Distractible - New Year, New Brain

Episode Date: January 1, 2024

Happy New Year! Naturally, the guys celebrate by taking an existential journey down the dystopian rabbit hole of linking human brains with AI. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Happy New Year. And welcome to the first installment of Distractible for 2024. This episode, Maniacal Mark plays Dr. Frankenstein as he gets Irracula with organoids. Winterly Wade waxes technical about the windows of the soul. And Batjudge Bob denies mice have a soul and displays his bored biological bent. From poop flies and fountains to dodging ethical issues. Yes. It's time for New Year, New Brain.

Now sit back and prepare to be distracted and enjoy the show. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Distractible, the only podcast that you ever need in your life. You can unsubscribe to all the others. My name is Markiplier. I am your host for today because I won in the last episode. And that's how it works on this game show of sorts or slash talk show or slash just banter hour, nonsensical discussions. Things with which we decide the fates of the universe upon.

I'm joined today by my panelists, Bob and Wade. Hello. Bob, who graduated from law school and uh recently moved back to cincinnati new father uh very capable man about six foot four and a half and uh his opponent is wade uh six foot four uh so shorter um and then he also wanted to go to law school. I got a bachelor's degree. Not a father, as far as he knows, and is ready to participate as far as I know. Thanks for the glowing introductions, Mark. I feel like one was more glowing than the other, but you know, I haven't seen you in a year. I was very impartial to my descriptions of you guys. They were just the facts.

Yeah, I'm shorter, less educated, and less accomplished in life. This is true. So as your host, I'm going to be bringing a single topic of discussion. Today's going to be a little different. I'm going to bring up one topic, and we are going to discuss it because on this new year, this might be the grand future that decides where humanity goes. Is that the success of the Cincinnati Bengals? I like that shirt. That's nice. It's from a brewery in our hometown of Milford, little Miami brewing company.

Yeah, so Wade just stood up. He's got a shirt that has a Bengal tiger in it. It says, Who Day? in curly letters. It's very nice. I like that. And then on the football, it says LMBC. So today's topic of discussion will be addressed after we get through small talk uh if there's anything else that you guys want to admit confess here today now would be the time nope i'm good i spent a lot more on the holidays than i thought i had oh i was like one of my nephews wants a lego set i really like lego i'm gonna buy him a cool lego

set so i found this like star wars lego set when i picked it up i had misread one of the digits i was like this is a really cool set for 50 bucks because legos are not cheap oh it was closer to 500 i don't know if you guys have this but when you go to buy something and like you all of a sudden realize like uh-oh ego or pride steps in and they're like what are you gonna do tell him you're not gonna get it now oh is it too too expensive for you what's gonna stop you come on be the big man make the purchase and i was like i am the big man yeah i'm buying this lego set and then as as i was leaving with my purchase, I was very proud of because I followed through. I realized I have more than one niece and nephew.

And now I've got to try to treat them somewhat equally. Oh, dear God, what have I done? You got to match what you just did. I see. So my budget for Christmas shopping went up a little bit more than I expected it to. The thing about having a thing in your possession after you've bought it is you can just keep that and not give it as a gift that costs $500 or return it. Sell it on eBay.

Or any number of things that don't involve giving it to a child and then being like, well, I guess your other. Well, you say child. My nephew is like 22 years old. But you were shopping at the Lego store. It's not our problem that the presumption was child. I shop at the Lego store for me, and I'm a couple years older than 22 now. Are you old when you get to the point where you're lying about your age? Does that make you officially old?

I don't know. Why would you lie about your age? Who gives a shit? The same voice that made me buy the expensive Lego said, What are you doing to me? I hope there's someone standing next to you, Wade, or I have some concerns. I do have this standing doing to me i hope there's someone standing next to you wader i have some concerns i do have this standing next to me oh i was really hoping it was going to be a human being but that's okay can you imagine if it was a human being and uncle jimmy i don't know still my brain was like what if a person walks in uh i am alone i have i have uh something with which i take umbrage and i want to talk about it now because i've been given a platform i am not anti bidet i just want to start this start this i love where this is going i i am in

favor of bidets in general i think they pleasant. I think it's a nice experience to go to the bathroom and have that as opposed to just dry toilet paper or whatever. A good butthole flossing goes a long way. But there's this advertisements

going around, especially on some podcasts that I watch slash listen to. But in general, their ad read and their general theme is why would you use toilet paper? Because you're just wiping

the poop around on your butt and that's gross use a bidet our bidet it just cleans your butt without having to wipe around poop you're right bidet company i don't want to carefully wipe the dirty stuff off of my rear end when i'm done in the bathroom i want to explode it off with a jet of water so that little particles of that poop go in every direction then i can still take the same toilet paper because you can't just use a bidet without toilet paper because then you have to dry it which is still just wiping the wet poop off of your wet butt who says you have to dry it i say you have to dry it because putting a damp ass back into your underwear with who knows what particulate from the explosion of poop jet.

I like bidets, but the idea that a bidet is somehow less a less gross way of disposing of what happens when you take a poopy and you need to clean your rear end is just terrible and stupid. And I resent that that is a strategy that makes me not want to use bidets that makes me like oh yeah well i'll just use it i'll wipe it i'm just gonna wipe poop then what about that then let me introduce you to this thing i call jar of flies so hear me out you lay down after you you spread your cheeks you open the jar and all of your problems are just gobbled away i don't think

you understand what flies do with poop i don't like any of this okay okay what about aquarium of dung beetles now listen to me they roll up terrarium it's a terrarium i i am shutting this down because this is shockingly not the first time I've hosted an episode and it's immediately gone into poop talk. Oh, you're the host, Mark? I thought Wade was the host. I gotta be honest. I am shutting this down.

I know you guys may be surprised at this, but it's, you know, it's weird that this has happened more than once. Look, it's not about the poop. I just am raising it's a marketing. It's a truth and marketing issue really more than once. Look, it's not about the poop. I just am raising, it's a marketing, it's a truth and marketing issue really more than anything. It's a bad scam and I'm pro bidet, but I am anti lies in marketing.

So it's a marketing rant, Mark. It's not about poop. It's not about butt stuff at all, almost. Well, either way, we're moving on because this topic of discussion is actually vital to the future, and it has very little to do with poop. I'll be the judge of that.

All right, I'm the judge of the episode. Bob's the judge of poop. Wade, what are you? I'm the poop judge. Wade, what are you the judge of? Bald. Sorry. I couldn't. It came out like I was bald. It erupted like a bidet attached to a power washer like a bidet of truth it came out and rose out of me yeah i guess i'm the judge of bald because fuck you

guys i didn't say it i just laughed really hard at it damn Damn you, Mark. God damn you, Mark. Unbelievable. Listen, Bob, I'm giving you three points for making me laugh. Wait, I'll give you four points because it's a hard job being the judge of bald. Is it for the flies? Oh, no, for that. Okay. You reminded me of minus one. So today we are going to be talking about something that I'm starting to learn about. It's not lenses, don't be afraid. Oh thank god, okay. It's brain organoids. Oh I wish it was lenses. Alright, so I want you guys to give me what you think brain organoids are. Alright, alright, so oids, we can think of like steroids. So oids are something you take.

Organs are the things you play or the things inside your body that have like crucial functions, which the brain is probably an organ, right? So organoid uh and it's a brain organoid so it's uh something you take to enhance your brain's function no bob much in the way that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell the philosophical mitochondria organoid of the brain is the powerhouse of the i'm imagining that the organoid is a subsection of the brain that is is responsible for a specific set or type of task or something and that it's because the brain is an organ but within it there are different areas that do different things and so the organoids are like the different non non-physical delineated areas of the brain functions i like your line of thought, still incorrect. A cerebral organoid, or brain organoid,

describes an artificially grown in vitro miniature organ resembling a brain. Cerebral organoids are created by culturing pluripotent stem cells in a three-dimensional rotational bioreactor, and they develop over the course of months. The brain is an extremely complex system of heterogeneous tissues and consists of a diverse array of months. The brain is an extremely complex system of heterogeneous tissues and consists of a diverse array of neurons. This complexity

is made studying the brain and understanding how it works a difficult task, which is why they are making brains in vitro. Why is that more horrifying? I think brain steroids are much scarier because like your eyeballs shrink up and you're like...

...... One point for making me laugh. Alright, there you go. You get one. Alright, there you go. What's happening nowadays is brain organoids are going beyond just studying how the brain works because there was an article and actually I'm going to share

a screen. I know this is a problem for people that are only watching, but if you guys take a look at what you see. So I want, Bob, you describe what you're seeing in the pictures, please. Little things with little brain chunks growing off of them, I guess. I've got this. Based on the picture alone,

it looks like pancake batter with two meatballs stuffed in them. If I use my powers of perception, the brains look like they sort of developed eyes. For those who are just listening, it's exactly what was described. It does look circular like pancake batter, and it has two dark, like brownish chunks. So the title of this from Science Alert written by Michelle Starr, scientists grew many brains from stem cells then the brain sort of developed eyes so this is this is horrifying to you mark is that

where is this the part that's horrifying it's not horrifying yet that's the thing that's the topic of discussion is this horrifying or is this fascinating i think it's fascinating horonating it's horonating pacifying oh that's that's really straddling the fence there you gotta you gotta pick a side i think it's fascinating and i could see i guess why you're posing this as something that could be horrified but i think where that is not very horrifying i think in theory or in whatever like thinking about this i would agree looking at those images this is one of those moments where i want to back up put on a suit and just go has science gone too far this time i don't know the details of how stem cells differentiate but the the way

that the at least the title of the article is phrased and the tone of it gives me the impression that they what they intended to do was take some stem cells put them into the bioreactor blah blah blah thing uh we're going to create conditions where we think brain cells will develop from these stem cells and while they were trying to develop only brain cells they also developed some early some very rudimentary eye structures which given our as far as i know relatively simplistic understanding of cell differentiation in general, doesn't seem that weird to me. It seems like they accidentally made these things that had some brain cells and some eye cells and they were like, oh, didn't see that coming.

So your conclusion is this is all accidental. It's incidental. Interesting quirk. No ramifications. Yeah, I mean, it's certainly on purpose, but but like i think this is just part of the process of they're doing research in an area that humans don't have a very uh deep grasp of of the complexities of and it's you know it happened and they were kind of like oh we should study that that's interesting and i'm sure they did and hopefully they learned something useful i think this is like the alien movie where ripley has like a baby that's also part xenomorph and

like it's like mama and it's like, mama. And it's like, well, that's amazing that that happened. But also, I want to rip my own eyeballs out and go wash them in bleach, because that is the most horrifying thing I've ever seen. All right, well, that's good, because if you feel that way now, then you guys are going to really feel strange, because the name of this episode

is likely the brain organoid iceberg. That was the surface. Human brain organoids implanted into mouse cortex respond to visual stimuli for first time. Ooh, interesting. I'm on the horrified fence because visually it's horrifying to look at. However, as someone who worked in the medical field of eyes for a while, and I understand how complex, like, whenever you have glaucoma, whenever you have anything that goes wrong with the retina, things that go wrong with the optic nerve. There are certain things that go wrong with eyes unless things have changed dramatically in the last 10 years.

I don't know about they go with a we can treat it. We can't cure it method that can give you drops. They can like try to help with your eye pressure. They try to help with certain things but there gets to be certain errors and things that go wrong with your eyes where it's just like there's really not much we can do if this develops in a way where like they can figure out how to grow stem cells to help an optic nerve or you know to help with different parts of the eye i mean obviously the brain too which i just just i don't know much about that but eyes alone that would be amazing to be able to help with different parts of the eye. I mean, obviously the brain too, which I just, I don't know much about that,

but eyes alone, that would be amazing to be able to help people that have blindness, that have glaucoma, that have different issues that so far we've been able to cure. So that is a fascinating and amazing thing if we can do it. But looking at the pile of sludge with the meatballs is horrifying.

So I'm going to stick with horrifying, but I would want to note that I do respect it as someone who worked with eyes and knows that there are developments that are badly needed. That sounds like a good conclusion. Bob, initial thoughts before I dive deeper. Dive deeper. I'm ready. Human cerebral organoids establish subcortical projections in the mouse brain after transplantation. that essentially they put the the lab-grown human tissue or humanoid tissue whatever into a mouse's

head and it formed sin it joined synapses with the mouse's brain yes very interesting uh importantly the grafted human cerebral organoids functionally integrated into pre-existing neural circuits by forming bi-directional synaptic connections with the mouse host neurons i mean mice are used a lot for like medicine testing and other testing right like lab rats is a well-known thing there has to be certain similarities already i would imagine between mouse brains and human brains to the point where they use them for testing for things like this it doesn't seem like they'd be super close i think it's more like ease of reproduction, ease of use on such a small mammal creature. I don't know if the mice are actually any more significantly similar to humans than any other non-human. I mean, that's possibly true, too. That's fair.

It just seems like they do a lot of testing on them for things that are then, like, they go to human trials. I don't know if they... Look, mice don't have souls, so everyone's chill if we really just fucking murder a bunch of mice for science that's the deal it is one of those things where they they breed very quickly it's they live relatively short lives they are fairly similar in that they're mammals but you know there are obviously animals that are closer but it's like it's it's the it's the the ethical line is kind of like yeah mice and rats Like that's kind of because science has to be done somehow. And,

uh, it's not all fun compared to control mice. The mice transplanted with their cerebral organ always showed an increase in freezing time in response to auditory condition stimuli, suggesting the potentiation of the startle feel fear response. So what this means is that it extends beyond vision it affected their brain function and it affected their musculoskeletal like responses the control goes beyond just vision it actually was integrating with the rest of the the neurological system did they put this

on top of a mouse's already existing brain or did they like replace part of the brain? How did they? I was I was trying to research. I remember something about that, whereas like they put it into regions of the brains that they wanted it to affect. I don't know if they removed that portion of the brain beforehand. I can't say there is an image that I have here that is really, really cool. I'll share this one, but I don't know if this is indicative of what they did, which seems like it just plopped right on top of there yeah i mean it's hard to tell because if that is a slice it does go into part of it but i mean it's also three-dimensional it wraps around forward to backwards probably i would imagine cutting into the mouse brain is

probably damaging and also negates the nature of them as a control thing. Do it add the thing to those probably just grafted on? But I don't know. For those are not watching. There's oh, that's nice. Oh, an image of a slice of a rat brain is colored red on a black background. A lime green human organoid sits on the top left of the brain. It looks like a tumor.

That's the funny thing about this is it looks a lot like a tumor just sitting in the brain. It looks like a tumor. That's the funny thing about this is it looks a lot like a tumor just sitting in the brain. And the way that it was describing it, it kind of cooperating and forming with the neurons that were there in the rat's brain was very indicative of kind of how like cancer works in some ways into co-opting vascular systems and communicating in certain ways that's also how tissue i mean that's that's how tissue works in general the thing about cancer is that it replicates at a speed and in a way where it's it the destruction of cancer is not that it's a tumor it's that it's a tumor that grows and spreads and metastasizes and destroys systems that way right there are a lot of tumors that you can have that you can

totally like they might not even say you should have removed, because it's like, well, the surgery would be more damaging than just leave that mass in there. It's fine. It's benign. It's not going to do anything. The brain organoids were growing in that they were having new neural connections, but it was more

growing in the way that it was extending to form those connections by weaving itself into the rest of the brain. Yeah, I mean, it's extending to form those connections by weaving itself into the rest of the brain yeah i mean it's similar to like it i would imagine like tissue grafts and stuff right part of the point if you get like a skin graft is you do want it to revascularize and you want it to integrate with your body's system and so that that seems like a normal thing that would happen but maybe it's not the fact that the synapses work across between the like the dna structure of whatever a mouse synapse is and the and the structure of a human synapse i think it's very interesting like i would be curious how that

communication worked because it's not they're just synapses which is still electrical impulses i guess at a basic level but they're just it's like two different operating systems that are unrelated in a lot of ways i would think can we differentiate between i'm assuming mice also have stem cells can we really differentiate between the stem cells do you mean between mouse stem cells and human stem cells or yeah because i don't even know if we can differentiate between human stem cells and other human stem cells at the moment cam like i don't know okay i don't know much about stem cells let me preface that in my brain there's different stem cells that have different little coded packages in them that do different things.

So like some stem cells will be... That's the thing about stem cells. They are all the same. A glob of stem cells is one glob of all the same things. The differentiation is how a stem cell turns into a brain tissue, a liver tissue, whatever. is how a stem cell turns into a brain tissue, liver tissue, whatever. That is a complex like chemical and biological process that I know none of the details of. But my understanding is that the human research on it is pretty limited and the understanding is pretty limited as well.

But like if you harvest stem cells from someone, they're all literally just stem cells. So would a mouse's stem cells be the same thing as that then? No, no, no. It's per species. And also there are like offshoot stem cells so would a mouse's stem cells be the same thing as that then no no no it's per species and also there are uh like offshoot stem cells so there's like the skin has stem cells but they are specialized to skin stem cells it it can be reverted backwards to be an original like i forget what the actual name is but that's why uh the a lot of research is about like fetal stem cells and like, you know. Because those are like unchanged. Those are just stem like generic stem cells.

Right. So are we closing on making a real life version of Pinky and the Brain? Pretty much. There was an article that I was trying to find where they they actually spliced in some genes of like human brain DNA into a chimpanzee and they, they didn't allow it to be born, but it was growing and it's, they could see through like scans that its brain was starting to be much bigger than it should be.

And I, I don't remember what this article was. It might just be, I might quoting the beginning of planet of the apes or something like that. Ethics. Yikes. Yeah. But there's some questionable ethics going on here. We're going to keep descending unless anyone wants to swim to the surface now.

I like it. Iceberg me, daddy. So working off of the studies going into brain organoids, they are starting to develop technology that allows neural connections to form with traditional electronic circuitry so that we can interpret signals and send them across. Because what this is all trying to showcase is that the adaptability of neurons is very high. But the fundamental physics behind their conduction is different than electronics, but not that different. You can get shocked and your whole nervous system can go all over the place, but it's like the way that they work with sodium and potassium ion gates to actually conduct signals and the way that they like have the myelin sheath

and like the way signal conducts is different, but not that different. You can still put like electric shocks on your body and your muscles will twitch. That will occur. But the sophistication of communication through chemical signals is still out of reach. It uses brain organoids, bundles of tissues mimicking human cells that are used in research to model organs. Organoids are made of stem cells capable of specializing in different cells,

in this case, neurons, akin to those found in our brain. The research aims to build a bridge between AI and organoids. Some AI systems rely on a web of interconnected nodes knows a neural network in a way similar to how the brain functions not that like close but very similar uh so they are starting to do research into whether or not there can be a bridge in between computers and the brain i mean certainly that's the that's the pre the prologue

chapter of a dystopian book about how human brains melded with computers and everything was ruined and society collapsed but or whenever your teachers used to tell you growing up you're not always going to have a calculator on you and you open up your skull and show it and they're like fuck you

Mrs. I'm not going to say your actual name but I do have a calculator built in now meanwhile everyone pulled out their phone you know next up cyborg computer with living brain organoid aces machine learning tests oh very interesting i'm curious what exactly the machine learning test is and i'm sure we don't have the type of details or knowledge to get into that in a meaningful way but interesting okay as incredible as recent advances have been in machine learning artificial intelligence still lags way behind the human brain in some important ways the for example the human brain happily learns and adapts all day long on an energy budget of about 20 watts

so the brain very efficient if you were to like equate the amount of energy that the brain uses throughout the day, it's 20 Watts of power, which is not that much power. Uh, a comparably powerful artificial neural network to do say like the Dolly stuff or chat GPT uses about 8 million Watts of power, an ungodly amount of power,

a stupid, uh, a day, a day. Meanwhile, all I need is some chicken nuggets and Funyuns and I'm good to go. I mean, yeah, you eat one Funyun or maybe two or three. That's about the amount of power that your brain needs to function all day long.

And it can do some, like, again, it's not a computer in terms of its ability to accurately do numbers, but it is doing incredible amounts of visual and audio processing, sensory processing, prioritization. It's doing a ton of different things. Memory, there's so many things going on in the brain, and yet it works on 20 watts and you barely notice it. So we are now living in the era of the biocomputer, a cyborg-esque confusion of silicon and living tissue. In September, they spoke to Cortical Labs, who stunned the world by growing an 800,000 odd brain cell silicon substrate mixed computer that played Pong. So these neurons in a Petri dish basically were grown. I have a picture here. It helps illustrate it. I know this is a very picture heavy thing for people watching at home, but again-

We only care about our viewers here. Yes, but we're going to describe it. We've been describing it. If you can see this picture, what it essentially is, is it looks like a web of like fibers and that's the neurons growing over top on a checkerboard. Yeah, but underneath it, you can kind of see a checkerboard pattern, series of square things. And that's an array of electrodes a very small one but as you can see compared to neurons and cells even our smallest electronics are still kind of big it

looks like something killed like a small rodent and scattered its bones over this too like all the little rocky things it played pong i would be curious if they had an analysis of how much of the computational load was processed by the organic neuron are there you know is it talked about if there's any like processing cores silicon based processing cores on this is it a hybrid or is it purely neuron processing power or what um this reminds me of where i was young and i had like an afro and i used to go play in the woods and like i have all kind of like sticks and debris in my hair that i would go take a shower. And then if I'd look at the drain in the shower afterward, it was very similar to that image, just hair and a whole bunch of crap clogging up the drain. Ah, I see.

Okay. So what they did is the grid array represents one-to-one, not one-to-one, but the screen at which Pong is played on. So that picture you saw, imagine that they use that as a template for the they gave signals because it's not seeing the the screen so what they did was on a very basic level whenever there was a paddle position over on the left side they would have the a certain number of the the array light up to indicate that and they basically trained the array of cells across that to uh if it wanted to move the paddle down it would like propagate a signal that would go more south and then over on the right they would do the same thing going over there and then the ball they would send they would give the neuron signals of where the ball was by moving it across the grid substrate and

give it a position so uh what it says is like training dish brain, that was the name, was understandably tricky. Reward and punishment are usually key if you're going to train an organism to perform a specific task, but that won't work on these cell cultures because they have no dopamine system to incentivize them. Instead, the researchers took advantage

of what's called free energy principle. Essentially, this says that the cells at this level will always try to minimize the unpredictability in their environment. So if the brain cells failed to hit the ball with their paddle, the system would deliver an unpredictable stimulus for four seconds. So they would shock it. That sounds a little bit like torture, but yeah, go on. For every successful hit, they would receive a brief predictable signal before the game continued on, also in a predictable manner. So it's like, think of it like you hit it, it goes ding, do ding, in the same pattern. And if it didn't, it could be white noise.

Using this method, Dishbrain learned to play the game in five minutes. Quote, the beautiful and pioneering aspect of this work rests on equipping the neurons with sensations, the feedback, and crucially the ability to act on their world. Remarkably, the cultures learn how to make their world more predictable by acting upon it. This is remarkable because you cannot teach this kind of self-organization simply because, unlike a pet, these mini-brains have no sense of reward and punishment. This experiment might sound a bit spooky and ethically questionable, but other scientists explain that it isn't a kind of intelligence that we need to worry about mistreating.

Don't worry. While these dishes of neurons can change their responses based on stimulation, they are not sci-fi style intelligence in a dish. These are simple albeit interesting and scientifically important circuit responses but what it shows is again in the mounting iceberg of evidence the adaptability the adaptability of human neurons is astonishing and generally like neurons in general it's astonishing the the ability to even if you're blind the only sensation coming in is an electrical signal in a grid array but

you're able to communicate with all the other nerves in your group and say what's happening what's happening oh okay all right we're gotten a pattern in five minutes able to play pong to create organization in the structure that was given to it, but create organization and propagate signals, communicate to each other, all while completing the objective in five minutes. I feel like this iceberg, the deeper we go, the harder my brain is having a time of wrapping around all the things we're doing. This is the part of science where I start to question whether I'm just an ignorant fool or whether science is not as cool as it sounds when you dig into it. Because this is one of those things where when you read the headline, it's like,

they taught a brain in a dish to play Pong! And you're like, holy shit. And like, well, what they did was they took electro-sensitive organic cells and put them across an electronic array and then gave them positive and negative reinforcement stimulus to do something that we don't know how fast the game of Pong was playing. We don't know how complicated the moves could be, what the feedback, because it's like there's a lot of levels of how hard even just Pong can be, right? And that grid was not that big.

It was maybe like 12 by 9 or something, 15. It was like, it's not like it was a 1080p grid of pixels and this thing was interpreting complex imagery. But at the same time, it's still like it was a 1080p grid of pixels and this thing was interpreting interpreting complex imagery but at the same time it's still like they they did clearly this is research that's progressing the understanding of how neurons work and the interconnectivity and how they adapted it's very cool but in terms of meaningful applications this is one where as a as a non-educated non-science person i'm like it doesn't seem like that would do that much but you know maybe this is on it doesn't seem like that would do that much but you know

maybe this is on the path to understanding something that would be more applicable to something that would be completely world changing or ground earth shattering i don't know i i think i guess i'm on kind of the opposite side of things where it's once we get that base level of understanding like think about what that opens i guess i'm i agree that that by itself isn't that interesting but i feel like once you have an answer to one of these like seemingly simple things it's like how quickly that can balloon up into being able to like stack that or increase it or apply it somewhere else and combine things to where it becomes complicated very quickly because like if you think about human development i mean when you go from a sperm and an egg to a person like that's not really a

slow process either so to take a section ofness, slap it on like a piece of toast and all of a sudden it's playing Pong in five minutes. That sounds pretty cool to me. You ready to go deeper? Deep me. Neuralink receives FDA approval for human trials of brain chips. Neuralink has struggled with concerns over treatment of animals using clinical trials before. This is a different company, of course, but the principle is still the same. A electronic interface to human brains. This is not growing organized, because if you think about it, and what you were saying, Bob, is totally true. It seems mundane,

and in a sense it is, and it's isolated, but what it does is showcase the foundational principle of your neurons are super adaptable, even without you consciously being aware of it. You don't have to be aware if an electric, like electrode is attached to your brain and certain stimuli is attached to it. Uh, it could cause you to have a seizure for the rest of the system, but the neurons that are there would still adapt to it. Not saying it would fix any problems, but it's like, it can not that it will, will but it could what is this chip supposed to do yeah well that's the thing i'm curious about what what is their stated goal or stated function of such a chip all right so neural links brain computer interface it will use invasive surgery

it's emerging as a key player in a fairly nascent brain computer interface industry uh while many companies have developed related systems receiving f FDA approval to release medical devices into the commercial market has been historically challenging for good reason. So this approval is to explore a to have a clinical trial for patients to have a product implanted into their brain on the surface of the brain. Specifically, it's called they call it the link device. brain specifically it's called they call it the link device it'll be interconnected to the brain through flexible thread-like structures that will have to be inserted directly into the brain patients will have to learn to control the device using an app and will use bluetooth to make inputs on a keyboard or mouse that's i love how dystopian that sounds please control the device and i don't know how much people should be excited to line up about this, because while FDA approval is very positive for the company, it is still facing investigations by the U.S. Department of Transportation for packaging and transporting contaminated materials in an unsafe manner and under fire for the potential abuse of animals with whistleblowers stating that around 1,500 animals have been killed since 2018.

animals have been killed since 2018 yeah no well this is one of those things where like again and maybe i don't have the knowledge to see it but the on the surface level it's like ah implanting a trip into the brain this is the future right they're gonna even if they're they're just trying to figure out like how do you can you manipulate something like that once it's implanted and your brain starts to integrate with it and maybe you get some some tissue growth or whatever like however it works and they're just like yeah well if we figure out that you can maybe then we can make chips where you could actually do something with that but also like there's every possibility that they they're what they're doing is implanting very expensive complicated seizure inducing chips into people's brains and like yeah your neurons are adaptable that that does not

necessarily mean that they're adaptable in a way that's conducive to human consciousness they're adaptable in a way that's conducive to tissue living and to them being satisfied in the way that they like to function but i have no idea how related or unrelated that might be to human consciousness or a human controlling a computer with their with their brain electricity i am not endorsing this thought okay all right but say it proud is it possible that putting it into an adult brain would be less adaptable than putting into a growing brain you got a good point there buddy not saying we should do that so you're saying they need to be implanted into children i see i mean let's go younger really it's babies no you're saying they need to be implanted into children. I mean, let's go younger, really. It's babies.

No, you're going down exactly deeper into the iceberg of the place I wanted to go. All right. All right. So we're leaving the world of I have articles and research to back up what I'm saying. And we're going into a world that is kind of more about conjecture and you get you get an article that is titled like move over artificial intelligence science announce a new organoid intelligence field but it is kind of this mentality of yeah it's much easier to change something that is in this hasn't been grown

fully yet than it is to do something else. Because the whole subject of brain organoids, which I will get back to because it's circled back, but the field of neurological research, we are currently at a point where, you know Gattaca, the movie Gattaca? Battlestar Gattaca. In a world where genetic modification has been not perfected but mastered by humanity in this case we are approaching the place where you can kind of start to see where guiding development into a certain place that you would like as far as like bigger brains taller babies choosing the sex of the baby. It could be something that, you know, it's not far off in the future because at least in now it's like the observations. What what happens when you do these things?

Because as I was talking before about that chimp, which I couldn't find the article, I might be talking about my ass out my ass about it. But they implanted a monkey with like a developing fetal monkey with human brain cells and it started to incorporate into the brain or i can't remember if it was gene editing at first or something like that and then they didn't allow it to like continue as long as they killed it and it's just one of those things where it's like yeah it's easier to interfere with something when it's developing and what does that mean for the future well once the monkey stopped offering its young food without currency and exchange they knew they created a monster no one wanted capitalistic that's good that's good that's good that's good there's another point for you way that's good

this is a whole i mean and gattaca touches on this in a way that's, you know, it's a movie for entertainment purposes, but also it makes some social commentary. If you told me that if I was going to have a baby, I could do something, you know, CRISPR-esque to genetically modify or affect the baby to guarantee that the baby would not have any genetic birth defects or to guarantee that the baby would not have any like cancers or anything like yeah that sounds great but that's that's in the exact same neighborhood as choosing how you know try to get a taller baby try to have a baby with blonde hair blue eyes or whatever your preference is i don't have a good answer for the ethics of humanity in modifying the growth of

fetuses in that way, but there's no version of science that does exist or has existed that humans have had such a grasp on any kind of biology or even lots of other kinds of science where we do have a pretty solid grasp on things, where I think that the science is definitively correct and ultimately all-knowing enough, where I would say that it's a good idea to use whatever that scientific knowledge is to affect human fetuses medicine and genetics and biology in general is one of the fields where humans have a lot to figure out and only barely understand why some drugs cure some diseases or treat some symptoms there is no

fucking way that there's a level of understanding and knowledge base that's like deep enough and correct enough that anything like this should be happening in in any of our lifetimes not saying it's impossible that humanity will ever reach a place where we like we understand everything about how humans develop and the genetics of it and what influences what. Like, yeah, I don't know, hundreds of years, thousands of years, if humanity persists as a species, maybe someday the ethical concerns of doing something where you don't understand every little detail of what you're doing to something that is going to be a human person will be okay. But right now, not even close. I don't know that there's any kind of science

where humans have that kind of understanding where it's like, yes, we definitively know everything about this. We don't know definitively everything about anything. I feel like the thing about science is that scientists constantly are like, whoa, shit, did you guys see that happen? Oh, we gotta study that.

Even in fields where there's a lot of understanding there are still things where it's like i didn't expect that to happen at all oh man we got some more stuff to figure out it's it's a complicated issue but i don't think it's that complicated for where we are as a species we're not there yet we're not there at all all right good point point for you oh that was like there's like a seven point answer. Come on now. Two points for you. You ducked yourself into it. That's good. All right. So getting back to the brain organoids, why we are here in the first place, because I think we can all agree messing with baby's genes.

Probably not. Great idea. Wade, I got to shoot your idea down. I'm sorry. Are you pro baby gene editing, Wade? Oh, okay. Point for boldness. So funneling all this down back to brain organoids

and there is a question of like what it actually is what it can do um and then there's ethical questions about like how much how much brain is to to brain and these brain organoids what's the what's the brain size limit yeah that that actually is a question because i want to talk about brain aware again we touched on it very briefly and this is actually not the Pong thing. That was the precursor to what brain aware is. So the researchers hooked up brain aware to

the brain aware organoid computer chip into a system, treating it as an adaptive living reservoir. I don't fully know what that means, but they made sure the mini brain was responding to electrical inputs in a suitably non-linear fashion, checked that it had some kind of memory in effect, figured out how to feed its spatial data in a grid array, and then started some unsupervised learning tests. Long story short, they set it up in a way that it could take in

data and they were making sure it wasn't just like completely one-to-one linear responses, that it was like actually doing something and that the cells were alive basically so they focused on two areas firstly speech recognition some 240 audio clips of adult males were speaking japanese were fed into the brain aware chip after being converted into electrical signals remarkably on day zero the organoids was able to distinguish from a single vowel sound which of the eight different people were talking with 51% accuracy, which doesn't seem too high, but that was day zero. And that's just differentiating picking between eight with a 50% accuracy. Two days later, it had risen to 78% accuracy from a single vowel sound. I don't know how many cells this is, but I think it's 800,000. They then moved on to mathematics,

getting the brain-aware chip to predict a Henon map, which is a typical nonlinear dynamic system with chaotic behavior. This involved an extra layer of abstraction as each 200-point 2D Henon map had to be converted into a one-dimensional spatiotemporal electrical signal that could be fed into the brain tissue.

In two days, it increased its accuracy at predicting where a given point would be from 0.356 to 0.812% accuracy out of one. To flex on Team Silicon, they also threw the same problem at some artificial neural networks, finding that it notably outperformed a ANN, which must be artificial neural network, without a long short-term memory unit, and showed slightly lower accuracy than ANN with LSTM, decreasing the training times by 90%. There was a lot of big words in there, and a lot of the people listening at home are probably very lost. I'm going to summarize.

They did some tests that are typical of machine learning right now with brains in a jar, very small jar, very small brain in a jar. It did good data. There's a lot of graphs and a lot of data points of what I'm looking at. I'm not even showing it. Don't worry about it. It would be gibberish to you. It's basically gibberish to me, but it did good and it did better than art of like current machine learning models, right? So so the question is if this area of science is allowed to pursue at what point did we and if it's like working and it's scalable and all this at what point is it growing a human outside of their body just their brain because all we are really is the brain and the nervous system and everything else at what point did you just cut a

person's brain out and put it in a jar in all of this it's a very science-heavy episode but i'd say this year was all a bunch of people talking non-stop about ai what is going to happen with this line of development and the new can of nightmares opening up where we've got brain in jars and there's two lines of science one pure silicon one neurological computers i think we're gonna have semi tissue oriented graphics cards in our computers that learn and adapt so that we've got like biomechanical pcs and whoever gets there first apple or pc will really determine which way mark leans by the end of this year ah that's pretty good because the long story short this is a predictive kind of thing we're looking forward to this new year what nightmare is going to befall us because as it has been

evident with every other uh year since then we we we go into this year we go into the past years being like this year will be better than than the rest I want to know how this year is going to be worse than the rest. With this line of science, anything else, when does the nightmare train stop? I know there was a lot of science talk in this episode, but I'm a little surprised Wade isn't more into it. I was pretty into it, wasn't I? Well, it's a philosophical question, though, that Mark is posing right now. He's effectively asking, when is a clump of brain matter humanity and or maybe not even humanity specifically? When is it a sentient being that deserves its own rights?

I studied this in a similar fashion for taking out the computer parts. But like whenever I took philosophy classes on abortion, that issue specifically, when is a set? When does cells become a human life? I would have loved to delve into all of that. But one, it's been a while since I've looked into it. Two, I was too curious about how deep the iceberg went. I didn't want to focus on any one level too long because I just wanted to see how far we were going to get in the iceberg today. But also, what I learned from the class I took was that we just don't have an answer and I could give you my

thought on it but it wouldn't mean shit because there's another article out there somewhere else that completely disputes my feelings on the matter and leaves us all going maybe that's why it's still a hot debated issue today because none of us know is that that's the point of talking about it Mr. Philosophy here discounted the entire idea that even if the conclusion to a philosophical question is I have an opinion and the opinion is based primarily on how I view things more than anything objective, isn't that still valuable to share? Yeah, but we have time constraints on how long we can talk during one episode, so I have to balance going, you know what, whoever wins this, we could go into the ethics

of it next episode and have a whole episode on it if you want. If you want my philosophical answer, I think it's complicated and I think that humanity lacks the understanding of what makes something sentient to make a decision on that in a meaningful way. And I do think there are ways it's even different than the abortion debate, which is a whole thing to get into. But if you want my practical real world answer, no one gives a a shit the people who want to advance that sort of technology are just gonna do it disruptive technology style like this is the thing where the reason that the world of of bleeding edge technology is so dystopian is because a person who would ask the question and then pursue the answer of oh well can you make like human brain

tissue processors? Would that work? Person who is so curious that they would pursue that to begin with is way too curious to give any shits whatsoever what a regulating body, what the general public consensus is, if they're causing actual harm, if it's demonstrable in meaningful ways that they are creating beings and then harming them, essentially torturing them into being computer chip slave brains that have a miserable existence and then die whenever they're killed off by the researchers. They just don't care. And that's part of what allows technology to advance at such a bleeding edge sort of rate.

But also part of the core of the problem is you need people who are willing to ask those questions and want to pursue that. And you need people who have the authority and are in a position to actually stop them because they don't, the people doing it don't necessarily care where the line is. And there probably is a line where even if we don't have a definitive answer, there's lines you shouldn't cross in pursuing research of that nature. I got to jump in a little bit here. Okay, I can't, I don't want to go too deep, but you're sparking me here. So there's different levels.

I've talked about there's different moral theories, right? There's like Kantian ethics. There's utilitarianism. Basically, there's different levels of ethics. There is global or universal, which could apply to like everything. Then there's down to the individual what might be great for the planet might be really awful for one person a meteor is heading toward earth there's one person who is comprised of dna that can explode the meteor but

we have to shoot them at the meteor and explode they would die but it would save all of humanity is it worth sacrificing that person most people probably say yes. Shoot him. Oh, yeah. Shoot him. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Shoot him. In that case, there is an argument to be made that the individual can be overridden for the greater good of humanity, right? That's utilitarianism. So you take this problem and you say, all right, if the world was all under like one governing body and we could say, this is morally wrong, all of you stop and everyone would

listen, then maybe you stop it. But in the real world application, you have to say, okay, maybe the United States, we could say this is wrong and it gets stopped. But there's another country that's like, you don't listen to them. Our labs will continue to pursue this. And they keep developing and researching this technology. Then in real world application, is it wrong for us to have stopped because we need to keep up with the technological rise of whatever's going on. So does that override the previous thing of, yeah, we should have stopped? And then now you've got a question of, okay, is it better to keep going so that we can balance out things? Or is it better to have stopped because morally on this one level,

it's wrong to hurt an individual brain that might be real? Or is it greater for everyone to keep going because of the possible things and outcomes that could happen from that? So it's a complicated question. And this is oversimplifying everything because I could delve into this and I would love to delve into this on multiple levels because that's how my brain works. And I love philosophy. There are we everything we talked about from the start of the pancake with meatballs. There are a hundred different questions to ask about what is life what is torture when is something to the point of intelligence that we should stop should we never start to begin with to the point of like okay is it morally right to even try to pursue this kind of stuff so you have the what is life question what is intelligence do things have a

soul is it okay to experiment on mice all the way down to is it even ethical for us to interfere with these things because you've also got religion and philosophy it's like well if god intended for us to be this way is it right to interfere with his plan you've got people that discount religion it's so complicated i can't go into the philosophy of it without like us sitting down for probably three months debating this stuff to actually get anywhere love well said i didn't understand most of it but then again most people out there did no i didn't understand it was good it was good it was good thank you i was scared i was like oh no i thought i was speaking real simple like i do yeah i didn't actually i didn't understand maybe our future is covered in brain organoids that we'll inject into our own

head to give us a temporary boost before our immune system squashes it out of reality and that small piece of us gets obliterated into nothingness. And that'll be super fun. But until that day comes, I'm going to give Wade an opportunity to philosophize if he wants to next time. Wade, you win! I do? Thank you. I'm going to take this. Is this the winner's speech time?

Sure. Instead of talking about the philosophy and stuff like that, I would like to talk about how i'm really kind of curious if pancakes like i love chocolate chip pancakes would meatball pancakes be good and if so do you use syrup or like a marinara sauce on them meatball pancakes no breakfast sausage meatballs mixed into pancakes with syrup yes that yeah yeah italian seasoning would not work the same way that breakfast seasoning would work. And if that point had been made just before the winner's speech occurred, it would have gotten you the win, Bob. But unfortunately, loser's speech. I feel like I contributed a lot. I don't think Wade said anything that profound. Nothing he said changed

my mind. I know the correct answer. You should just ask me in the future. If you have questions about brain silicon research, I know the answer uh just ask me just me an email i'll let you know yes or no you respond with an emoji thumbs up thumbs down i have to admit bob i think you had a lot more interesting like technology science discussion but man some of my one-liners were just on on fleek today it was what you should lose just for that yeah you should but yeah it's kind of too late i've it's a new year i want to keep i want to at least see if we can hold on to the rules well i guess it was old rules but i'm gonna establish some rules once the speech has occurred it's over however it is up to

the host discretion to see who goes first in terms of loser's speech, winner's speech. So if it's close and you declare a winner, but the loser's speech goes first and it's so compelling you have to give a point, that could then be converted to a winner's speech. We'll figure that out in the next episode. We got a lot to learn this year. Thank you for the good past year. This year is going to be terrible and horrible and full of nightmares and things beyond recompense. Look forward to that. Thank you for listening and or watching on Spotify.

This has been me, Bob, and Wade. You can find Bob at MiceCrim. You can find Wade at Minion777 or LordMinion777. And I'm happy to say we have...