StarTalk Radio - StarTalk Live: Big Brains at BAM (Part 2)

Episode Date: July 26, 2014

Our tour of the human brain continues with Neil deGrasse Tyson, Eugene Mirman, neuroscientists Mayim Bialik and Dr. Heather Berlin and guests Michael Ian Black, Paul Rudd and Bill Nye.Read more and listen to the full show:http://www.startalkradio.net/show/startalk-live-big-brains-at-bam-part-2/ 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 to StarTalk Radio. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson. I'm an astrophys deGrasse Tyson. I'm an astrophysicist and director of New York City's Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History. The following show is the second part of a live show we recorded on February 24th, 2014 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, known to locals as BAM. In addition to my co-host, comedian Eugene Merman, we were joined on stage that night by neuroscientist Heather Berlin, Bill Nye the science guy, comedian Michael Ian Black, the

actor Paul Rudd, and star of the hit TV show The Big Bang Theory, Mayim Bialik. NASA did a study on neuroplasticity, your brain in space. Okay, told you I'd bring it back to space. So in space, you are in zero G. And so in zero G, your sense of balance, which requires your body's awareness of gravity. Other things, your vision, your sense of day and night. Because in space, if you're orbiting Earth, the sun rises and sets

every 45 minutes. So this could totally mess with your rhythms. And they did a study, and they found out that the brain has plasticity to it, where in fact, you will completely adapt to those changed conditions. Not only that, the brain builds new brain cells, and in some cases, permanently responds to this environment. And so because of the permanence of some of this plasticity, they were suggesting that you should not bring kids into space because they don't know what a permanent change in a kid would be like as an adult. What is it like in an adult? What happens in this? You go crazy.

What's the result of this neuroplasticity? Well, I know people have their eyes change shape, right? Like squares? Like they become a square? That sounds kind of cool. When you have the hard-boiled eggs and you compress them. Which part of the eye? I need you to be more specific. Like the whole eye? Guys who go into space with fighter pilot eyes come back

and they don't have very good close-up or distance. They need glasses when they get back permanently. I'd be careful, though, when you say permanent changes, because if you're talking about neuroplasticity, if it could change one way, it could also change back another way. But I think the reason why not to bring developing brains into space or children is because they're critical periods of development. And if they miss certain stimuli during that critical period, then there could be problems. Well, and you're talking about circadian rhythms, correct? Among other things, yeah. So talking about our awareness of day and night,

you're saying those things can reset so that you have a normal body period that is shorter than what it is if you are on Earth. Well, it really disrupts your sleep cycling. Sure. And you don't get as deep a REM sleep in space as you do. Right, so all of that developmentally would be really, really a bad idea.

Not to mention, like, my kids are a pain in the ass on just like an hour and a half flight. Could you imagine sending them to Mars? I figured you sort of can imagine. I hope it would be like JetBlue, where you at least get some television or something on the back of the seat. So here's what I wonder, Heather. If there's this neuroplasticity, where your body can adapt to stress in the ways that we're measured in space, why don't we adapt more on Earth? Why do people stress out and end up in mental hospitals?

How much? Those are two very different questions. I thought he was going to ask about working a night shift. Exactly. No, no. Why are they two different questions? If your brain can adapt with all this plasticity that the neuroscientists are boasting of, then why do we have people just freaking out here on Earth?

Well, okay, they're two separate things. Tell me why. Well, this is one thing. I went around and actually met people who had extraordinary abilities way outside the norm of what we think is possible. Extraordinary memory and tolerance to pain. You hosted a TV show on that. There was a Discovery Channel show called Superhuman Showdown,

and we went around the world to find people with these extraordinary abilities. One person could hold his breath underwater for 22 minutes. And not be dead. And not be dead. And he could actually... Could he talk to fish even just a little? But it's amazing how far we can actually push ourselves, our physiology and our brains.

So I think a lot of what people stress about is they think they can't adapt, but really we can adapt well beyond what we think we're capable of doing. Why people are in mental institutions is another question. There's a lot of different reasons why people go insane, so to speak, but I don't think it's because of lack of neuroplasticity. Does that make sense? I support that completely. Is it because of heavy metal music? That beat. As I was saying, you can modify the brain within certain biological constraints. So if you're born with a certain predisposition or immunostructural differences in the brain, you can only push it so far.

But we can definitely go far beyond what we think we can go. So if we see someone else who has ability, then can we all try to have that ability? And so these superhuman people who I met, they all practiced a lot, a lot of hours dedicated to it. But they also had certain, like the guy who could hold his breath underwater had a greater lung capacity in general. He started out with that and then he pushed it further and further. So I think we can all go further within our particular dreams. There is this book, The Sports Gene, that talks about the exceptional athletic ability that we don't really think about when we see Olympic athletes.

They're at a whole different physiological level. We would think, oh, Michael Phelps is a great swimmer. No, like his arms are really, really long. His feet are practically webbed. Like his body is different than ours. He's really different. He's a monster. No, what is weird, when you watch swimmers

at that high level, they go about twice as fast as a normal person. Their bodies are, like I could swim all day. I'll never look like that because I was not born with the genetic predisposition to have really long arms and webbed feet. I think you look great. I mean, doesn't she look great, everybody? That's really what matters. I have a question, but on a somewhat pedestrian level, talking about sports, you see certain populations, like people from the Dominican Republic, which is such a small country, but have a large portion of people entering the major leagues of baseball? Is it because they have peer groups? This is such a dangerous question we know you're about to ask. It's so dangerous. I was not going into racism, although I will if you want me to. No, it was about something somebody else asked about observing other people in peer groups

ascending to higher levels and therefore seeing firsthand what's possible. Does that make you more susceptible to those possibilities? I think that's a huge sociological, environmental, behavioral influence, but I don't know. I know, I'm writing my dissertation on it. Have they found a gene for baseball? That's really what I'm asking, right? You're born with certain genetic predispositions towards, you know, maybe better athletic prowess, but it gets dangerous. Different distribution of muscle fibers, for example, in runners.

The thing we're dancing around is it can be very controversial. There was a book written called The Bell Curve about intelligence, and it said we did this whole study and looked at populations and X number of people from a certain type of background have the highest IQ and others don't. And it really can lead to... Ashkenazi Jews. It happened to be Ashkenazi Jews, but it was... Who have the highest IQ.

Yeah. Wait, me too, me too. That's right. Another factor as a baseball fan, another very strong motivator in those countries is you can play baseball all year. I was just in Minneapolis this morning.

Very challenging. That's because the snow is white, the ball is white. And then you also have this... Now he's being racist. You also have this extraordinary motivation of money. You can make it in the big leagues. And have you ever seen the World Baseball Classic? Yeah. It's mostly Latin America.

Extraordinary players. Yeah. But it's one more click to hit it. I'd like to change the topic. Yeah, well, go on. To anything. Let's talk about eugenics for a moment. Okay, sweet.

Sweet. Sweet. Sweet. We're back. StarTalk Live at Band. Woo! So, Heather, I want to talk about sleep for a moment. Why the hell do we have to sleep? So what a waste of time that is, I think to myself.

Did you just say, why the hell do we have to sleep? Yes! We could be literally learning karate instead. No, I'm just saying. Every time I sleep, I'm like, I should be learning karate. I'm reading, I'm learning, I'm having fun. I say, damn, I've got to go sleep. Be semi-comatose for the next eight hours. If an alien came to Earth, and you're having a great conversation with him,

you say, excuse me, I have to lay semi-comatose for the next eight hours. I'll get back to you to wonder, what's wrong with you? Maybe they go down 16. You don't know. No, I know. Maybe. Like a baby. Why do we sleep?

The latest theory that most of the neuroscientific evidence is pointing towards is the way the brain can sort of clean itself out. So during the day, you're taking in all this stimulation, and it's almost impossible for your brain to kind of integrate all of it every day. It would be cluttered. So at night, what happens is there's sort of a pruning. It solidifies the information that it wants to keep. Whether or not it's accurate or correct or anything.

Without this cleaning out process, they looked at people when you deprived them of sleep, and it causes all sorts of problems, including, it can relate to things like Alzheimer's, because the plaques entangles that form, actually, that sleep is kind of a way that helps clear out those plaques and, well, things that could potentially form the proteins. So you're saying people who don't

get as much sleep as... No, no, no. I knew you were going to say that. I'm just asking. To be clear, she's saying people with Alzheimer's are simply extremely sleepy. What conclusion are we to draw? If you're sleepy, you're going to get Alzheimer's. That's how science works. So remember, play baseball.

Well, like for memories, for example, like if you're studying for an exam, actually, you'll do better if you get a good night's sleep. It's not good to just cram the whole night before because the brain can then solidify the kind of associations that were made and get rid of the nonsense and the noise. All right, so but some people sleep five hours, others nine. Should the five-hour person be sleeping more

or the nine-hour person be sleeping less? It's hard to say. No, I don't think there's an exact number on it. I mean, there's a lot of things out there that say you should get X number of hours of sleep, but really everybody's different. Some people just don't need that much sleep. I don't get a lot of sleep.

My feeling is if in general we are productive, functional, getting the things done that we want to get done, there's going to be some variability there for sure. Okay, so also if you don't get a lot of sleep. My feeling is if I'm, if in general we are productive, functional, getting the things done that we want to get done, there's going to be some variability there for sure. Okay. So also if you don't get sleep, that's like a form of torture, right? Your brain goes crazy. What happens is people start to hallucinate. Yeah. Yeah. They start to sort of, because again, the brain isn't able to properly prune out and all the information can get kind of jumbled. Also if you disrupt REM sleep. Exactly. REM sleep is where a lot of that happens. It is an individual thing because you have people like Edison or Winston Churchill or these

high functioning people who slept for four hours a night or two hours a night. There's actually an extraordinary, a large number of people like that. Bill Clinton is another one, Margaret Thatcher. They would only sleep a very few hours but then they would take these power naps during the day. And there could be something to that. But they all said at least they take those little mini naps

and that maybe the brain can sort of revamp itself during that time period. They also have a giant staff and many assistants and chefs. Are you describing mini naps or hooking up periodically with people throughout the day? Both sound relaxing. Depends on the people. So what they found was that the REM sleep

was disrupted by astronauts who, in orbit, see sunrise, sunset every 45 minutes. They couldn't get the rhythms going. They could just pull down the shades, couldn't they? I would have thought. I would have thought. Those masks that cover your eyes? Yeah, I would have thought, you'd think.

It's all coach class, that's the thing. It doesn't come with a little thing. It's a little palette. They flew the space shuttle coach class. They didn't get the little eye cover. Studies show that if you deprive people, particularly of REM sleep, that they have to make up for it later on

so that they'll have more hours of REM sleep when you allow them to sleep later. Okay, so this is a feature of our human species, not a failure of our design. Yeah, I mean, if we could design it better without sleep, that'd be great, but so far it's... But it's all species, right? There's no species that does not

need sleep. I don't know that. I don't know. Sea jellies? Squid? Algae? Fish? There are low metabolic periods, I would would say for all sorts of vertebrates yes i mean at least yeah yeah there's always a rest period there's a rest period even if it's not what we call sleep there is a rest period from an evolutionary standpoint one could ask if it's a big advantage to need less sleep would these people be more successful become captains

of industry and get extraordinarily wealthy? Well, the answer is there must be something advantageous, i.e., incorporating a tremendous amount of input from the day that can then help you make different kinds of decisions, more complicated decisions, correct? Yeah. The next day. I see. So the digested information has more value to you the day after as it's for your survival. If that were evolutionarily advantageous, that's why it would be retained. Thank you.

But there's some animals, I think there's, maybe it's dolphins, there's some animals that sleep with only half their brain and the other half is a dolphin. So part of them is aware for any sort of, let's say predators coming. Samurai. The other part is sleeping.

The people who sleep with their guns and swords. Samurai bears. And isn't it true, like, lions sleep 20 hours a day? Something like that? Yeah, is that true, Heather? I don't know everything about everything. You're a cognitive neuroscientist. Do lions sleep 20 hours a day?

They do. They sleep sleep 20 hours a day? They do. They sleep for 20 hours a day. Was that in Time magazine? No. You went to the zoo with your kids. No. I went on safari once, and it's true. And I remember learning that.

Okay. And by the way, the females do all of the hunting, and then the male lions just go in and then eat first, swat away the kids, and then they go back to sleep. Yeah, yeah. It's just sweet. And if there's a bunch of them, they're called a pride. Wow.

A pride of lions. Yeah. A murder of crows. A boring of lions. Yeah. A murder of crows. A boring of panelists. Smack. Sea jellies. So, how much sleep do you get a night? I actually, I'm like a five or six hour person.

As am I. I'm like five and a half hours, exactly. Yeah. And I'll nap something on the weekend, but during the week, it's five and a half. I take a Saturday, a Shabbat nap for about 20 minutes. Yeah? Yeah. I give my kids a cookie, and I say, I'll be a much better mother if I can sleep for 20

minutes on this couch with earplugs in, I promise. And how old are your kids? Five and a half and eight. Whoa. Yeah. Yeah. So, presumably, when they were much younger, you got no sleep. Well, yeah.

I mean, honestly, it's amazing to see what it's like with a newborn. I was a breastfeeding mom, and I was up literally every two hours for about four or five years. Literally every two hours. Did you study yourself at that point? I wrote my thesis while breastfeeding my older one. I literally laying down, nursing, and typing. I was doing data analysis and writing and editing my thesis with my first son. And, yeah, but it's amazing to sleep again.

And she knows three languages. Totally impressed. Just get so five and how many hours of sleep are you? Now? I have a three-month-old. And I'm breastfeeding. This is her most restful part of the day. I'm sleeping right now, actually.

Half your brain. Half my brain is up in the other half. She's a dolphin. Nope. I need seven and a half. Furthermore, I claim I'm skilled at the power nap. I put in the hours. I put in the third of an hour.

Power nap. Paul? It really varies. I guess probably about six or seven. Although it seems now I am falling asleep for that 20-minute power net. I don't mean right now as we speak, but at about like kind of 5.30, 6 o'clock at night. Generally, if I'm flipping around and I'm watching Pardon the Interruption, I notice that I fall asleep on a show on ESPN.

Yeah? About 14. Good. Around 14, yeah. Yeah, like six to eight. Yeah, okay. So there are no nines up here. Is that weird?

No. I always sleep five and a half hours. I'm normal. Six point four hours. I'd say five to eight with hours. I'm normal. 6.4 hours. I'd say five to eight with a lot of afternoon naps after I type out my weird things. While breastfeeding. A cat!

Not a human. A dragon. I breastfeed a really cute dragon. Okay, oh, by the way, when all this is over, the bar is open, and there's a special drink that we invented just for this program. It's called the Brain Freeze. So you just go up there and ask for the Brain Freeze. We invented it.

The drink did not exist before tonight, and it has sort of the color of your brain, a brain matter. But it's really tasty. It does sound good. Mmm, a great drink. Really, really cold. A little milk and nails. When we come back, we'll be talking about the future of neuroscience.

What is possible, what isn't. Separate the fact from the fiction. StarTalk Radio at BAM! Woo! We are talking about the science of the brain. I've got it written here that we have 100,000 miles of nerve fibers in each brain. That's extraordinary. That's the hell of a computer. But it still has issues.

This brain failure in some people, right? So what is the hope for really disentangling what all this is and perhaps being able to fix people who have problems? You just go in and snip a connection or nip and tuck? Well, I mean, it's a huge problem actually to solve, to understand how the brain works. And you're talking about a hundred billion neurons with a quadrillion connections. So to understand the workings of the human brain is one of the greatest mysteries. And we're all working on that very hard. But once we understand how it works,

then just like a mechanic has to know how the car works so that when you bring it in, when it's broken, they know how to go about trying to fix it. So knowing the underlying structure is the beginning. But is it that reductionist? Not to get all philosophical on you, because in physics, you can describe each molecule of air careening off of another one, but that description doesn't give you the bulk properties of it. You need to sort of step back and say, this air has a temperature. The individual particle doesn't have a temperature. We have macroscopic descriptions of things that enable us to function because you can't describe every single little thing. Do you think the brain will be intractable in that way? So what you're trying to say is that if we understand everything about the brain,

will we understand the mind? Or is that, that's what I think you're saying? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So some people think that the mind or consciousness is an emer understand everything about the brain, will we understand the mind? Or is that, that's what I think what you're saying? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So some people think that the mind or consciousness is an emergent property of the brain. Right. And there's... It just happens. Is that what you mean? Well, it emerges out of the workings of it. Yeah, if you have enough circuits, you're going to get a mind. You're going to get this thing called consciousness. There's something called the easy problem of consciousness, which isn't that easy,

but we can correlate every single thought with the actual workings of neurons in the brain. And let's say we can map all that out and we can do it. We solve the easy problem. There's still going to be a hard problem of why is it that those neurons firing and those neurochemicals slushing around cause us to have these subjective experiences. They call it the explanatory gap. We might not be able to fully explain that, but I think we have to start somewhere. And just understanding the workings of the basic system is a good place to begin. Can I ask a really maybe dumb question maybe not. Do we know that consciousness exists in the brain?

I would venture to say yes. Because I know that when you take out like half your brain you can still function right. You can take out you know the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere will rewire. But then if you were to cut that in half again and you only get a quarter of your brain, would you still have consciousness? At what point does your consciousness disappear?

Heather, how many subjects have you done this experiment on? So we do that every day in the lab. But seriously, what is the N on this? The N. Yes. When does it move to your feet? I mean, it's a philosophical question. People say, take little bits of the brain away. How much do you take away? How much of the brain do you actually need for conscious awareness? And some people claim that you only need the brainstem. Well, we know that that's not true, because if you take a full adult and you take away their cortex or they have a damage to the cortex, they're not going to be conscious

anymore. However, there are children who were born without a cortex and they just have their brainstem and they have some semblance of what we might call consciousness. Are these what we call children of the damned? You can't joke about anencephaly. You can't joke about anencephaly. I didn't know there was a name for it. But seriously, I'll have conversations with dogs. I can see dogs are dreaming. Dogs experience the joy of discovery. But is a dog paralyzed by self-doubt? Actually, I think I've even seen that.

A dog with an especially aggressively disciplining owner seemed to be paralyzed, like I can't cross this line or the guy's going to hit me. And so how far back do we go from, what is it, Rhesus? What's the guy? Rhesus monkey. But they have a K? More information. In Amy Farrah Fowler's lab?

Kaboochin. Oh, Kaboochin. Oh, kaboochin? It's a C, not a K. Thordashian. How far down do we go? Then there's a cat. Then I've spoken, albeit briefly, with birds. And it's a different deal, right?

Bill, you're Dr. Doolittle, as well as the science guy. Okay. Once we have a measure of consciousness, then we'll be able to say, does this animal have it? Does the baby have it? You know, when is it emergent? But until we have an understanding of what it is,

so there's certain theories of consciousness. One is when you have a system that has a certain amount of integrated, differentiated information, that it will fundamentally have consciousness. That could be a computer. It could be any kind of system, a nervous system. So once we have an understanding

of a theory of consciousness, then we can measure it and see what has it. Well, and I think it's important to think about if you take out, quote, half the brain, you're essentially dealing with duplicated structures existing, correct? So there's going to be some asymmetry between left and right, but you're dealing with half of a brain that then is pretty much duplicating all the structures you've removed. Once you start chopping up that half, there's really no more duplicated structures you can start taking. So if there's one amygdala left, you can't take away that amygdala. There's nothing to take that place. So if you want to start

chopping up cortex, or if there's an accident that compromises part of cortex, you have other parts of cortex that are similarly structured that can theoretically take over some of that function. Once you start getting into those limbic structures and the sublimb construct, all that stuff, there's no more duplication. You can't keep like hacking it in half. It's not like a, you know, calculus limit. Like how much can I leave and still have the person be conscious? You understood what I said.

Yes, I did. I understood. You can't have a person with a brain the size of a penny. It's too little. But you know what's really interesting? You were saying chopping up and chopping up and I was sitting here just actually thinking of your vegan cookbook. The really interesting thing here is that you can take away the amygdala, which you can take away both the amygdala.

But what about the hypothalamus? You can even take away the hypothalamus. Wait, wait, wait. Heather, you said that way too glibly. Okay. Well, there are certain people who have a disease actually that calcifies their amygdala, so they become damaged and they no longer work. So you cannot have emotion, you can still be conscious.

You cannot have memory and you can still be conscious. There's a case in England where he only remembers things for like 30 seconds. So each 30 seconds he writes down, I'm just now conscious for the very first time. And then I'm just now conscious for the very first time. But he's still having awareness. So the question is, you can take away all these things, but how much of the brain is necessary to have subjective experience? Yeah, actually, that is a great question.

How does he remember how to write? Has he seen memento? This is very interesting. This is a great question. He's seen it 3,000 times. But every single time, it's like the first time. So there's something called procedural memory, which is different than declarative memory. It's like riding a

bicycle. Exactly. So when you learn something like motoric, like riding a bike or tying a shoe, so what's interesting about this case in England is that he was a pianist. Once he got started playing, he could play the entire piece of music all the way through. As soon as he came out of it, he didn't know where he was, what he was doing, whatever. But it's procedural

memories with a different part of the brain called the basal ganglia, which you can engage in even if you don't have declarative memories, semantic memories, memories about things or facts. So it looks like all of your research is happening on people who have brain disorders. Some of the best ways to learn about the brain is by seeing what happens in the natural world when it doesn't work. Because of all sorts of legal and ethical issues, we can't do that. So we take what nature gives us, but that's one of the things that, you know, every brain lesion is different,

every accident is different. There's a tremendous amount of unpredictability when you're dealing with any of these sorts of syndromes. So you use the brain mapping to, is that the way to go to cure these horrific brain diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's? Just sleep more. I can cure that.

I have a question. I have a question. I had my brain scanned a couple times on camera for a hilarious science comedy. So it looked to me like if you could get another order of magnitude, that is to say, what is the current resolution of a magnetic resonance image? It looks like it's half a millimeter. Yeah, or voxel. Something like that.

Yeah. It looked to me like if you could get another, instead of half a millimeter, with 50 microns, then you'd really be able to figure out what was going on. Well, this is where we're at. Is that too reductionist to your point?

No, I like reductionism. I just was wondering if that was the pathway to... This is... So where at is that? I converted to reductionism when I got married. Your wife made you. Happy wife, happy wife. Reductionism.

The state of affairs now is that we have this technology to be able to look at the microstructure of the brain, so we can go in and measure the activation of one or two individual neurons in a monkey or even in a human during surgery, and we can look at this very microstructure of the brain. So we can go in and measure the activation of one or two individual neurons in a monkey or even in a human during surgery. And we can look at this very microstructure. And then we look at the macrostructure or the activation and things like fMRI, which is like a very functional magnetic resonance imaging, which is sort of looking from very far away. But we need something in between, like a meso level to understand how all these circuits are wired up. Because just looking at where the blood flows in a certain area,

that's what fMRI is looking at, is to... Course. Exactly. And the other way is to find. So we need something in between. And there are certain technologies that are being developed now, things like optogenetics, where you can actually look at the neurocircuitry and control.

So optogenetics, I did a little reading on that. And so you've got photoreceptive organisms you put in the brain or proteins. Yeah. And then you follow the light that they emit. Is that how that works? It's sort of like that. Is this from Wrath of Khan? Oh, God.

That was really worth it. That was deep. That was hard carrying geeks up here on the stage. So these are ways to poke and prod a living person's brain without doing damage. You basically take these photosensitive algae, you take the gene that codes for that, you insert it in a virus which then inserts that into the... You just said you get a photoreceptive virus that you stick in someone's brain. Did I just hear that? You take the gene

of the photoreceptive algae and then you want to transport it into the brain so you do it via a virus. That's not dangerous. So you're letting your virus do your bidding in someone's brain. Yeah, and so then what happens... It's like Khan. You put the thing in his ear and it goes into his... I remember. We all saw it.

That was creepy. But it's a virus? It's algae that you attach to a virus? Yes, Eugene. Yes. No. No, no, no. Wait, wait, wait. Heather, I got this now.

Viral algae, Eugene. Everybody knows this. Let me see if I got this right. The algae has photoreceptive proteins. Yes. There's no good way to get that protein into another living body unless you attach it to a virus where that's what they do. Well, they're going to start transcribing, correct?

Yeah, and then what happens is that now, wherever you insert this gene, now you've inserted a receptor that's going to be sensitive to light. So now when you shine light on it, the neuron will fire. And so what they've shown, let's say in mice, for example, is that you can shine a certain, like a blue light and cause a whole circuit because it's being activated. Dr. Berlin. Yes. Is it that you shine a light and it causes the neuron to fire, or when the neuron fires, it lights up? No.

Okay. You're shining? I see where you're going. Well, you know, when you shine the light, the receptors that are sensitive to light open, which then cause the neuron to fire, because then there's a whole rush of, you know, a whole chemical process.

So the virus is introducing a sensitivity. Which is detectable, right? The purpose of that is to make it detectable. That's the whole rush of, you know, a whole chemical process. So the virus is introducing a sensitivity. Which is detectable, right? The purpose of that is to make it detectable. That's the whole point. This is Schrodinger's viral algae, right? There are two sides to this. You want to repair people who have real neurological disorders, Parkinson's, but maybe you want to make people smarter or more, like you said, superhuman. I'd love to throw a car. What do I need to do?

Yeah, yeah. How much algae do I eat? Are you or your people, are they involved in this work trying to enhance human intellectual performance? So there's something called neural prosthetics. We're using some of it right now to treat psychiatric illness

where we implant electrodes. It's called deep brain stimulation to help treat psychiatric patients. But you can implant electrodes to help people, for example, who are deaf to hear or to help blind people see. And that technology is in pilot studies now. There's a whole field of neuroengineering that is combining. And eventually, yes, we can do things like enhance memory, enhance attention by using

these neuroprosthetics. Is this like drinking Red Bull? Similar. Okay, so the brain, as far as I can tell, is chemistry and electricity. You're manipulating either the chemistry of the brain or the electrical circuitry of the brain with magnetic fields or whatever else.

If that's the case, I know my computer uses electrical circuits. So is there a future where we're going to attach your brain to a computer? Yeah, I don't see why not. I mean, we already... We already do. I have an old question about magnetism in brains.

There are animals, apparently, that find direction on their own using some sort of ferrous, some iron-bearing thing in their cells, in their brains. But we never got that. Bill, you trying to find true north? The fact that MRI machines work indicates that there are magnetic prop- I mean, there's all sorts of properties to all of our bodies. So there's smaller, lesser magnetic qualities to our body, but no, we cannot navigate by them. Maybe you can't. He doesn't ask directions.

But Bill, other animals got all kinds of stuff we don't have. Newts can regenerate limbs. We can't. Eagles can fly. We can't. I mean, you just go on down the list. We'll get to that thing where our brains really will be like a computer. We can hook it up to a computer and be able to speak languages without actually learning them.

We will be able to download information. Ask Mayim. Apparently she can. No. The answer is no. Wait, I think the answer is probably yes though, right? Eventually. I mean, there's computers that can translate it like Google. Learning a language is a very, very complicated, I mean, just to use that as an example, we're not translation machines. So in theory, I could picture a world where if I had a catalog dictionary, I could be hooked up to something that would allow me to be a translation machine. But the subtleties of language and interaction and the way we communicate and answer questions and have

experiences through language, it's beyond complicated that you could plug into a computer. But you could at least maybe read a menu in another country. Sure. I will grant you that, yes. I know what the hell I'm getting when I'm in Paris. I will grant you that. That's possible. Besides eggs. And champignon.

Which is a mushroom. So you wouldn't understand another language, but you could technically translate it hooked up to a computer. I'm guessing about the future. I'm going to believe anything you say. No! When you chew on those pink pills and it shows you where you haven't brushed,

how does that work? I'm going to actually rebut Mayim here. Who would have thought some years ago that a computer would ever beat a human in chess? Who would have thought that a computer would ever beat a human in Jeopardy would have thought that a computer would ever beat a human in Jeopardy? So computers are moving pretty fast here. So why wouldn't the context of language

be just another thing it learns rather than just a translated dictionary? Why should we put limits on the computers that have transcended limits we've ever given for them in the past? If you want to look at it that way, they're already smarter than us. They can do math quicker than us.

They can do calculations. They can translate into languages. They're much math quicker than us. They can do calculations. They can translate into languages. They're much better in terms of holding a lot of information. And then why would we even want to incorporate that into our brain? Right now we have our iPhones. We don't have to remember numbers anymore. Our computers do that for us.

So then one of the questions is, what are humans still good for? In fact, the idea that you plug chips in your head to know things, this is not a chip in my head, but it's an arm's reach. And it eventually will be. It'll get smaller and smaller and smaller. You can implant the iPhone in your head to know things. This is not a chip in my head, but it's an arm's reach. And it eventually will be. It'll get smaller and smaller and smaller. You can implant the iPhone in your brain, and you can talk to it, and it'll give you information. They'll already talk to their iPhones. Right, they do.

I've got to step in as an engineer here. I want to remind you that computers don't just come out of the sky. Somebody designs these things. Shock the guys over here. I'll believe it when I see it. But then as far as communication in another language, I can easily envision,

I guess a pun intended, a computer that can recognize faces and emotions on faces and then that would enhance the translation of a language. Seriously, I don't think that's an extraordinary step. But there's a famous

impossible sentence for computers where you say, time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana. Why is that impossible for a computer? Because the two sentences, they're grammatically identical, yet they

have completely different meanings. Why couldn't a computer learn it the way you did? Yeah, Chomsky. Your timing of the words changed how they were perceived? Yeah, yeah. So what we don't know is whether the computer then has to have a human life experience. Consciousness, some might say.

Right, that I was going to say. The real thing is, will it eventually have consciousness or experience or subjective states? What is it like to be a computer? Can it ever have awareness? Well, now we get to the Turing test, everybody. Oh, very good. I said the Turing test, guys, just because I could. That was pretty impressive.

That was pretty impressive. You've been listening to Star Talk Live at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, recorded on February 24th, 2014, with Eugene Merman, Michael Ian Black, Heather Berlin, Paul Rudd, Mayim Bialik, and my good friend, Bill Nye the Science Guy. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson. We'll have more of the show next week. Until then, keep looking up.