Science Friday - Bird Populations In Decline, Real Life Sci-Fi Disasters, Brain Wiring. Sept 20, 2019, Part 2

Episode Date: September 20, 2019

There may be almost 3 billion fewer birds in North America today than there were in 1970, according to a study published this week in the journal Science. The decline over time works out to a loss of about one in 4 birds. However, the decline does not appear to be evenly distributed. Then, journalist Mike Pearl investigates what the world would look like after technology breakdowns, a real-life Jurassic Park, and other sci-fi doomsday scenarios in his book, The Day It Finally Happens. Finally, new research on the brains of people who paint with their toes reveal how our limbs affect our internal maps from birth.  Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. We've heard about steep declines in the populations of certain species, for instance, just this February. Reports of a drop in insect populations worldwide. Now another possible warning sign of global environment in crisis. A report in the journal Science this week says that North American bird populations have declined by nearly 3 billion, and that's, will it be, three billion birds since 1970? That's a loss of nearly one in four birds. What is the cause, and how do you count that kind of population decline?

Ken Rosenberg is one of the authors of that report and an applied conservation scientist at the famous Cornell Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca. Welcome back to Science Friday. Thanks. Hi, I, Ira. That's a lot of birds, isn't it? It is a lot of birds. There are a lot of birds out there, but we've been seeing this steady decline, and people who love birds and are out there every day have been noticing fewer and fewer birds,

and now we can put some hard numbers on those declines. But there's still a lot of birds left, right? We're not talking about an extinction here. We're not, and this is different from other studies that are showing. And, of course, there are birds that are dropping towards extinction. But what we're seeing here is like a whole another level of biodiversity loss because we're seeing the loss of abundance among common species of birds. So it's not just the rare and threatened species,

but what we're finding is this pervasive loss among common, familiar everyday birds. Giving me an idea of what we're talking about. What kind of birds? Well, some of the biggest losses are in grassland birds, birds like metal larks and horned larks, savannah sparrows. but not only the specialist species, one of the big surprising results is that other birds that are found out in farmland, rural landscapes across America, like red-wing blackbirds, are also in steep decline. So what that's telling us is that habitat loss is so pervasive in that these environments are just not able to support basic bird life. We have had birds go extinct. I'm speaking specifically about the famous passenger pigeon, right?

That's right. And we make an analogy in the paper. One of our co-authors had done this fascinating study where she was able to bring in whatever data existed from the passenger pigeon from the 1800s and essentially create a model of what the decline of the passenger pigeon might have looked like before it went extinct. And that decline looked a lot like what we're seeing today in these other common birds. And nobody ever thought the passenger pigeon would go extinct. It was the most abundant bird that ever lived on the continent. But these declines look very similar. And what it's telling us is that if we had been monitoring birds back at that time and people were paying attention and we were at that 30% loss point, let's say, it's very likely that we would have been able to prevent that extinction and do something about it. And is that the same case now? Can we prevent any loss of birds? Well, we might not be able to save everything, but that is what gives us hope. And we have examples of birds more recently that we have recovered and that we have brought back,

the bald eagle, the peregrine falcon. In those cases, we knew what the problem was, and when we were able to ban DDT, the harmful pesticide, and past laws that stopped shooting of hawks and eagles, and these populations rebounded pretty quickly. So we know birds can be resilient. We know that they will respond positively to our actions if we do it. But don't we have to know why they died off to begin with?

That's true. And we maybe got lucky, in a sense, with the bald eagle because DDT was such an obvious factor. And since these losses we're seeing now are so pervasive, they're really across every single habitat, then obviously multiple factors are at work. And it's very complex, and it's not a small. simple thing, but we do know in a lot of cases what the major factors are in habitat loss, and we know a lot of the things that are killing birds, such as collisions with windows and buildings and predation by outdoor cats.

And these are things that we can do something about, and we can minimize those bird deaths at the same time that we're working to protect and restore habitat. Is changing climate have anything to do with this, you think? Well, that's a good question this week, of course, and we've thought about that a lot, and climate change is obviously having an effect, and it's probably going to be having more of an effect as we move forward. But climate change is not the driver of these big declines. It is habitat loss.

And so, in a sense, the habitat loss issue is, it's right in front of us. There's so much urgency there, and if we're not protecting and restoring habitats, and if there isn't enough habitats for these birds to survive in and move, and not just birds, other wildlife to move into as climate change does whatever it's going to do on the landscape, then it won't matter very much. So we can't just focus on climate change into the future. We have to make sure we're protecting these populations right now. Let me get a bit into the methodology. This is fascinating to me, I hope to my listeners too. How do you know? How do you count the bird populations?

Well, we relied on two very independent sources of data, and one of them were fairly simple counts that have gone back 50 years or more that are done by bird watchers. And because so many people love birds and can identify them, we have this fantastic collaboration between the scientists and the amateur bird watchers where the scientists can design these surveys that are quite rigorous. but the bird watchers are the eyes and the ears out there. Scientists cannot collect this kind of data themselves. So we have thousands of people out there collecting the data and then giving that back to the scientists who can then do these analyses. And so we're very lucky to have this 50-year monitoring data set

on bird populations. We don't have anything like that for any other group of organisms. But then the weather radar data was a completely different source. that doesn't rely on human observations. And radar can see the migration that's happening in the sky. And since most birds are actually migrating at night, the radar is picking up these bird migrations at night. If you could even, you even see this on the weather channel, if you see a big storm coming on when they show the radar, that clutter that you see out behind the storm. Those are birds, usually.

So the weather people filter that out, but ornithologists have taken advantage of it. And it's really only recently, because we need supercomputers, really, to look at that scale. There are 143 of these next red weather radar stations, and we're able to piece that together and look at the total mass of migration that's passing over the United States over the entire spring migration. And we went back in time with that kind of data. We were able to go back only 11 years, but we saw a 14% decline in the massive market. passing over the United States in just an 11-year period. And that's about the same order of magnitude that we were seeing from the surveys.

So these two very independent sources of data are essentially telling us there's this major loss. And that gives us a lot more confidence that the result is real. Do you have any confidence that folks like us, you know, the individual can do anything to help? Well, it's going to start with the individual. just as your previous guest was talking about, and if we're going to solve the climate crisis, the response to this paper has really been phenomenal. There is so much interest in this story

because so many people love birds. And we've provided a list of actions that people can do, and we have a sheet called the Seven Simple Actions, and I'm not sure I can remember all seven of them, but they are things like protecting your windows and preventing birds from crashing into your windows by breaking up the reflection and keeping your cat indoors so it doesn't hunt birds. And drinking bird-friendly coffee is a great simple way.

It's great coffee, and you could be saving bird habitat at the same time. Stop there for a minute. Tell me what bird-friendly coffee is. I'd like to get some. Well, most coffee, all coffee, is grown in tropical regions, and like a lot of other agricultural crops, to grow coffee normally requires cutting down the rainforest. But in certain areas, they grow the coffee underneath the shade of the rainforest canopy, and it serves to protect the habitat, but it produces great coffee.

And it's a small proportion of the market right now, but it's something that we're trying to make people aware of and make them grow. Make that grow. So it's shade-grown coffee that we consider to be friendly to birds. What about pesticides? Do they kill off the birds? Well, they certainly do. And since so many of the declines we're seeing are birds associated with agricultural areas in one way or another. On top of the outright loss of habitat, you have this greater and greater use of more toxic pesticides. These neonicotinoids could be worse than DDT. And a different study just came out this week in science as well, showing the high toxicity of these chemicals to birds. And we think that this, could be the cause of declines in certain groups of birds, such as these aerial insect-eating birds, aerial insectivores,

such as swallows and swifts and nighthawks that have been declining so steeply. So absolutely, that's part of the puzzle. And then minimizing your use of pesticides around your home is a good start. Every one of these individual actions can then be amplified, you know, by taking it to scale in your community, and ultimately we want people who are doing these things to be a voice for change so that these can actually result in changed policies and societal change. You mentioned in your list that pollinators were a problem.

Tell me what you mean by that. Pollinators are a problem. Well, birds are such an integral part of all ecosystems, and they perform these services as part of the ecosystems, and they act as predators and prey in the food webs, but birds are also doing things like pollination. They're doing pest control of insects. They're doing dispersal of seeds.

They're helping forests regenerate by dispersing seeds. So when you're losing this big chunk of bird abundance, you're losing those functions within the ecosystems, and we could be approaching a point where the ecosystems themselves are unraveling. Another tipping point to be fearful of. Okay. Yeah, well, it could be happening. You know, it's hard not to be alarmist when you have numbers like we've generated here.

We've all read Silent Spring. So we know what could be happening. Ken Rosenberg is author of Report in Science and Applied Conservation Scientists at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca, New York. Thank you for taking time to be with us today. Thank you, Ira. When we come back, a look ahead of what might happen if some. seemingly sci-fi scenarios actually come to pass.

Pretty spooky stuff. Could it really happen? What would happen? Stay with us. We'll be right back after this break. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Imagine this.

One day your phone rings. Your friend is calling you through FaceTime. When you pick it up, your friend pops up on the screen, telling you that you've been robbed while on vacation, and can you transfer them a few hundred bucks until they get home? Well, you go online, you transfer the money to the account info that they sent you. But when you scroll through Instagram, you've discovered you've just been deep faked. Someone impersonated your friend's image and scammed you.

So you sent the money to somebody you don't know. Now, that's not a real story, but it doesn't sound too far off. For example, how far off are self-driving cars or possibly the death of the oceans or antibiotics that no longer work. These are all topics we talk about today that could lead to a disaster scenario if they aren't kept in check. We asked what sci-fi disaster keeps you up at night on our Science Friday Vox Pop app. We heard from Mike in Louisville, Bob in Jupiter, Florida, and a listener in Buffalo, New York. You know what plausible sci-fi scenario keeps me up at night? AI.

If the machines gain sentience, and it sounds far-fetched, but some of the captains of industry today like Elon Musk, And even guys like Joe Rogan, that's their big fear. It's not really a sci-fi scenario, but hurricanes do seem to be getting stronger. I was born and raised in Miami, and we never had any hurricanes like we've had since the last 20 years. So I believe that it's going to be time for us to all evacuate when it comes to all of these more powerful hurricanes. I would have to say a zombie apocalypse. We're pretty much at each other's throats all the time anyway. So it doesn't seem that far out of the realm of possibilities for us to take it one step further

with the addition of some sort of super rabies or something to that effect. Pretty scary stuff. We have some imaginative listeners, but we want to hear from you. What sci-fi disaster scenario from today's headlines keeps you up at night? Give us a call 844-724-8255-8-4-Sy-talk or tweet. us at Sye Frye. My next guest has turned the knob all the way up to 11 into panic mode, and he talked to scientists to imagine what the future might look like under some of these scenarios, and he says, it's going to be all right, mostly. Mike Pearl is a journalist and author of the book,

the day it finally happens, alien contact, dinosaur parks, immortal humans, and other possible phenomena, and you can read an excerpt of his book on our website, ScienceFriety.com. slash deep fakes. Welcome, Mike, to the show. Hi, Ira. It's great to be here. Now, I know you looked at a lot of scary scenarios. Did researching them make you more or less anxious about the future? Well, definitely less anxious. It's a habit of mine to research the things that scare me the most. So for me, you might say it's therapy. Okay. It was pretty scary for me when I was reading it. Let's go into some of them. I mentioned deep fakes. you know, where people can impersonate you? How close are we to that technology? Well, I'm not in the business of giving an exact timeline. I find that when forecasters give exact timelines, that's kind of when they get in trouble.

But I think within my lifetime, you know, I think we should definitely worry. Next few decades, I would say, is a pretty safe bet. Because we've seen already on YouTube channels or videos of people imitating or putting words into the mouths of famous people, and you can't tell the difference. Right. And I mean, and they've done a lot worse. You know, they've made some non-consensual sex tapes of celebrities and things like that. And it all started, it's funny how it all started in 2016 with this, you know, this demonstration out of the Max Planck Institute called Face to Face, where it all looked very innocent. They were just replacing one person's face with another face.

And I think a lot of people thought, oh, this could be used for movies or this could be used in therapy, you know, creating suppressed memories or something like that. And then it just went as dark, it went as dark as it could go very, very quickly, you know, which is definitely a theme of the book. Well, you know, if the pendulum really swings so far where people are communicating with each other and you can't, you don't really know if that's, you know, a avatar or a deep fake, Maybe it goes backwards. Maybe then we have to resort to real face-to-face talking to one another again, like in the old days. That sounds good to me. That definitely sounds good to me. I mean, you know, I talked to Peter Eckersley, who at the time was working at the Electronic Frontier Foundation,

and I said, surely there must be some kind of security protocol that you can put in place that will make sure that we're authentically talking to people that we know. And he was just like, no, absolutely not. But he said, you could just ask them a question that nobody else would know. And I was like, oh, yeah, right. It's a very low-tech solution. But it seems like it would work pretty well. Yeah, it's a capture for talking to somebody.

Exactly, yeah, yeah, and sort of analog capture, yeah. Let me go through some of the stuff you have in your book. And I think, speaking relatively about what we're just talking about, you have something called the day the entire Internet goes down. Can anybody think of a more horrifying thing than the entire Internet? internet going down? For me, it's pretty horrifying. I mean, sometimes I fantasize about it, too, you know, like people have an internet, people who want to do an internet cleanse, as they call it, which I can't bring myself to do, but if the whole thing went down, as scary as that would be,

I sometimes go, oh, maybe I kind of want it. And you also put the probability of these things happening. You say the plausibility rating is four out of five, which seems pretty high. Yeah, I mean, I didn't go with things when the, when the plausibility rating I found to be too low. One of your people who called in suggested a zombie apocalypse. The plausibility of that is, you know, zombies aren't, zombies aren't real. So I just thought, well, I don't want to go down that low. But with something like this, I think the plausibility, not necessarily the probability, but the plausibility, I would put at about four point, four out of five. That's pretty good. Well, tell me, give me the scenario under which this happened. So my editor was a little bit

worried about this because I kind of because like what what you see in the chapter is almost a bit like a roadmap it's not going to happen because of like a solar flare or because somebody trips over the wrong wire and the internet goes down it's it's more like um there would have to be a concerted effort by something with a lot of money like a state actor some a network of a network of cells around the world really trying very hard to damage the internet infrastructure because it is so widespread. And there are a number of places where it's particularly vulnerable. You know, I don't think a lot of people think about the fact, for instance, that the internet

is the worldwide web because we run cables under the ocean, just like we did in the telegraph days and that if you if you if you if you strategically cut a bunch of those cables which by the way I don't endorse you know you would you would kind of you would lose that worldwide aspect of the World Wide Web it would take a you would take several other several other measures along those lines for these terrible terrorists who I again don't approve of to completely knock out the functionality of the internet and it would only last for a short time because the effort to bring it back on would be so, you know, a global effort to bring the internet back would be,

you know, would be very quick. Yeah. A lot of interest in getting that back. Yeah. Let me go to some of the, our listeners and the people tweeting in some of their doomsday things. Let me go to Steve in Gainesville, Florida. Hi, Steve. Welcome to Science Friday.

Hi, Ira. How are you doing? Hi there. Go ahead. Yeah. So my doomsday scenario has to do with the. new CRISPR gene editing tool. I'm thinking about way back towards World War II where, you know, the Nazis were trying to do the final solution. And I could see that becoming a thing where

you can take the genes and say, for instance, you didn't like people with blue eyes. You can design a disease or a virus or whatever to attack only people with blue eyes. I see that is probably one of the most dangerous things we can have. All right. What do you think about that, Mike? So, I mean, the designer baby, that was definitely a tempting chapter to write. There is that movie Gattaca that kind of goes into that a bit that describes, to my mind, a really sort of plausible and an interesting version of that scenario where you have a stratified society where there are the altered people up top and then the sort of like natural, the more natural people, the bottom layers of society. But I'm still trying to understand. So in this scenario, there are, if you have the blue-eye genes, somebody sends out some kind of technology to kill those people. What was it exactly?

He's gone, but he's just worried about, you know, the ability with CRISPR. Well, just, you know, peripherally, what about the day when humans are cloned? We can clone dogs, right? Animals. Sure. Is that worry you at all? I mean, I'm pretty sure we could probably clone humans now. I mean, as it stands, if you clone, when they've gone through and cloned extinct mammals,

usually they don't, they have not lasted very long. There was an extinct goat that was cloned that died very quickly of a lung defect. Cloning a person, was there not just a Chinese scientist who cloned some fetuses? Yes. He was not welcomed with open arms. Right. Right, exactly. You know, if it were a chapter in my book, I think my approach to writing about that might be to focus on the reaction rather than the technology itself.

I think that, you know, mass hysteria is always a big part of these, like, big newsworthy events and, you know, kind of an underrated aspect of any kind of sci-fi scenario is sometimes an overreaction. Here's some tweets that are coming in. Candace tweets that she's afraid of going out like the dinosaurs because of a near-earth object striking us, you know, like the, yeah. That's very likely. In fact, a large near-earth, a one mile or more near-earth objects striking us sometime while the earth still exists, so in the next few trillion years, I think is viewed as, you know, something that's 100% certain. So I hope you take comfort in that. Well, let me go to another tweet before I go to the phones. How about mass migration by desperate people escaping climates that are too hot for human habitation where crops can no longer be raised? And it goes on to say, these, in capital letters, will happen.

I mean, some might argue that that already is happening, as a matter of fact. What about, do you see that we're going to have absolutely self-driving cars? Well, the expert that I spoke to, Vivek Wadhwa, was very, very certain when I spoke to him. But he helped me kind of, he gave me a little bit of focus. When we think about self-driving cars, you know, we tend to think about them, you know, I think about them in L.A. And I think about how our roads work. He helped me think about how self-driving cars would work if they were universal in some place like India. And it becomes sort of much more discouraging to think about self-driving.

Those streets in India being full of sort of like self-driving robocars, these sort of like golf carts replacing the like vibrant streets that they have now, things like tuk-tooks that they have. When you think about that all over the world, when self-driving cars become universal, it sounds a bit more dreary. Talking with Mike Pearl, author of The Day, it finally happens,

and we're talking on Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Let me go to the phones now. Let's go to Brian and Yuma, Arizona. Hi, Brian. Hey, good afternoon. How are you doing? Hey, there. Go ahead.

The thing that keeps me up at night is the fact that we keep advertising our location in the universe the search for extraterrestrial intelligence kind of scares me. Can you imagine how far down the food chain we are compared to somebody who would have the ability to travel here? You have thought about that, Mike, haven't you? I sure have. Yeah, the way that I approached aliens in the book was I tried to imagine what it's going to be like on the day,

when you flip open Twitter and read it when aliens have been absolutely 100% confirmed. The situation I propose is one where, you know, the city authorities say, hey, can everybody with the ability to transmit radio signals, please not send them to this area because we have just confirmed that aliens are there and we have no idea if they're friendly. But it's too late. You know, a billionaire with access to radio has already sent his little hello. Because there actually is no international law that says there's any kind of penalty for contacting aliens.

and, you know, summoning them here to turn us into their breakfast. Yes. And how can we ever forget that Twilight Zone episode to serve man? Right. Google that one if you don't know what we're talking about because we don't know. Did people send you, or let me put it the other way, how did you, you know, filter out all the different things that could happen? Well, I mean, I wrote about everything that I thought I could add something to the conversation. conversation about. You know, there are, there's an, there's a, there's a, there's an

infinity of potential events out in the future. And I think a lot of them cause us, cause us a lot of anxiety when we think about them. We think about, for instance, you know, a nuclear war as, as something that absolutely ends the world. And, and as, and as terrible of a catastrophe as a nuclear war can be, you know, when you actually break down the day that it occurs, say the day that 100 nuclear weapons are used, as disastrous as that obviously is, and as much as we don't want it, when you get right down to it, humanity survives. We don't think about what comes next. That's why I kind of wanted to focus on each individual day.

Rather than treating each one like an ending, treating it more like a beginning. So the horror comes after the apocalypse. Right. Right, exactly. I mean, we have that term post-apocalypse, you know. I didn't want to go to post-apocalypse. I'm trying to focus on that one day, what you'll feel and feel and see and smell on that one day. But, yeah, I mean, it's good to think about what happens next, you know, and in realistic terms.

For me, for me, that really, it makes me feel better, not worse. Well, how did you leave out zombies in all of this since it's so, you know, it's all over culture? Sure. And I knew I would be facing these questions everywhere I went, having written the book and not done a chapter on zombies. And it really is just because, you know, zombies are this, you know, they're this, correct me if I'm wrong, traditional Caribbean, a sort of like a local urban myth. And if I were to, I could, I probably could write a chapter on them. I would focus on, you know, what it's like to be bitten by a humanoid.

If anybody's been attacked by somebody, if anybody used their teeth to attack another person, I would want to talk to the victim for the book. That's a story I would like to hear because that's what it would be like to be attacked by a zombie. You know, I try to capture those kinds of feelings. I would want to talk to people who'd been in villages that were ripped apart by Ebola. What's it like to fear your neighbors because they might have those? the disease. I think a zombie outbreak would be something like that. There are, even in these terrible sci-fi stories, there are human stories with real emotion that can kind of give

us insight into the present and can tell us more about who we are. Mike Pearl, author of the day, it finally happens. You can read an excerpt of his book on our website. It's sciencefriety.com slash deepfakes. He's going to join us after the break, so we'll take more of your questions. Stay with us, 844-724-8255. We'll be right back after this. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. We've been imagining what the world might look like under sci-fi techno-environmental disasters.

With my guest Mike Pearl, he's a journalist and author of the book, The Day It Finally Happens, Alien Contact, Dinosaururoparks, Immortal Humans, Other Possible Phenomenas. We haven't even mentioned the title stuff that's in the title of the book, because there's so much. else to talk about. So you read the book and you see what he has to say and we'll fill in all the other stuff on the radio here. A lot of things that people are asking about, I'm just going to sum up a bunch of tweets we've had and people from Vox Pop calling. And they're worried about AI, artificial intelligence taking over, the singularity is their number one concern. What do you feel about that? Well, I did the deepfakes chapter and that was my main AI company. My main AI When it comes to the more the judgment day from Terminator 2 scenario where Skynet comes online,

I had done some research about that prior to this, particularly, again, with talking to Electronic Frontier Foundation and others. And they cautioned me against talking in too much detail about a certain kind of singularity where the machines turn against us, where the machines decide that we, the matrix singularity, where they decide that we're worthless, that we're just nothing but answer, that they need to convert us into energy or something like that. Not that it's impossible. I could have easily done a chapter on that.

But what they said I found very interesting and sort of comforting, which was that, you know, in philosophy of mind, the concept of intelligence, the concept of sentience, they're a bit of a black box. We don't quite understand what those are. And if we ever do put together some kind of neural net, that has human intelligence as we understand it, that'll be a kind of a spontaneous thing

that I think once we build it, we may never understand it. And that it's not just sort of like snapping enough microchips onto your robot brain to sort of like grow and grow and grow and grow. They said that's not really what intelligence is. So they told me, if I were to write a chapter for this book on this, it would be more about algorithms that drive, our economy, algorithms that drive our politics, the way that those, the way that we trust software at times to make decisions for us collectively and sort of like leave, you know, we,

we step aside and let an algorithm decide where our roads should go or what stores should be there or what our city should look like. And before long, maybe we miss something that we didn't even realize was going away. So that was sort of, that's sort of how I view the scale. scary singularity. I think mine is a little bit more comforting than most people's. All right. Speaking of comforting, let's go to Athens, Georgia. Jackson's on the line. Hi, Jackson. Thanks for taking my call. So a scenario that's always kept me up is what about Yellowstone

National Park and waking up to a super volcano exploding somewhere or some other natural disaster that's going to displace or potentially kill hundreds of millions of people? Okay. You talked about the asteroid that might hit us, now about the volcano and Yellowstone. Sure, and this is another one that most likely will happen sometime. But, you know, the volcanologist that I spoke to told me something very comforting, which is that we will have some degree of warning, most likely. It could be decades or centuries of change at Yellowstone, the ground itself elevating, the different gaseous compounds leaking from the earth that geologists will understand signals move toward a super volcanic event.

The scary part is that they said that as volcanism increases around the Yellowstone area, people will start to become accustomed to things like earthquakes and eruptions. And that, you know, when you look at times, and I don't want to blame victims, but people who don't evacuate from disasters, it's because, you know, they look at, they look at, they look at, at their situation and they say, I'm a survivor. I've made it through the last one. I'll make it through this one. But if you're in Billings, Montana, for instance, and the Yellowstone Caldera goes, you know, it actually super erupts, you're not, you're not going to survive. There's pretty much going to be no survivors in that area. In fact, it's going to be a near-extinction event for humanity, if not an extinction event, when that actually does occur. Let me, last question, another natural disaster and tweets,

what keeps me up at night is a Carrington-level solar flare that has the potential to damage our electrical system so that it takes months or years to recover? Yeah, I mean, they're pretty scary, right, because there's just absolutely no way to know when one is going to happen. There was one in the 80s that knocked out the electrical grid in Quebec. What I find really interesting about solar flares, and for the most part, if you're, if you're,

out sunbathing and there's a solar flare, even the really strong ones aren't powerful enough to even give you a bad sunburn. But as we move more and more of our communications infrastructure into orbit, as we have more satellites out there and maybe other technology orbiting us that we haven't thought of yet, we're making ourselves more and more vulnerable to solar flares. But the fallout is stuff where we do not yet understand how it's going to impact us when a solar flare knocks that stuff out. That's something to worry about some more. Thank you, Mike.

Sure. It's a great book. It's a great. Mike Perel is an author of the book The Day It Finally Happens, Alien Contact, Dinosaur Parks, Immortal Humans, and Other Possible Phenomen. And we have an excerpt on our website, ScienceFriety.com slash deepfakes. Thanks for joining us, Mike. Have a great weekend. If you're able, go ahead and touch something near you.

Maybe your radio, maybe your nose with your index finger. Go on, great, right? Now, do the same thing with your pinky finger. According to decades of work in neuroscience, a slightly different area of your brain was activated for each of those actions because your brain contains a map of your hand with individual regions in it for each finger. But if you perform the same actions with two different toes, your brain might just light up a generic foot region, the same place each time, unless you're a person who happens to use your feet for everything.

New research from cell reports last week studied people born without arms and who paint with their feet. And that research found that their brains' maps of their bodies place a much higher emphasis on their feet and individual toes, which says something interesting about our brain's capacity for rewiring in response to how we use our bodies. Here to talk about it is Dan Veselink, a Ph.D. candidate in Clinical Neuroscience at the University of College of London, co-author on the new research, and he joins us by Skype. Welcome, Dan. Thanks for having me. Hi. Please explain this mapping that the brain does of our hands, of our feet. Why do we have it?

How is it different? Yeah, so what we have, we are basically in our brain a big map of our body to know where we're being touched when we have to use a different body part, right? And as you explained, when you touch individual fingers of the hand that activates a slight different place on that map. and yeah for the feet normally that doesn't exist so different body parts have different like resolution right so a place where you're touching a lot which is your hand you need that fine detail you have very detailed regions for parts of our hand but an area that isn't touched very much your lower back maybe you just don't have you just have this generic somewhere around around in my back and that's why it's so hard if you tell somebody just to move one of your little toes or toes, you can hardly do that. You move all the toes at the same time. Yeah, yeah, very few people can indeed. And so what did you see when you looked at the brains of people who do everything with their feet, and who were they? Right. So we got in contact with two people who have this amazing dexterity with their feet so that they can paint with their

toes and actually make a living doing so. And what we did is we put them in an MRI scanner, which is if we touch a body part, we can see exactly which part of the brain is activated when that happens. And what we found is it actually for individual toes you could see as well of a separation as normally you would see four hands. And so it turns out their feet are mapped the way other people's hands are mapped. Yeah, so it really shows that they have this fine dexterity and this fine sense of touch, knowing where parts of their feet are, that that has an impact on how the brain represents it as well.

So what happens when people don't have this map or some part of their body isn't very well mapped? Would I notice if my brain didn't have really precise finger map, for example? Yeah, yeah, you would. So if I would touch your lower back, right? And I could possibly even touch you with two fingers in different places of your lower back, and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference whether I'm touching you with two fingers or just one. Wow. Does this have implications for people who might want to use prosthetic limbs, for example?

Yeah. So in general what we showed is that you have this correspondence. between the way you've learned to use your body parts or your life and how your brain represents it. And we've sort of shown that in these two people who have these phenomenal capabilities, the brain sort of stretches its body representation. And just the fact that the brain can stretch this body representation, that it can make room for more resolution, as it were, is very positive news for, yeah, artificial limbs and prosthetics to see whether,

that potentially the brain would also have space to make room for those kind of tools. So were the people you studied, the painters are used who painted with their toes, were these people who did not have hands or arms? Yeah, so they were born without any hands, and that's why they used their feet for in their everyday life. And so in doing that, their brain knew that and rewired their toes, basically, to be where their hands would be in the brain. brain. Right, yeah. So we saw two things, both that the normal foot area becomes more defined,

but we also saw some evidence of, yeah, that the place where typically you would, you would, the place you typically would use to control your hands and to do touching with your hands, now also was used during foot movement. Do you think this is something that could be taught to people, to, you know, aid in that rewiring in the brain? If you practiced it enough, or, you know, even if you had your full use of your limbs? Right, yeah. So we do think so. I think the fact that they didn't have hands is not necessarily important for their foot area and the way that developed.

So if you were, even if you had hands, started from a very young age to use your feet to do your writing, to drive your car, to paint, indeed, then probably this foot area would develop similarly as well. I'm Ira Flato. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Talking with Van Vandes-Link, a PhD candidate from the University of College of London. Dan, what do these foot and handmaps tell us about how our brains are at birth?

I mean, well, just tell us. I'm not going to try to figure it out myself. Yeah. So the big question that we have going on now is, we found these foot maps in foot painters, right? But the one question we do not yet know is whether everyone's born with these maps and you just kind of lose it by, because no one ever pays attention to foot, to our feet movement, right?

So we wear shoes all day, we kind of are taught to use our hands to reach for things and so on. So the one question we do have is, are we born with these maps and we just lose it? Or is it we've not, Everyone's born with a generic foot area, and because these artists use their feet in very dexterous ways, they developed this special map. Do you have any ideas which one you prefer as an answer? What do you think? I think there's probably some genetic predisposition for developing these specialized foot maps, because if you look at non-human primates, for example, who use their feet often for grasping branches and climbing in trees and also.

many Dexter's ways, they often also show very localized brain areas for each individual digit of their feet. So what about amputees later in life? Can they be taught, do you think, to reuse those areas? Yeah, so this is the actual main focus of our lab with Professor Macon at University College London. And the main thing that we find actually is that when you are born without a lot of the a hand, you do not no longer have this, you do not represent this hand.

So the hand, what is in the hand area in people with both hands, is no longer activated. But people who are amputees, as you asked, people who lose a hand later in life, they still represent this hand in that area. So there doesn't seem to be much changing later in life. Now, we keep talking about how the brain is so plastic and adaptable when we're young, you know, are we going to be able to unlock greater plasticity in adults, do you think? I think, I mean, the main, currently we think there probably isn't a lot of opportunity later in life for this plasticity. And this is a general movement that the neuroscience has made where 20 years ago people were very optimistic.

We saw a lot of evidence for the plasticity of the brain. But now much of research has come out that to see actually for change. is later in life, the brain isn't that plastic anymore. Like early in life, as this study showed, there's a very large scope, but later in life, not so much. So, but that's actually a good news for people who are amputees, because when they lose their hand, because the brain is not that plastic,

it doesn't lose that information either. So you could potentially design a prosthesis, which can, can it recruit that information again. So because the brain keeps all the information it used to have, if we just find a way to wire an artificial limb to that, we should be able to control it that way. Yeah, they're making progress on that.

We have been following that. I want to thank you very much for staying up and taking time to talk with us today. Yeah, no worries. Thank you. Dan Veselink is a PhD candidate in Clinical Neuroscience at the University College of London. If you missed any part of our program, you'd like to hear it again.

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