StarTalk Radio - Live at the Bell House: “The Space Between Your Ears” (Part 1)

Episode Date: March 28, 2013

Warning: Our live Bell House show about the human brain and consciousness could just blow your mind. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to new episodes ad-free and a whole week early.

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. Welcome everybody to another StarTalk Live at Bell House. Talk live at Bell House. We have a wonderful show for you about neurology, psychology. You're going to leave here learning and I'm sorry for that.

It is now my great pleasure to bring on the host of Star Talk, ladies and gentlemen, Neil Tyson! Tonight's show we're calling the space between your ears and let me bring out my two special guests two experts on what's going on inside your head first up cara santa maria a journalist on neuroscience and all science topics for the Huffington Post. Kara, come on out. She has a video blog called Talk Nerdy to Me. And her particular expertise is the neurophysiology of love and also depression. Okay, so we've got to work that one out.

depression. Okay, so we've got to work that one out. And my second special guest, Professor Heather Berlin, neuroscientist. Heather Berlin! She's a professor of psychiatry at Mount Sinai Medical Center. She actually probes the human brain to find out what's going on when things are happening to you. And her particular expertise

includes helping Jews. I'm Jewish. It's fine. But compulsive disorders and impulsive disorders. I should have waited with my joke. I remain accurate.

We have one more guest from The Daily Show, Wyatt Senak. Here we go. First, I want to find out a couple of things. You know, what is normal? Because every time I turn around, somebody's identified with a mental disorder. But if most people I know have exactly that disorder, why would that be abnormal? So what is normal for humans? I've seen animals do weird things, and we say, isn't that cute?

And if a human did it, they'd be committed. So how do you decide? It would be ostracized. Just to be clear. How do your people decide what is normal and what isn't? I have no idea. You know, historically, I think that that was just decided by social invention. You know, I've talked to some neuropsychologists who study religion, for example,

and a lot of them claim that religion is mass delusion. But because enough people are Deluded by it doesn't qualify as a mental disorder. What's mass delusion, technically? You go to mass. There are enough individual people who share the same kind of hallucination And you know what's funny is that really there are certain things in certain cultures that are considered normal, and in other cultures they're considered abnormal. Actually, there's no such thing as being a normal.

There's no normal person. Everybody is abnormal, really. I'm normal. The question is... We'll be the judge of that one. Normal-esque. How we decide if somebody has an actual psychiatric illness is how much distress it causes the person. So there is the social norms of exactly if somebody's outside of the social norm. However, it's also how much distress is it to that person.

But nobody is normal. I'm sure I could diagnose you with one or two psychiatric illnesses. Do it, do it, do it. So here's what interests me. Humans are capable of extraordinary extreme emotions, of hate, of love, of rage. That's a little like hate, but go on. Okay, well, no, no. Bieber fever.

I'd also throw Bieber fever in there. That's an extreme emotion. When those emotions are expressed in their extreme, havoc is wrought upon society. What possible evolutionary good is that? The evolutionary basis of Bieber fever. Yeah, thank you. Heather, you got some insight into this? Yeah, so I think the reason our emotions evolved, our emotions evolved initially, if you think about, you think about these sort of little creatures crawling around the earth, before humans evolved, it was about seeking out pleasure, which meant food, water, sex that helped you survive.

So we needed these things, emotions, likes, dislikes, stay away from poisonous things. Are you describing gentrification? As we evolved, we developed these more cerebral cortexes that interpreted these emotions and put labels on them, like love and passion and anger and hate. But really, they evolved from human need to have sex, to eat. Life needs.

Life needs, animal needs, animal needs. Beneath animal needs. Like, the brain evolved inside out. And so, generally speaking, we see functions in the brain that are happening in very deep brain structures. Some people call that the lizard brain or the phylogenetically older part of the brain. And kind of the more outside we get in the brain towards the cerebral cortex, the more that we see these kind of higher mammalian functions. Wait, wait.

So the two of you are saying that we have these basal sort of caveman lizard needs, okay? Write a play. But now that we're smart, we actually try to interpret these basal needs and that can mess us up. And we give them labels and that can really mess things up because we mislabel things. We feel something and we have to put a label on it. It might not be the right label. People fall in love with their professors, for example. Well, really, they might feel emotion. They're excited

about the information. The way you said that is true. People keep trying to hook up with me. I think they're crazy. But, you know, I think we say that these are kind of hiccups and these are mess-ups of evolution, but the truth is we wouldn't be human without these things either. I mean, what makes us human is language and poetry

and putting meaning into some things that we generally think of as just being these kind of hindbrain or midbrain activities. But the scary bit is really most of what's promoting our behavior is happening outside of awareness, and we're only aware of it after the fact, and then we start to make up reasons. To rationalize it after. Yes, exactly. So what's promoting our behavior is happening outside of awareness. And we're only aware of it after the fact. And then we start to make up reasons. To rationalize it after. Yes, exactly.

So what's a good example of that? For example, there are free association tasks. They'll learn word association pairs, like mood and tide, for example. Don't say mood and tide. That has way baggage with Bill O'Reilly saying, you can't explain the tides. Yes, I can. So I don't want to go there right now, okay? That's the moon god.

If you missed, just Google Moon O'Reilly. It's all there. Moon and ocean. Let's say moon and ocean. Moon and ocean. I say to you, you've learned these things previously. Now just name any detergent you want. Free association, whatever you want.

Name a detergent. Name a detergent. Most people are likely to say Tide. Tide. They've been primed. And they'll say, well, why did you choose Tide? They'll say, oh, my mom used it as a kid or I loved it. But really, it was because they were primed by learning this word pair, ocean and moon.

So people explain their behaviors or the decisions they make after the fact. In the lab, we can show that we can manipulate the way people decide things. And they'll come up with all sorts of reasons why do you manipulate people in the labs? Why do we even have war then? You could just put Al Qaeda in a lab. This comes down to a question which I probably don't want to take the conversation here but they always go to this place when I try to write about

these kinds of things is does that mean that we have no free will? Yeah. Actually free will? Yeah. Actually, free will is an illusion. I can assure you. I disagree. Everybody needs to know this right now. Why would I go like this? I'm a bat. I'm a bat.

Free will. Disprove that, scientist. There's no explanation for that behavior. I'm the only human with free will! So Heather, in the old days, the psychiatrists, they'd lay out on the couch and just have a conversation. But you're saying now you're beyond this. What are you doing to people's heads? So for people who are really suffering, and they've tried all sorts of pharmacological treatments and psychotherapy,

and nothing works, they haveotherapy. Compulsive disorder suffering. Nothing works. Yeah, they have obsessive compulsive disorder or severe depression. There's a new alternative treatment in which we actually implant electrodes in the brain and stimulate these deeper structures of the brain. And people who are depressed for 20 years, they all of a sudden, even in the operating room, they're awake. We implant the electrodes, we turn them on, and they feel alive. They feel happy. You're poking around inside of people's brains. You're going inside people's brains. They do.

They sign consents. No free will. Of course they're going to let you. Let me go inside your brain. Yes. Man. Yeah. They let you do this.

Well, imagine. You're suffering. Yes. They're desperate. This is like a last resort. This is a last resort. I mean, people used to get shock therapy for depression. I mean, they still do.

I saw that movie. You know, a small amount of people still do. They have to fail shock therapy first in order to get the treatment. They're that desperate. And they've already tried having a glass of wine. Right, right, right. I imagine. You're taking therapy to another technological level.

We actually call it deep brain stimulation. Deep brain stimulation. Sounds so sexy. But it's really these evolutionarily older parts of the brain that we were talking about that evolved for these emotions that we have. Those are the parts that we're actually going in and manipulating. The lizard brain. The lizard brain, yes.

And the alternative was actually people used to go in and lesion those parts of the brain. Lesion cut. Yes. I saw that movie too. Yeah, they don't destroy it anymore. There's no destruction. Yeah, that was one slew over the cuckoo's nest. Exactly.

How'd that work? It's not like that. What was the effectiveness of it? Of the lesioning the brain? Yeah. It actually worked for somebody. It wasn't like one flu over the cuckoo's nest. Actually, they would lesion these subcortical structures, and they would work for obsessive-compulsive disorder.

You would just cut out the idea of counting to 100? Yes. This is one part here. Before you turn on the oven. Woo! But now this deep brain stimulation doesn't cause any damage. It's reversible. It's adjustable.

We can change the amount of stimulation. It's really quite amazing. So if you have OCD and then you get it, and then you're like, you know what? I want a little bit of OCD. You can add and change the, yeah. You're like, I'm just counting to four before I go in a room. So actually, there's an interesting ethical question here. If you can go in and mess with someone's brain, altering their state of mind, can you go in and make them smarter?

Can you go in and change their political affiliations? Can I make them fall in love with me? First, we have to understand. Can you electrocute someone until they date you? Yeah. You don't need to be a scientist to know how to break someone. So Heather, that's your fifth date. You just bring them into the lab. You don't know what hit them. You know what? We are a bottleneck to that research. I mean, first we have to understand what intelligence really is

before we can even start to conceptualize a way to go into the brain to improve intelligence. And there's so many facets of how we define intelligence today. Name 90. And what's interesting, and this is a quick aside, is that when we do a statistical measure called factor analysis and we look at all different intelligence tests, we find this factor called G, the G factor, Spearman's G. Does that relate to the G spot?

For the brain. For the brain. The G spot for the brain. What's with the letter G? It's this thing that we see. Yeah, general intelligence. And it's this thing that we see across all intelligence tests, and they all rank high on it.

And so there is this kind of fundamental intelligence, intangible measure that we don't even really know what it is, but some people have it and some people don't. Have you asked those people what it is? Those who have it, right? They might have an insight. Can you figure out whether you have it on a test that might be in the sidebar of a Facebook page? Possibly. Okay.

All right. But the wave, I think, of the future with these neural prosthetics, as they're called, implants into the brain where we can stimulate certain parts, is we can actually increase things over time, like memory, like attention. So while it's not intelligence per se. And both of those are components of most intelligence. Exactly. But there's a lot of ethical issues there because, you know, who can afford to get the implants? Rich people.

Exactly. I'll do that right now. It's rich people who can afford it. Thanks, Eugene. Occupy cerebral cortex. You don't want to let a lot of potentially reasonable hippies into your mind. Let me ask, given that you can probe the brain, given that there are these disorders that can be adjusted,

given that there might be a future in where you go in the brain... Why are women so crazy? I'm just curious. Okay. We're continuing the broadcast of our show, The Space Between Your Ears, recorded live at the Bell House in Brooklyn, New York, along with my co-host, Eugene Merman. Joining us on stage that night were professor of psychology, Heather Bodelin, science blogger, Cara Santamaria, and the comedian, Wyatt Sinek.

One of the other things I study is the neural basis of consciousness. What other basis could it possibly have if not neural? A lot of people would think that it doesn't. People thought it was way back in the Greek... You know, in the religious science, it could be just in the ether. Exactly. There are people today, there are dualists who truly believe that mental states come from some sort of soul-like substance,

that they're not founded. Yeah, I don't have them here on stage. And one of those people is Yoda. Yoda, yeah. Did you say doulas? Doulist. The monist kind of looks at the brain and mind as the same thing.

The doulist looks at the brain and mind as two separate kinds. Should I now make my Yoda joke again? But I do think that we're getting closer to understanding it, whereas before we can only sort of peer into the brain using things like neuroimaging and say, oh, this lights up when a person thinks about that or feels this. And that was just looking at correlations.

But now we're getting into causation because we can actually go in and change a person's emotion or percept. We can induce a memory or an image. So we can actually go in, stimulate the brain, and cause a person's emotion or percept. We can induce a memory or an image. So we can actually go in, stimulate the brain, and cause a person to have a percept. And by going from correlation to causation, we're learning a lot more about the relationship. So why are you you, and why am I me?

What are you, high and funny? No. Heather, I was driving home, and I said, every day I wake up, and I am me. I'm not someone else. The persistence of self. The persistence of me. And if I had a twin, I would never become my twin, even though we're genetically identical. But there are certain types of brain damage where you might lose that sense of self. There are also ways that we can induce that pharmacologically. Oh.

Ooh. Where you are not yourself. Where you might lose a sense of self and maybe gain a sense of connection with a greater You're talking about ecstasy. I got it. Acids. Yeah. Okay. Mushrooms.

Yeah. I mean, there are a lot of ways that we can kind of affect our brain so that that sense of self becomes a little less tangible to us. Well, okay, so when we think of drugs on the brain, we think that somehow they're stimulating phenomena. Is that really what's going on? Yeah, so a new paper actually just came out recently. A research paper. Yes, a research paper.

Yes. Not the Denver Gazette, to clarify. When an academic says a new paper came out, it means something different. Yes, go. Where traditionally people thought when you go on things like LSD or mushrooms, the brain becomes activated

and you have all these hallucinations and weird, strange experiences. But they actually put these people in a scanner to look at what's happening in their brain while they were on. A neuroscanner. In a neuroscanner. Look at brain activation.

Put your head down. Not a copy machine. Or they don't just hold up Shazam to the head and go like, I don't know what this song is. So they put the people in a scanner while they were on mushrooms, the drug that's in mushrooms, and they found actually that they had decreased activation in certain part of the brain, in the prefrontal, in the frontal area of the brain, that has to do with executive function,

and that that part of the brain actually decreased, which allowed these, again, the evolutionarily older bit of the brain, the subcortical regions, to have full range to just act out. What you're saying is that our normal state suppresses hallucinations. Yes, yes. So that dreams, for example, when you're dreaming, there's decreased activation in the prefrontal cortex. When you're in hypnosis, there's decreased activation. So normally we're suppressing all these weird, freaky, strange things.

Are you also saying that lizards are naturally high? Lizard brain. Well, you know, a lot of Are you also saying that lizards are naturally high? The lizard brain. Well, you know, a lot of animals don't recognize themselves in the mirror, and they may not be able to... Well, how do you know that? Email! When you put them in front of a mirror, they don't notice their reflection.

Some dogs will bark as if it's another dog, and some will be like, I don't care, and they'll walk off. And so there are kind of some tests. It's very rare the dog that's like, hey, what's up? Exactly, yeah. But many apes, chimpanzees and bonobos, can look in a mirror, and if you mark their forehead

with yellow paint, for example, they'll go to wipe it off. They know that it's on their own forehead. And then they'll go to destroy you for putting it on their forehead. I trusted you! And did you know that the laws of optics dictate that in a mirror, you can only kiss yourself on the lips? Unless you're a vampire. Vampires have no reflection.

Exactly. That's why. Vampires never know self-love. Okay, so Heather, I interrupted. Yes. We're talking about our sense of self. There's actually a theory that there's certain cells in the brain called spindle cells that are only found in creatures that have social interactions. So they're found in humans, they're found in dolphins, they're found in great apes. And these are the animals

that can recognize themselves. The three species that have sex for pleasure. Which are those? Bonobos, dolphins, and humans. Wait, wait, wait! Dogs look like they're having fun when they're doing it.

I think all animals get something out of sex. But these are the three species that have sex outside of estrus. They have sex when they can't get pregnant. What's the reason dogs have sex with human legs, then? They're very frustrated. Very frustrated. Okay, so three species that have sex without regard to... Procreation.

Procreation, exactly. And which are... Bonobos. Bonobos. Everyone's favorite ape. Dolphins. Dolphins. Dolphins. No one for the BJs.

Awesome orgy. Oh, yeah. Bonobo dolphin happening at Burning Man. Don't give a dolphin too much tequila. We're never going to let Heather get to her point. Yes. I think I made it. Really, the essence is that our prefrontal cortex acts to rationalize our brain. And we have all these thoughts that are constantly bubbling up. And the prefrontal cortex makes sense of them, explains why we make

the decisions we do, why we behave the way we do, and organizes our thoughts. If you depress that part of the brain with a certain drug or with certain types of therapy, it will allow these strange thoughts to bubble up and have no rational meaning. Now, is the prefrontal part of your brain, is that still the lizard brain part? That's actually the part of the brain that we consider makes us the most human. Humans have the largest prefrontal cortex of all animals. That's right, we do. Proportional to the rest of the brain. USA.

I think a whale has a central cortex. USA. Ratio to the body weight. We call it the executor of the brain. So I always got really angry when I watched the movie Saw. I would get angry if I watched the movie Saw. I'm with you. I say it like I've watched it multiple times.

The giveaway, for those of you, spoiler alert, is that this guy, you know, who plans these extravagant ways to kill people, had frontal lobe damage, which is not possible, because when you have frontal lobe damage, the first thing that goes out the window is your ability to plan things.

Oh. Wow. Okay. So you get pissed off watching... Yes. You're like a fireman watching Backdraft being like, I don't think so. That's not accurate.

I'm very obnoxious. That also seems like the best way to get out of any Valentine's Day or anniversary thing was like, oh, I didn't plan anything because I hurt my frontal lobe cortex. Oh, it's bruised. Oh, I'm sorry.

We're just going to have to sit on the couch and rent saw. So I didn't know there are movies to which you would not take a neuroscientist because they would just be annoying. Wait, but I can say something. Hannibal, I think that was the film, was very accurate. So this is one scene where the man is awake and Hannibal has opened up his skull and is taking pieces out of his brain and feeding it to the man. He's eating his own brain.

But the thing is, actually, there are no nerve endings in the brain. So a person could be wide awake and you could be cutting in their brain, actually, as we do when we implant these electrodes. Most brain surgery is done in awake individuals. Absolutely. So you only have to anesthetize the scalp. And then once you're in the brain, they don't feel anything. The brain has no nerve. It's a quite phenomenal thing

because the thing that controls your entire nervous system doesn't feel itself. So you were cool with that scene. I was cool with the scene. That was an okay scene. That was good for me. Hannibal is very true to neuroscientific evidence. What about on the show Heroes when the guy who played Dr. Spock, he would like cut

things out and then eat them and get their powers. That's also real. Actually, if you eat human brains, you may get prions, which is a disorder that will make you have delusions and insanity. That sounds like that's the new drug.

You don't want to eat human brains. Hey, we're going to go hang out and do prions. Safer than bath salt. So, let me bring this segment to a close by asking, do you think as neuro... neuro... Folk? Neurobabes, right? Right on. Neurobabes.

Do you think computers will achieve consciousness one day? Kara? I think we are the bottleneck to that. I disagree with the Kurzweilian future of the singularity. And I think that as humans programming these things, until we really fully understand computational neuroscience, we're going to have a hard time programming computers to learn beyond our limitation.

Heather, you think... Well, there's a lot of work going on now, actually, in Switzerland, and they're trying to create... It's like the figures, right? Yeah. Socialism, working. Go on. They are building a computer

modeled after the human brain. It's a huge project. Millions of dollars are going into it, and they're trying to simulate what it would be if they could make a computer like a human brain. My own personal feeling, and there's a huge project. Millions of dollars are going into it. And they're trying to simulate what it would be if they can make a computer like a human brain. My own personal feeling, and there's a lot of debate in this area, is that there's something about the biological material that's something different. So even if you can map out every connection we have in the brain in a computer, it wouldn't have what we experience as consciousness.

Because there's something special that it evolved within a biological being, this property of having sensations and perceptions that a computer can never have. According to the movie Short Circuit, it's just lightning. That's all it is. Then Johnny Five is alive! I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist with the American Museum of Natural History. This show is about the space between our ears. And we've got two experts on this.

One, Cara Santamaria. Cara, welcome to StarTalk Radio. Thanks for having me. She's the science correspondent for the Huffington Post and has a video blog where she talks about all manner of science, including brain issues, especially brain issues. And it's called Talk Nerdy to Me. We like that. And Heather, professor of psychiatry at Mount Sinai Medical Center, specializing in compulsive disorders. Excellent. I mean, good. I mean, what do you say to that? I don't know.

Thank you for having me. And Eugene Merman, this is your house? Yes, hello, everyone. I'm here. And you've got a gift? And Wyatt Sinek from The Daily Show. All right. So in this next segment, I just want to break stride here just a little bit. Every now and then I tweet something, and people write back and say, mind blown. I know the feeling.

retweeted tweet of them all was a simple observation that the numerals 11 plus 2 equal 12 plus 1. We agree with that. For now. If you take...

I mean, we're talking about base 10. Okay, yes. Thank you. He's good! Thank you. He's good. Not only does 11 plus 2 equal 12 plus 1, so too do the letters that spell 11 plus 2 equal the letters that spell 12 plus 1. Whoa, mind-flated. So things can blow people's minds, apparently. And the universe is like really good at that. All right. So for example, let me just take you to a few places.

Butterflies. Wow. Okay, so here you go. Numbers that get large quickly. So we have million, billion, trillion, quadrillion, quintillion, sextillion, septillion, octillion, nantillion, dectillion. You lost me a billion. All right. So we have words for these. That's not the metric prefixes. You can go metric on it, and you get ato and femto in both directions. Oh, yeah. So here's the point.ixes, you can go metric on it and you get addo and femto and in both directions. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So here's the point.

Totally with you. But none of these are my favorite number. So glad I got homeschooled. The favorite number going on here is Google. It's a number, Google. G-O-O-G-O-L. Not Google the company that changed the spelling and incorporated themselves Google is a one With a hundred zeros Now here's the catch

That number is bigger Than the total number of atoms in the universe And so you might ask When would you ever need such a number If there's nothing that big To count This is a good example right now. Without that number, it would be like, what is happening? But what's the other instance? Okay, so now wait. Okay. So now here you go.

Here's what you do next. You take the number 10 and raise it to the Google power. Googleplex. Googleplex. Nerd, we found the nerd. Get him. The Googleplex. Wait, which is actually what Google called their headquarters. It's all derivative of what we had first. Now, Google doesn't invent everything. Let me just let you know that. So, here's the point. If a Google is a one with a hundred zeros, that's ten to the hundredth power. When you go to the power, that's how many zeros follow the one.

Ten to the hundredth power is a Google. A Googleplex is ten to the Google power. Yeah. Which means it's a one followed by a Google zero. What about a Google to the Google power? No, you can't. So now what? I just did that to you.

He made a Google Apple app. And then I threw in a Google to that. No, no. So here's the thing. Boom. And then I threw in a Google dot X! No, no, so here's the thing. Boom! If you want to write that number, you'd have to write a Google zeros. But there aren't even a Google atoms in the universe. So the Googleplex cannot be written out in the available space and matter of the cosmos.

And your pen would run out of ink. But wait. But the universe is expanding. So are you saying... What? I'm just saying, should we wait, like, what, two years? Okay, three years.

But the amount of stuff in the universe, is that expanding? No. Thank you. Thank you, Kara. Sorry, three years. But the amount of stuff in the universe, is that expanding? No. Or just the space? Thank you, thank you, Kara. Sorry, buzzkill. So the amount of ink is not expanding. Thank you.

There you go. The empty space is expanding, but if you're going to put a zero somewhere, you need something to write it on, and there aren't enough atoms. I will use the blood of the poor! Plus the regular ink available already. So we deal with these numbers all the time.

We don't deal with these numbers. Oh, sorry. I do. You deal with these numbers all the time. The astrophysicists. Sure. And just a couple other quick things. For example, the galaxy has about 100 billion stars in it. Billion.

I love that number. No, it's a good number because you feel very Carl Sagan-y. 100. Everybody say it together. On three. One, two, three. Billion. There you go. See, I like to say 100 Warren Buffetts. Oh, good start. Yeah, let it sink in.

So we have about 50 to 100 billion galaxies in the universe, and if each galaxy has 100 billion stars, you multiply these two numbers, you get 10 to the 22nd power. That number is bigger than the total number of grains of sand in the Sahara. Can I bring in neuroscience here for a minute? Yeah! So what really blows my mind, and this is sort of what motivated me to get into the field of neuroscience,

is that given all these extraordinary numbers that you just talked about and our little speck, this little earth, right, in the universe which is huge and expansive and Googles and all that stuff. The fact that our little tiny brains, this little piece, three-pound piece of matter, can comprehend that is extraordinary. How does it do that? How can we understand? If you look at it, compare it to the rest of the universe, it's a speck of dust. Yet that speck of dust can understand itself.

And understand its place in the universe and the enormity of it. Carl Sagan famously said... I'm standing on a pole. I'm getting stripped down. Okay. Read this. Cara, read this to everyone. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.

That's a freshly acquired tattoo. It is. That's my newest tattoo. I also have. Yours says, ask Casher Grass. Nobody rides for free. Another famous Carl Sagan quote. He said a lot of stuff.

So really this quote speaks to me, which is why I got it tattooed on my body. In a sense, I think that what he was really saying, and I think Neil kind of disagrees with this, with this idea. I think he had it! Yes! Oh! Wait. this, with this idea. I think he had it! Yes! Wait. She asked how he knows that I had this. How did I know? I imagine you told him.

I told him. Jesus Christ! Backstage, we were all in our bikinis backstage in preparation for this talk. That's what was going on. Neil has cameras all over the world watching us. Duh. So I am not a religious person.

I'm an atheist. I'm pretty open about that. Yeah, right? And in a sense, I think that what Carl... You are damned to hell for all eternity. According to my parents. Yahweh is not happy. So I think what Carl was really saying here is that because...

You and Carl were like that. Yeah, we were like that. Wait, okay, so you believe in Carl but not Jesus. All right, I get it. So because in the minds of people like myself, there is no greater consciousness, and because the universe can't contemplate itself, but we are made from the stuff of the stars, we, in essence, are a way for the cosmos to know itself.

We can contemplate our own existence in the eternal landscape to the extent that we are able. Well, so my rebuttal to that, it's a mild rebuttal, but I just want to keep our hubris honest. It assumes that our understanding of the universe is a meaningful understanding of the universe. It assumes that.

What about gray matter, right? Is that a thing? Dark matter? What are we talking about? Here we go. That's a thing. Dark matter is a thing. Dark matter? We don't know what that is? Yeah! What if it's super smart? And gray matter is a thing in the brain. And gray matter is in the brain.

What color matter isn't there? Heather, what? Yes, the question is how, right? And I think you're right. We might be having a really distorted vision of what it is that we think our place in the universe is. It's completely, completely incorrect. And another sort of mind-blowing thing is that perhaps the aliens, right, these space creatures with big heads and big eyes who come down to see us,

are really us, evolved many, many years from now. This is a theory, actually. Coming back to visit us with a greater understanding of who we are. And we're these primitive ape-like creatures. Which is why they haven't conquered us and why they look at our bottoms. So why are they so curious

about our reproductive organs? They're harvesting them. For research, of course. So here's the thing. They're horny ourselves in the future. So here's my concern about that concept. Because you look at the DNA between we and the bonobo, or the chimps, and the trifling difference between the two.

Less than 1%. It's less than 1%. Wait, but that 1% can code for... Well, well, well, I'm getting there. That is a whole point. And they have their own version of law and order. That's right. Version of Law and Order! Okay! Welcome back to StarTalk Radio.

I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson. We're continuing the broadcast of our show, The Space Between Your Ears, recorded live at the Bell House in Brooklyn, New York, along with my co-host, Eugene Merman. Joining us on stage that night were professor of psychology, Heather Bodelin, science blogger, Cara Santamaria, and the comedian, Wyatt Sinek. Maybe the difference between us and chimps is as small as that one percent consider another species one percent beyond us and they studied us and say oh look at steven hawking he's slightly smarter than the rest he can do astrophysics calculations in his head like little timmy over here okay

so if they look at us and say our smartest are like their toddlers the way we look at chimps and say they're smarter so like our toddlers it makes me lose sleep at night wondering if in fact we truly understand the universe and whether if we are visited by aliens, they just pass us by because their observation of Earth draws them the conclusion that there's no sign of intelligent life. Maybe our brain is not as great as you say. Of course, of course. But this is a function of human evolution. The truth is. I'm just going to say I am very close to just becoming pure energy.

I don't want to brag i'm probably about three weeks away from floating around being like you do not get it eugene merman the living laser so i just want to say something about this one percent the one percent can code for things that will let's say create a whole new region of the brain. 1% sounds like it's a little bit, but if it's coding for a protein that creates, let's say, the size of the prefrontal cortex, that's a huge thing. Right, so now you go 1% beyond us, and we're blithering, drooling fools. Exactly. So 1 in 100, that's a pretty big percentage, actually.

You're saying the 1% are the brain creators who create other things for the... Uh-oh, uh-oh. You're saying the 1% are the brain creators who create other things for the... Uh-oh, uh-oh. So we shouldn't tax the capital gains of the brain that comes up with new ideas. It's a trickle-down brain economics. Yeah. We are actually limited in our capacity by the very thing we're trying to understand, let's say our brains. But I think that the collective

consciousness, which some people talk about, let's say the answer to everything is the table, for example. And I have my little microscope, I'm looking at one little piece, and you're looking at another little piece, and somebody else. But together we can shine our light and see the entire table, but only collectively. So I think the accumulation of knowledge of everything people

discovered before us, and they'll discover after us, the accumulation of all this knowledge will have a greater understanding than one any individual brain can have yeah so now i'm you just all right so the future of this would be going into the brain finding all the lizard parts and just severing the lizard connection from what we need to function in an organized society wait wait wait wait, wait, but hold on. So what you're saying is we create these sort of Spock-like creatures, which are very rational but non-emotional, that they would somehow be more evolved.

But there's a caveat there, because research has shown that actually people make better decisions when they're informed by their emotions. This is like Captain Kirk on Star Trek. Yes, yes. He beats Spock in chess because Spock is exactly logical and Kirk just is feeling it. He just grunts his way to a victory. Now I gotta go find a nurse and have sex with her.

Or blue. This is also why I have a problem with this Kurzweilian singularity. There are some very human components to neural processing that I don't think in the near future, at least not in the next 50 years, we're going to be able to infuse into machines

so that AI can really rival the human brain. I think it's important to distinguish between artificial intelligence and artificial consciousness. Computers, they're already more intelligent than we are. I mean, they can do mathematical calculations way faster than we can. They can analyze information

way faster than we can. If that's how we define intelligence. Exactly. But if you're looking at consciousness, perception, so actually, just our simple experience of seeing the color red or smelling a rose is much more complex than anything a computer can do. But we can actually implant things. Let's say, for example, the iPhone.

We all have it. It has a lot of memory. It has a lot of things. It's become an extension of ourselves in a certain way. We don't remember numbers anymore because they're in our iPhone. So now let's say the iPhone gets smaller and smaller and smaller. I otherwise remember numbers. Exactly.

Phone numbers, directions. 3.141953. Very good, very good. Don't tell me I don't remember numbers. Oh, really? What about 18? The point I was making... You had a real point.

I actually did. And I'm sorry we ruined it. Is that if you can imagine all this information in the iPhone will become smaller and smaller and smaller, growing exponentially, as Ray Kurzweil would say, that eventually, let's say we can implant an electrode in your brain that has all the information that's stored in the iPhone.

So it's not just using what your brain is capable of doing, but it's expanding it using a neural prosthetic. And you'll have access just by thinking about it. Imagine you don't even have to speak in your phone anymore and say, call mom. You can just think, call mom, and it will happen. Imagine you don't even have to speak in your phone anymore and say call mom. You can just think call mom and it will happen. We're getting very close to that. And you can just talk to yourself without even having

a headset. We'll all be walking around looking like we're insane. What happens when you're on a plane and the flight attendant is like, hey you need to stop playing words with friends in your head. I can think of even more weird things that would happen

if your head was a phone by accident. Say you are doing it. Calling everybody in your phone because you're distracted. I just got pocket dialed by Eugene. Oh, God! Oh, what am I listening to? Mind dialed. Do. Oh, God! Oh, what am I listening to? Mind

dialed. Do you foresee like a USB connection to download brain information and upload? Eventually, and eventually what some philosophers are saying is that we can avoid death. We can achieve immortality by downloading our brain onto a computer. And so in a sense, all of our

memories, our perceptions, everything could be downloaded. If that's how you define who you are. You have to bring the consciousness with it. Exactly. Otherwise it's just information. We still don't know what that is. Thank you. But as you say, if you're an atheist and there's no such thing as a soul, then what are we really but the computations that are happening

inside of our brain? We are that gestalt though. We are that sum that's greater than the whole of its parts. It's the mind that arises from brain or the mind that exists concurrently with brain. And we still don't really know how to define that. But if we thought even more outside of the box, a lot of futurist biological thinkers are thinking about going beyond these neuroprosthetics and actually going into the genome. Because of course, all the brain is, is a manifestation of these blueprints in the nuclei of our cells. Oh, so rather than poke the brain,

poke the genes to make the brain. Tell the genes to create a being which has perfect memory. I mean, we can go even farther. Who will control the super baby? Or will the super baby control you? And the bottleneck here is our research It's our ability to find intelligence in the brain It's our ability to find consciousness in the brain

And where's the seed of that? We used to think it was in the pineal gland A bunch of fools! We know it's in the forhumers! The only problem with all this is if you think of the roundworm, right, only has a very few cells and connections in terms of its nervous system.

And we can barely understand that, barely. And to think about the complexity of the human brain is like thinking about the complexity of understanding the universe. We're so far off. This is where we get to those large numbers. Yes. So understanding now, not only how the brain works,

but then how to code it from the genome, I mean, it's not going to happen in our lifetimes. Yeah. You've been listening to StarTalk Radio, a broadcast partially funded by the National Science Foundation. Join us next week for the second half of our show, The Space Between Your Ears. Until then, for StarTalk, next week for the second half of our show, the space between your ears until then four star talk.

I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, urging all of you to keep looking up.