TED Radio Hour - Mind, Body, Spirit - Part 1

Episode Date: March 17, 2023

For millennia, humans have debated the mind, body, spirit connection. But today, the phrase sounds trite — a hallmark of the #selfcare industry. Over the next three episodes, TED speakers will investigate fresh perspectives on how we think, move, and feel. This hour: the mind. Guests include animal behaviorist and autism activist Temple Grandin, podcast host and meditation advocate Dan Harris, neurointerventionist and entrepreneur Tom Oxley and poet Sarah KayStarting Wednesday, March 22, TED Radio Hour Plus subscribers will get access to bonus episodes, with more ideas from TED speakers and a behind the scenes look with our producers. A Plus subscription also lets you listen to regular episodes (like this one!) without ads. Sign-up at plus.npr.org/ted.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks. Our job now is to dream big. Delivered at TED conferences. To bring about the future we want to see. Around the world. To understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you.

You just don't know what you're going to find. Challenge you. We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy? And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading.

From TED and NPR, I'm Manoosh Zamorodi. Hi, hi, great to be here. Hopefully this sounds going to be up to your level. Welcome to our special series, Mind, Body, Spirit. I was very severe looking. No speech until late 4. You know, back in the late 40s when I was born, I was the kind of kid they'd just put in an institution.

This is tempting. Temple Grandin. You may know her because she changed the way the world thinks about autism. But we'll get to that. As a child, Temple loved working with tools. My favorite classes in elementary school were art, sewing, and woodworking. And if I hadn't had those classes, I would have just been lost. Absolutely lost. Temple loved building and designing things. Conversation? Not so much. As a teenager, she spent a summer on her aunt's ranch, where she realized she related more to animals than to humans. That's right. And people thought this was really weird. She later took that understanding and revolutionized the cattle industry by designing more humane slaughterhouses.

She also became a professor of animal science, all of which she says was only possible because of one. one thing, how her mind works. Well, everything I think about is a picture. And when I was young, I thought everybody thought in pictures the same way I thought. I didn't even know that verbal thinking existed. When she learned that her mind worked differently, Temple started researching and writing about visual thinking and how it relates to autism. In 1986, she wrote her first book, Emergence,

labeled autistic, a firsthand account of what life was like for her. Later, her story was turned into a movie starring Claire Daines. And the Emmy goes to Temple Grandin. The name is Temple Grandin. I'm not like other people. I'm thinking pictures, and I connect them. And in my TED talk I gave just over 10 years ago, it was titled The World Needs All Kinds of Minds,

and this is one of the big points I want to get across to people. Here's Temple Grandin on the TED stage. So what is thinking of pictures? It's literally movies in your head. My mind works like Google for images. Like if I say, think about a church steeple, most people get this sort of generalized, generic one. I see only specific pictures. They flash up into my memory just like Google for pictures.

Okay, so what pops into your mind if I say pumpkin? I'm seeing pumpkins that we carved when. I was a child. We threw them in a compost heap we had in the field, and they grew in my mind. So now I'm seeing various composting devices. And now I'm seeing some fake pumpkins at our supermarket. How about teapot? Well, I'm seeing a teapot over in England that had a cozy array.

I'm seeing a teapot. We had as kids that when the water boiled, whistled tea, I was allowed to have as a child with lemon. Dreadful teapot. The lid falls off, splashes in the cup, and makes a big mess. Now, the thing is, the visual thinkers just wanted. kind of mind. You see, the autistic mind tends to be a specialist mind. Good at one thing, bad at something else. And where I was bad was algebra. And I was never allowed to take geometry or trig. Gigantic mistake. I'm finding a lot of kids that need to skip algebra, go right to

geometry and trig. Now another kind of mind is the pattern thinker, more abstract. These are your engineers, your computer programmers. And then there's a verbal mind. They know every fact about everything. Seventy years ago, doctors probably wouldn't have believed that Temple Grandin was capable of all she ended up achieving. But we now know that people's minds work differently. In fact, ideas about how we think, move, and feel have been debated for millennia, and they are constantly evolving. So where are we now? This is our special three-part series, Mind, Body, Spirit. Maybe that phrase sounds a little trite or cliched, a hallmark of the hashtag self-care, hashtag wellness industry.

Hashtag mind-body spirit. Well, we have decided to reclaim it. I've learned through experience that they are inextricably linked, whether I like it or not. Over the next three episodes, we'll explore how our brains make sense of the world and ourselves. For me, the huge mystery is the unconscious. This kind of bicep curl for your brain can impact your capacity to feel love. We'll hear fresh perspectives on touch, consent, and feeling good in our bodies.

You can't really dance and be sad or, you know, it just doesn't work. And hear stories about salvaging the human psyche, even in truly soul-destroying situations. I think some of the magic comes from, the pain and the beauty coexisting. Your spirit is that unshakable part of you that you define and feed. So let's get to part one, the mind. People talked about different ways that people interpret the world. Later in the show, we'll investigate where creative impulses come from

and how we might enhance our brains in the future. But first, let's consider how an ancient practice makes sense in the modern world. We have this little inner narrator that chases us out of bed in the morning and is yammering at us all day long, constantly sort of wanting stuff, not wanting stuff, judging people, judging ourselves, comparing ourselves to other people instead of focusing on what's happening right now. Dan Harris is the host of the 10% Happier podcast, and he has been on a years-long journey to tame that nagging inner voice. I worked at ABC News for 21 years. It was a very stressful job. Here he is on the TED stage. In fact, I had a panic attack live on the air in 2004. The good news is that my nationally televised freakout

ultimately led me to meditation, which I had actually long rejected as ridiculous. I was raised by a pair of atheist scientists. I'm a fidgety skeptical guy, and that kind of led me to unfairly lump meditation in with aura readings, vision boards, and dolphin healing. But the practice really helped me with my anxiety and depression, and so my goal became to make meditation attractive to my fellow skeptics.

And I saw that there was all this science that suggested it's really good for you. And that kind of provoked me to get interested in Buddhism and meditation. Dan ended up writing a best-selling book called 10% Happier. This led to hosting his podcast and building a business, all with the goal of bringing some inner peace to people who were skeptical about meditation too. And on a personal level, Dan felt like he'd really grown. So after a few years, he made an interesting choice. Well, the story's pretty embarrassing, actually.

He requested a 360 review. I wanted to get the 360, in part because I was genuinely curious about how I was doing. A 360 is pretty common in the corporate world. Consultants interview all your colleagues about you. and then compile a report on how you come across in the workplace. And I should say that my version of the 360 was much more intense than the normal corporate 360 because I included my wife and my brother, a few of my meditation teacher friends. So it was the colonoscopy version of a 360 review. I didn't think it was going to be that big of a deal.

That was an underestimation and humiliatingly so. And when I read the 360, it just, you know, melted me. Do you remember reading some of the harsher notes? I will never forget reading that document because adding to the embarrassment of the moment, I was so confident and so sort of cavalier and careerist about this move that I had video cameras rolling on me and my wife as we read it together. Oh, no, no, no. Yes. The first 13 pages were dedicated to my sterling qualities.

People talked about how hardworking and intelligent I was. Then came 26 pages of beatdown. He's self-interested and self-involved. It's a joke that whatever we showed Dan, he doesn't like. Some reviewers noted that I had a pension for being rude to junior staffers. He is intentionally intimidating when it serves him. I was called emotionally guarded, a diva, and an authoritarian. There's a flavor of the prima donna.

in Dan. He likes people to be serving him, and his is more important than other people's agenda or time. Some people even questioned my motives for promoting meditation. It got so bad that at one point my wife, who was reading it with me, got up and went to the bathroom and cried. Oh, that is brutal. I will say, though, I have to admire your diligence, because after the 360 review, you signed up for a nine-day silent retreat. Man, some people would be like, I don't want to think about this, but you went to a place where all you could do was think about this. Yes. But just to say that after I got the 360 review and, you know, people were saying really

harsh things about me that I was overcommitted in my professional life. That was making me really unpleasant to be around. I read all of that. And my first instinct was, I'm going to go into the fetal position and never come out. And then pretty quickly, I started to have a series of conversations with people in my life that helped me turn this around. So one of the many things that I did was to sign up for a nine-day silent meditation retreat in which we were practicing a kind of meditation called loving-kindness meditation. The ancient word for this is meta, M-E-T-A. Another translation of meta is friendliness.

And we have this tendency, I think, most of us, to think that we are hardwired for a certain kind of temperament. Yeah. But actually the data around this kind of meditation and other related practices show that these are not factory settings. You can boost your capacity for warmth. And so that's why I wanted to do that retreat. Okay. Can we talk more about loving kindness, the steps that you are supposed to go through generally? It's not complicated. My first impression of this practice was extremely negative. I sometimes say that it struck me as Valentine's Day with a gun to my head, but the seated formal meditation version of this is. So I sit in a chair and close my eyes and start by calling to mind, somebody like really easy to love. And you repeat four phrases, may you be happy,

may be safe, may you be healthy, may you live with ease. And then once you've done that with an easy person, we move into yourself. Usually the next step is a mentor, then a neutral person, somebody might overlook, then a difficult person, and then finally all beings everywhere. And And this kind of bicep curl for your brain can impact your capacity to feel love for yourself and for other people. And that's pretty radical. In a minute, the struggles Dan faced as he attempted to train his brain to be kind to himself. It's part one of our series, Mind, Body, Spirit. I'm Manusse Zamoroti, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR.

Stay with us. I want to tell you also about something new that is happening here at TED Radio Hour. It's called TED Radio Hour Plus. When you become a plus subscriber, you get extra special episodes, more ideas from TED speakers, and behind the scenes with our producers. This week, for example, Dan Harris will guide you through his favorite science-backed meditation. But you know what you won't get with these extra episodes down your plus feed? Ads. because being a plus subscriber is a way for you to directly support the show.

So please sign up at plus.npr.org slash TED or just click the link in our show notes. And if you can't sign up right now, don't worry, nothing is changing about our regular show. It'll still be free in your feed every week. But if you are ready for fewer ads and more ideas from TED and you can show your support, please go to plus. It's the TED.org slash TED. And thank you. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manusse Zamoroti.

On the show today, we are exploring the mind as part of our series, Mind, Body, Spirit. And we were just talking to Dan Harris, host of the podcast, 10% Happier. Dan is now known for his expertise in mindfulness. But when he was first introduced to the centuries-old practice of loving-kindness, It seemed to be utterly at odds with his personality. I didn't want to do what my teacher was recommending. In fact, she said, you know, when you see your demons arise, you know, when you see your capacity for anger or desire or self-aggrandizement, she said, you should put

your hand on your heart and say, it's okay, sweetie, I'm here for you. And I was like, hard pass. I don't want to do that. And a couple of days into the retreat, I was really struggling. And I did it. I put my hand on my chest. I didn't call myself sweetie. I just talked to myself the way I would talk to a friend.

I was like, all right, dude, I know this sucks. It's hard to see this stuff. You're good. Just keep going. And that approach I later learned is really backed up by the science that you can talk to yourself the way you would talk to a friend. You don't have to use sweetie if you don't want to. And that this will have beneficial, psychological, and physiological. biological ramifications. And so the radical disarmament of your inner critic is to give him a hug.

Be like, thank you. I don't have to listen to you exactly, but I appreciate the impulse. It is the organism trying to protect itself. And the idea being that the only way to feel love and kindness towards others in the world is if you can do it to yourself, because why? It's not as simple as saying you can't love other people if you don't love yourself. Because I think we all know people who are very hard on themselves, but extremely generous. But it's harder to love other people if you're constantly running yourself down. Even though that might feel like a humility, you know, I'm keeping myself in check. It actually is a kind of self-centeredness because you're just stuck in your own head in this dialogue. If you can cut that off, well, then you have more availability and bandwidth.

for other people. And there's another piece of this. When you see how much suffering you're doing, it just naturally and inexorably leads to increased empathy and compassion for other people. Self-love properly understood, not as narcissism, but as having your own back, is not selfish. It makes you better at loving other people. I consider love to be anything that falls within the human capacity to care, a capacity wired deeply into. us via evolution. It's our ability to care, cooperate, and communicate that has allowed homo sapiens to thrive. And it is a failure to exercise that muscle. It is a lack of love that I think is at the root of our most pressing problems from inequality to violence to the climate crisis. Obviously,

these are all massive problems that are going to require massive structural change, but at a baseline, they also require us to care about one another. And it is harder to do that when you're stuck in a ceaseless spiral of self-centered self-flodulation. There's something ironic about this, though, Dan, is that I can't help but think, despite the Eastern roots in meditation, that in some ways this is a very individualist approach to societal, systemic problems. You know, I bet people would have a hell of a lot more loving kindness if there wasn't, I don't know, police violence in their community, if they had enough to eat, if they could pay for their housing. Do you feel?

like this is a message for a certain segment of the population and that in some ways, gosh, we have a whole lot of other things to fix in addition to trying to be more at peace with ourselves. Well, I think you're onto something very important there. I don't think meditation alone is going to fix our massive systemic problems. We need systemic political policy level approaches to all of this. The one part that I'm not sure I agree with, though, is that this is a message for just a narrow band of society. We know these practices work.

So why should only wealthy white people who shop at Whole Foods? And by the way, I say that with no hate in my heart to those people because I am one of those people. But why should we be the only people who benefit from this? I think it's beautiful that these practices are being taught in foster care and prisons and this really should be for everybody. It's not either or. It's yes, I am. But, Dan, I have to say to get to this point, you've gone through what feels to me like an exhaustive amount of therapy and meditation and different strategies. And I mean, the whole other part of you, the part that's hard charging and asks difficult questions as a journalist, the part of you that wanted to start a business, do you feel like that part can coexist with this more, dare I say, mellow person?

Definitely. First of all, just to say, you don't have to do all the stuff I'm doing. I'm coming back with things that you can fit into your life in really easy ways. You know, this loving kindness meditation practice is something you can do for a few minutes before you go to bed or first thing in the morning. And it will help you. The second thing to say is that by no means am I not ambitious anymore. What I do find, though, is that I'm better at connection. to the more positive end of my motivations.

I'm a little more focused on, you know, can I make things in the world that really do help people and that in the process give me what I need to live to keep motivated and happy, which is, you know, some level of remuneration, you know, payment. And I view that as like kind of an exchange of love. Okay, so tell me where you are in this process. Are you practicing it every day? Have you seen results?

Well, the most tangible piece of evidence is that three years after I got my first 360, I got a second 360 with many of the same people contributing. And it was radically different. He pauses and listens, make sure he's hearing things correctly. There's real compassion in that, especially knowing that he has strong opinions, where he's able to watch what he's feeling and shelve it if he has to, in order to be there for the other person. He's genuinely curious and interested.

He's less negative in day-to-day interactions. In the last few years, he's become very emotionally intelligent. He's very self-aware, asks about feelings, and if he could do something more or less. Dan is so much kinder and more compassionate than he used to be. The way his ego has shrunk is really quite remarkable. Oh, that's a big change. Yes.

So, Dan, this connection, between the mind, body, and spirit. There have been people trying to make sense of it for thousands of years. I feel like in the West, it has kind of become a cliche. What do you make of this connection? The mind, you know, there is no you the way you think about it. Yes, if you, minutiae look in the mirror, you'll see a reflection of a human being. That's true.

But on some really fundamental level, all the atoms that make you up right now are going to dissolve. And so we are solid the way a hurricane is solid. It's just a coming together of atmospheric conditions that will come apart at some point. And the fact that life is short and unpredictable and chaotic means that what you really have is right now. There are very meaningful things you can do to be of service, which will make you happier and the people around you happier and to be of use to yourself and others in a way that will make whatever time we have as good as possible. That's Dan Harris. He hosts the 10% Happier Podcast. And earlier we heard from Temple Grandin. Her latest book is called Visual Thinking, The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions. You can see both of their talks at ted.com. Today on the show, The Power of the Mind. So we've talked about how our understanding of the mind has changed and why accepting our thoughts and staying present can help us. Now let's go to the future of the mind.

If you ever learned to program a computer, the first thing you probably did was get it to type out the phrase, hello world. And it probably felt like magic, if it worked, like you had given technology a brain. But what if a brain was given technology? A brain computer interface is a device that goes into your brain. and it can listen to activity in certain parts of the brain. This is physician Tom Oxley. He specializes in vascular neurosurgery. And I'm the founding CEO of Synchron, a brain computer interface company.

In 2020, Tom's company started testing their device in people, including a man named Philip O'Keefe. Philip was the second participant in our first in human study. of our implantable brain computer interface. He lives in Melbourne, Australia. And Philip has ALS or motor neuron disease, and he was facing a progressing loss of control of his body as the ALS progressed. So if your muscles stop working,

but your brain is still working, you can, in a sense, become trapped inside your head. So this technology is a way to put almost what is a microphone right on top of the brain and bypassing the inability of the body to transmit out your intention or your will to move. Basically, the technology decodes what part of the body the brain is trying to activate, and then sends out a signal that makes a cursor move or a computer mouse click. Yeah, so you're able to directly manipulate a mouse or a keyboard by,

thinking about trying to move, even though your body is no longer moving. Almost like a Bluetooth mouse directly controlled out of the brain that can work on any system. Philip started off doing simple tasks using his BCI, like sending an email and browsing the web. But after a year, he wanted to take things to the next level. So he sent out a tweet. The first tweet said, hello world. That was what it meant to him. He was saying hello back to the world because he'd gone.

quiet, he'd gone dark, and he was back. And that's really what this technology is about. Philip O'Keefe can't use his fingers to type like you or I, but thanks to a tiny brain implant, he was able to send the following tweets. Here's Tom Oxley on the TED stage. Hello, world, short tweet, monumental progress. No need for keystrokes or voices. I created this tweet just by thinking it.

My hope is that I pave the way for people to be able to tweet through thoughts, Phil. Now, you might be thinking there are some people out there who should not be allowed to tweet directly from their brain. I agree. But for people with paralysis and disability, this technology can be life-changing. They will fill up brain signals up on the screen. They're connected to their computers via Bluetooth.

The device is fully internalized, invisible to the outside world, and they learn to control the keyboard with clicks directly coming from their brain. Now, BCI's conjure up images of science fiction like The Matrix, with a cable jacked up into your brain through a hole in your skull. But I'm here to show you that the future can be much more elegant than that. I mean, it's crazy. Do you remember the first time that you heard about brain computer interfaces

because people have been trying to do this for a while, right? The first report of a human implant was in 2006 by Lee Hochberg and colleagues in Nature. and I was immediately besotted with the idea that this was going to be a transformational technology. I went into medicine because I loved the brain. It was this mystery and romanticism about what the brain was, how it worked, how it generated consciousness. And then you realize that there's not many things that you can do for neurological disease. You can't reverse the death of neurons. You can't replace neurons.

And I realized that this is a field in medicine, which is sort of behind the other areas of medicine and ability to treat conditions. And it struck me that the ability to directly interface with the brain was going to change that. Because up until then, what scientists had been trying to do, they had to go directly, like, drill a hole and put a device in people's brain. Is that what the challenge was? Yeah. The breakthrough early research device is that. a series of needles that sit on a base, and those needles get pushed into the brain tissue, and they are able to record information out of the brain. There's an issue with putting a

needle into the brain, and that is that it can cause a inflammation reaction. The brain does not like to be invaded. The brain has an immune response, which is different to the rest of the body. You can put a tattoo under your skin, and it will not cause a huge inflammatory reaction, but you can't do that necessarily on the brain. So my concept was, well, how do we avoid putting something directly into the brain? What's the next closest we could do? And the idea that we had was, let's try and solve getting these senses into the blood vessels and it can stay there for a lifetime.

The blood vessels are the natural highways into the brain. These are hollow tubes that connect every corner of the brain. The largest vein at the top there is right next to the motor cortex, the exact part of the brain that we want to connect to to restore control to the outside world. Now, we already know how to travel through the blood vessels. If anyone here today's had a heart attack, there's a pretty good chance you've had a stent. A stent is a metal scaffold,

delivered through a catheter, which opens up like a flower into the blood vessel. Millions of scents are delivered each year, not in the OR, but in the cath lab, or catheter laboratory. It's now common in the cath lab to navigate up into the brain through the blood vessels. But what's really amazing about this is that for BCIs, we already know that devices can be left inside a blood vessel, cells grow over it, incorporated into the wall like a tattoo under the skin,

and we're protected from that immune reaction. This is part of the reason why our team became the first in the world to receive a green light from the FDA to conduct clinical trials of a permanently implanted BCI. We called this the stentroid. So you've basically built a brain computer interface into a stent. And you place it not just in the brain, but in the brain's blood vessels, right? Yeah. It's extraordinary. Can you take me through that process?

The procedure involves putting a catheter into the jugular vein in the neck, then slipped up inside the skull through a little pre-existing hole that the jugular vein goes up. So it's kind of going up the drain pipes of the brain. So you carry your way up through those pipes all the way up into the brain until you sit on the blood vessel that's sitting right on top of the motor cortex. And what we had to solve was how do you put sensors? How do you build an electronic circuit onto that stent? So then that device opens up. It sits in the blood vessel. It's connected to a cable.

That cable exits that point in the neck and the jugular. And it plugs into a device in the chest that sends the information from the brain wirelessly out of the body. So if you were to look at the patient with the device in, you wouldn't know that it was there. Okay, so once the stent has been put in, do you just think something and out it comes onto the keyboard? How do you have to train the patient in order to use their mind effectively to communicate through technology? The patients do undergo training. What's interesting is that we are born in bodies where there's a part of the brain attached to a muscle,

and that's all that part of the brain does. So if you make a fist right now, there's a very particular part of your brain that's firing to do that. But once you digitize that, you can apply what used to be a particular movement, say closing a fist or putting up your finger or bending your elbow. And the patient will realize that that performs a particular task on the computer. When we come back, would you want to be able to tweet directly from your mind? the possible future of brain-computer interfaces. On the show today, part one of our series, Mind, Body, Spirit. I'm Manoosh Zamoroti, and you're listening to The TED Radio Hour from NPR.

It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoosh Zomerode. On the show today, The Mind. And brain computer interfaces that could change the way we think. As we were hearing, neurointerventionist, Tom Oxley has been testing his company's device, the stentroid, in people. It's a tiny sensor that sends signals from the brain to a receiver in the chest, which then, via Bluetooth, helps the patient send an email, search the web, connect to their devices,

and the world. For now, the goal is to help people with neurological diseases who can't move their bodies or speak. But what about in the future? One of the most famous people who's in this brain computer interface field is, of course, Elon Musk. And he has laid out a vision where people control all kinds of things with their minds. Virtual reality games, but also way more than that. He's talking about the brain fusing with artificial intelligence. Are you thinking of those things, too, where it's not just for people who have medical issues,

but for anyone who wants to enhance their mind? I watch Netflix and I read science fiction novels and I can see that there's a likely outcome where this technology progresses into humans being able to control things in a way which wasn't previously possible. The thing is that we're talking on a very long time scale and I think it's important for people to remember that this technology is critical for people who have lost the ability. to engage in the world. So I just worry that the conversation goes into a hundred-year-out time frame and we start looking at all the possibilities of how this could go wrong and we forget why actually we're doing this right now and who is it for. You know, I'm not dismissing the ethical considerations for where this goes. Like I've seen Black Mirror and I think the answer to that is let's confine the problem right now to what is needed to really help people and lay down a really strict regulatory

framework about, you know, remaining in that domain. I mean, that's the thing, right? It's a Venn diagram of medical device and Silicon Valley utopian, maybe out there, futurism. And, I mean, your company is a for-profit company. You've taken venture capital, and presumably your investors would like you to move as fast as you possibly can with this and scale it. So I guess I'm wondering, when do the ethical considerations, like when does that conversation start because we've seen it start way too late with so many other technologies in the past. I mean, you're right. The conversation has started for us now. We have a ethical charter. We have internal conversations about this a lot. We're talking with the FDA and we've been in close contact with them and continue to discuss these issues in an ongoing basis. I think the community's taking it very seriously.

the kind of Venn diagram into the tech utopia, I think our investors are investing because they see that there is a huge unmet need in the medical domain for paralysis. Now, I mean, one other thing that I'd probably add to it is if I was to think ahead about what it might look like into that tipping point and who would be the people in the consumer world that would start to do this, the corollary I think about is LASIC surgery. LASIC surgery started 30 years ago and it's a laser on your eyeball and it makes you see better. This is a procedure that's a day procedure. You have to go into a hospital. You have to see a physician. It's regulated by FDA. But if your visual disturbance is only mild, you can still go and do that and you can take on the risk and benefit to get that done.

I think BCI might go in that direction. I'm not saying next year, this is probably like on a 15-year horizon, but once the technology is demonstrated to be safe and effective, and it's in a day procedure and it's invisible to the outside world, there probably will be a portion of society who think, well, I would like to be able to engage in systems without having to touch anything, so I don't have to hold my phone. I can see that as a possibility. In the future, I'm really excited about the breakthroughs BCI could deliver to other conditions like epilepsy, depression and dementia. But beyond that, what is this going to mean for humanity? And what's really got me thinking is the future of communication.

Take emotion. Have you ever considered how hard it is to express how you feel? You have to self-reflect, package the emotion into words, and then use the muscles of your mouth to speak those words. But you really just want someone to know how you feel. For some people, with certain conditions, that's impossible. So what if rather than using your words, you could throw your emotion just for a few seconds

and have them really feel how you feel. At that moment, we would have realized that the necessary use of words to express our current state of being was always going to fall short. The full potential of the brain would then be unlocked. I mentioned just how many mysteries there still are about the human brain and how our minds work.

Where are we now in that understanding? I mean, it feels like, you know, we've mapped the human genome. That was exciting. We're now starting to hear about people getting genetic treatments. Where are we with the brain, with our minds? For me, the huge mystery is the unconscious. You know, we've, for the most part, mapped the brain and understand it. But we have not figured out how the random, chaotic, unconscious world that exists when we're dreaming,

interacts with our day-to-day life. I started psychiatry and I decided not to do psychiatry because I didn't feel like we fully had a biological or physiological framework to understand why people were suffering. But I still don't feel like we've really cracked how the unconscious works and we haven't integrated that into a clear physiological framework yet. And so I'm on a journey right now. I think BCI has been incredible and it starts to equate to a reverse engineering of how the brain works and the brain works similarly in different parts and where

learning that now, but I'm hoping that over our lifetime, we're going to have major breakthroughs in the ability to integrate the whole mind, which includes the subconscious and the collective unconscious. I think it's going to be a really interesting 50 years to unlock those mysteries. That's Dr. Tom Oxley. He's a neuro-interventionist and the founder and CEO of Synchron. You can see Tom's full talk at TED.com. We want to close today's show. with an investigation into the very nebulous concept of creativity and how the mind formulates its most beautiful and inspiring ideas. Sometimes people imagine, you know, sitting down at a blank page and going,

okay, world, inspire me now. That might work for some people, but it certainly has rarely worked for me. This is poet Sarah Kaye. And before she does any writing, Sarah says she does lots of observing. Because poetry has been a part of my life since I was quite small, it is in my brain as a filter through which I look at the world, which means that as I'm just wandering about in my life, there's part of me that's always looking for little moments of, oh, I don't know what else to call it. I used to use the metaphor of like puzzle pieces that I'd be moving through my life and then look down and see a single piece of a jigsaw puzzle on the ground. And I just collect these little moments, which could be in the form of memory. It could be in the form of

an image. But I hold on to them. And sometimes when I put them on the table, I'm able to go, oh, all of these things are. in service of one line of questioning or sometimes it's not obvious to me how they fit together. And for a long time, I've used poem as a verb in my life anyway. I poem my way through things. And poeming involves handing the reins over to my curiosity and my feelings without trying to dictate where it goes. Back in 2019, you read one of your poems on the TED stage. It's called A Bird Made of Birds. And it sounded like you came to that poem with a similar process of putting together the puzzle pieces. Yeah. So my friend Kava, who is himself a wonderful poet, found this

photograph where scientists had dissected a blue whale, and in the dissection, they took the heart out of the whale and hung it on a hook from the ceiling, which is how they were able to see that the heart of a blue whale is big enough that a person can fit inside of it. And when Kava saw this image, he shared it with the caption, this is a reminder that the universe has already written the poem you were planning on writing. And that phrase really stuck with me, and I was first shaken by it and almost indignant about it quietly to myself because I was like, oh, no. I was horrified. I was like, come on, man. I'm trying to discover beauty that hasn't been discovered yet. What do you mean the universe is always going to get there before me? And I know this isn't a uniquely poet problem,

but on days when the world feels especially big or especially full of grandeur, those are the days when I feel, what do I possibly have to contribute? Not long ago, I saw this video that makes the internet rounds every couple of months. There are these birds that are called starlings, and they fly in what's called a murmuration.

And at first it's just an amorphous blob. And then there's a moment where the birds shift and they form the shape of a starling in the sky. And as soon as I saw it, I was like, the universe has already written the poem you were planning on writing. Except for the first time, it didn't fill me with despair. Instead, I thought, okay, maybe it's not my job to invent something new.

Maybe instead it's my job to listen to what the universe is showing me so that when it's my turn, I can hold something to the light just for a moment, just for as long as I have. The universe has already written the poem that you were planning on writing.

You can do nothing but poor, at the flock of starlings whose bodies rise and fall in inherited choreography, swarming the sky in a sweeping curtain that for one blistering moment forms the unmistakable shape of a giant bird flapping against the sky. It is why your mouth forms an, oh, that is not a gasp, but rather, But rather the beginning of, oh, of course. As in, of course, the heart of a blue whale is as large as a house with chambers tall enough to fit a person's standing.

Of course, a fig becomes possible when a lady wasp lays her eggs inside a flower, dies and decomposes. The fruit evidence of the fruit, evidence, of her transformation, sometimes the poem is so bright. Your silly language will not stick to it. Sometimes the poem is so true. Nobody will believe you.

I am a bird made of birds. This blue heart, a house you can stand up inside of. I am dying. Here, inside this flower, It is okay. It is what I was put here to do. Take this fruit. It is what I have to offer. It may not be first or ever best, but it is the only way to be sure that I lived at all. Oh, Sarah, that's so beautiful. I've listened to it so many times. Thank you. Can I tell you a sweet epilogue of this poem? Oh, please, yes.

So since then, something that happens to me often is that strangers will let me know when strange phenomena is happening in nature, which is one of the loveliest accidental consequences of a poem that I've ever had. So, for example, scientists strapped a shark with GPS to follow the shark's movements. And then when they looked on the map, the shark had drawn a shark. No, come on. Come on. And everybody was like, Sarah, have you seen the shark made of shark? And I was like, thank you. Thank you so much. But even beyond that, they found these bees that live off of human teeth.

years. There's a beach in Okinawa, and each individual grain of sand is actually an exoskeleton from protozoa that lived millions of years ago, and they look like tiny individual stars. That's definitely going to end up in a poem. I wander the world already looking for these moments and experiences and phenomena that make me amazed and fill me with awe and fill me with wonder and questions, not just as poetry fodder, but as reasons to wake up in the morning and reasons to stay curious and stay fascinated with the world. That was poet and educator Sarah Kay. You can watch her full talk at ted.com. Thank you so much for listening to part one of our series, Mind, Body, Spirit.

Next week. Let's try it. Let's try it. It's part two. Oh, I'm stiff. So we're going to stand up. We're here. Shake your shoulders out.

Get the tension out of your upper body. Shake one leg, lift it off the ground. Shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake. We are shaking with choreographer Ryan Heffington. Reach your arms up over your head. Open your armpits. We'll also dive into how we respond when our bodies change in front of our own eyes and learn about an unusual way to talk about consent and pleasure.

This one's going to get you moving. We're just punching the ceiling up and up and up and up. Now shake your booty as you do it. Uh-uh. Uh-uh. This is serious. Don't miss more of our special series, Mind, Body, Spirit. New ideas that can change the way you think, move, and feel. Someone just walked by, and I smiled and waved.

See? See? And they gave me a big smile back. Alchemy. Alchemy. This episode was produced by Katie Montalione, Harsha Nahata, Andrea Gutierrez, and Fiona Guren. It was edited by Sanaz Meshkampur and me. Our production staff at NPR also includes Rachel Faulkner White, James Delhousi, Matthew Cloutier, and Julia Carney.

Beth Donovan is our executive producer. Our intern is Susanna Brown. Special thanks this week to Mickey Kapper and Malvica Dang. Our theme music was written by Ramteen Arablewe. Our audio engineers were Stacey Abbott, Joshua Newell, Valentina Rodriguez-Sanchez and Neil Tevalt. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Colin Helms, Anna Feelein, Michelle Quint, Jimmy Gutierrez, and Daniela Ballerzzo. I'm Manus Amaroid, and you've been listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR.