, c-span.org or listen live with the c-span radio app. >> use your mobile devices and

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