A few years ago, around the time of Twitter's I p O, I noticed what I thought was an odd coincidence. It's chief engineer had studied birds. Specifically, he'd studied the auditory cortex of zebra finches. I thought that was pretty funny for an engineer, especially because Twitter's mascot is that little blue bird. I forgot about it until a couple of years ago when I noticed another bird brain scholar
in the top echelons of tech. This person had been hired by Elon Musk, the entrepreneur behind Tesla and SpaceX, to join his new company, Neuralink. Neuralink is a very secretive futuristic company which is trying to supercharge the human brain. This all sounds pretty obscure. You'd think studying bird brains wouldn't be too relevant to studying human brains or figuring out social media, right, That's why I remembered it. It
just felt so random, But now here were two. So one day, when I was a little bored, I just tried type being zebra finch and the names of several big tech companies into Google. And what did you find? I found quite a few employees who knew a lot about zebra finches. That was that companies like Intelent, Apple and Google too. I was surprised. Okay, hang on, Sarah,
I'm googling this. The zebra finch is the most common astrill did finch of central Australia and ranges over most of the continent, avoiding only the cool, moist south and tropical far North. Zebrafinches are loud and boisterous singers. So what's the connection here, Well, that's where I jumped into the reporting process. Our goal is to figure out why tech companies are hiring bird brain experts, and this little quest has taken us to college campuses around the country.
We visited several university labs. Some smelled better than others. We heard a lot of birds on So this is our guy, and so they're they're very light, um, but super active. How big would you say that thing is? It's like, so they're about fifty in Graham's total weight. They're mostly feathers. That's Tim Achi, a neuroscientist and assistant professor at Boston University, showing us czebra finch in his bird lab and telling us about his research on bird brains.
He's running some pretty extraordinary experiments. Oh no, but the the implant. So this is actually just a lens. And so if you look at the top, so you see that little black thing that's sticking up, So that's a lens. If you look down and you couldn't see the brain, but there's not probably not enough light getting down there that you could actually see it. And it turns out what Tim's learning about the brains of these tiny birds is of great interest to the world's largest tech companies.
I'm brad Stone and Sarah mcbrad that, I'm Ashley Vance, and you're listening to decrypt it. So, guys, tell me a little bit more about Tim Acchi and his I'm sure wonderfully smelling lab out in Boston. Yeah, well, Tim's lab was one of the key st ups on our trip. Tim took over a Boston University lab from Tim Gardner, the guy who left to work for Elon Musk and Neuralink.
Tim Acchi is a forty year old guy with black frame glasses who throws in plenty of references to Portlandia and other TV shows when he check chats on his office wall. He's got a print of voltage chases called five Seconds of Donkey Kong. Now we're talking about something I'm familiar with, So what's the connection here. It turns out that that old eighties video game became the subject of a famous neuroscience research paper. There's one other thing you should know about Tim. He has a giant zebra
finch tattoo on his right forearm. Brad, how familiar are you with zebra finch? Well, actually, other than my very brief Wikipedia search just now, other than small birds that sing a lot, I would say not very familiar. They are very cute little birds. Indeed, they're about four inches long. The males have orange cheeks and black and white striped feathers across their chests, hence the name. They're super easy to breed, and they chirp a lot. Here's Tim's interpretation.
So how did Tim get into studying bird brains? He took a circuitous route into neuroscience. One thing I found interesting is he started as an engineer working at a company that helped factories to automate. His job was teaching robots how to sort stuff, everything from car parts to gives moos for circuit boards. It was just astounding to me how difficult it was to get things to do this,
and these were tasks that you know, children do. It really put in my mind the idea that, you know, a lot of the things that that children can do almost effortlessly and without almost any training, are incredibly impossible to get artificial systems to do or take an enormous amount of thought. Okay, so I think I understand Tim was curious about why a certain task is so easy for a child but so difficult for a robot. Yeah,
that's exactly it. So after a detour to Tim ended up studying neuroscience at Harvard, and that's where he discovered zebra finches. Now he's teaching it be you and doing his own research. One thing Tim focuses on is how zebra finches learned to sing. Tim described his study of zebra finches is more of a means to an end.
I don't, you know, really think of myself or or care too much about, you know, songbird neuroscience specifically, I take it as a as a way to investigate general principles and mechanisms in neuroscience and how brains function generally. So Tim is saying that he studies these teeny tiny zebra finch brains because he thinks it will give us
insights into the way human brains function. That's right. Researchers study all different kinds of animals for all different kinds of purposes, but in this case they're trying to learn more about the human brain. Seeing how birds learn to sing, for example, can provide insights into how we learn things.
So I think that you know, the songbird is one of those systems that we probably understand the best in terms of different brain regions that are involved, in terms of the roles of those different brain regions, and so I think that we can ask very very precise questions in the songbird about the interaction between brain activity and behavior. Sarah, you started out by saying that studying the brains of
zebra finches are somehow interesting for tech companies. So if Tim studies the birds because there are connections between bird brains and human brains, are there also connections between bird brains and computers. Absolutely, But to understand it, I need to explain a little bit more about Tim's research. When we met him in Boston, before we went into the room with the real life zebra finches, he played us one of his best songbird clips, and so that's what
the song sounds like. Okay, so that's one. Yeah, so that's what the that's what this this particular zebra finch sings. All of them have slightly different songs. That sounded like a cartoon. Yeah, it sounded a little like woody woodpecker. Right, but that but that is actually, uh, that is actually what it sounds. Yeah. Yeah, we had listened to these
all day long. Tim told us while male and female zebra finches can chirp, only male zebra finches sing, even if their song is so short it doesn't sound like much of a song to us. Tim studies the brains of the baby birds as they learn. Here's the baby zebra finch trying to imitate his dad's song. He makes an early effort, and then a better one a month later. Okay, so this is the father this one, well, okay, and then we can do the middle one where he's not
quite good. A right, Okay, this is the one. Yeah that's pretty good. So Ashley, I'm kind of praying that to these experiments, he's not hurting these beautiful, teeny tiny birds. Basically, what he does is they take these birds that have been injected with a benign virus. The virus makes their brains produce a type of protein that causes individual neurons to light up when they fire, they glow green and red.
To see them in action, Tim and the grad students in his lab performed very delicate surgery on the zebra finches to implant tiny, tiny microscopes in their brain. Tim showed us one bird who had gone through this procedure, male zebra finish. And so haven't we on his hiding He's got one of these windows that I was telling
you about. And so this guy has already been through the procedure in which we inject the viruses into the brain and then we've put a window or a lens on top so that we can actually image through it. And it's going to get a microscope. He will eventually get a microscope. Auch Sarah, that sounds completely crazy. Give
us a better sense for what this looks like. So there are all these little birds hopping around with a tiny bit of their skull missing, and instead they have a microscope there and a little hole where you can look in and see what's going on in their brain. And the microscope sits there for days, weeks, months, at a time, looking at their neurons fire in in real time, and the birds are in their little cages, and then when you go into their lab, it's actually it's pretty cool.
There's all these wires going off these cages straight into like a data center where they store all of this information. And so basically you just get to just get to watch this bird's brain behave in real time and then go back and look through all the information. So, Sarah, should we feel sorry for these birds? I didn't. They
seemed really happy. They were hopping around, they were chirping, they were acting normal as far as they could tell based on the ones they saw without microscopes in their head. They really didn't seem to be too much difference. Okay, so how is all this useful for the neuroscientists. They look deep inside each bird's brain and they look to see which neurons are firing and for how long, when say the bird is learning to sing, and they can
make hypothesis on the relationship between different neurons. So that's actually a technique used pretty widely in science now and all kinds of animals. While we were visiting Tim in Boston, we also stopped by a mouse lab that does something similar, and a fish lab. In each of the labs, the neuroscientists there are studying other things as well, like how animals move, what happens in their brains when they make decisions.
For example, at the Roland Institute in Cambridge, we saw a couple of video games that mice play using tiny joysticks size for a mouse paw Wow. So how do they how do they mice get the quarters in the video game machine. They're highly trained and and the video games tells us what it tells us how they're making decisions exactly. So the mice are a lot like the birds.
They have bits of their their skull have been removed, and we're watching their brains and real time again and and so you watch them play these video games, and you see how they adapt. Sometimes they get different rules, and you see how the mouse learns the rules of the game, and they move this choice stick around and one of them to find the edges of a box. And if the mouse is successful, it gets a little
bit of sugar water. And and all this time the scientists are sitting in there seeing which parts of the brain light up and how the mouse reacts to these different situations. So what is it about this research that tech companies find so interesting? One reason is that these scientists are working with tons and tons of data, and
that's something that every tech company needs to do. And also it's to do with artificial intelligence, the field that has computer systems mastering tasks that require human traits like visual perception or decision making. Maybe how to identify a cat. That sounds simple, but it's actually way more nuanced than a traditional computer task and very hard for a computer to masse term. So there's this one school of thought that AI moving forward should loosely be modeled after the
human brain. The AI systems we have today are still basically number crunching systems. They're doing tons of statistical calculations. And if we want to get to this this future that Sarah's talking about where you actually have decision making and much more sophisticated thought, the ideas that we could borrow from the human brain and and maybe I have something that's way more flexible than what a computer could do.
And so presumably, since we can't cut open human skulls and make people play video games against their will, the zebra finch brains are first Yeah, exactly, human brains are a little too big and complicated to study in the kind of detail we can get from animals right now, they're smaller, easier to study, and obviously the ethics of
studying a living human brain very tricky. So I'm so curious about why zebra finches have become the bird to study and what exactly tech companies are doing with all this. Let's get to that after the break, Okay, Sarah n Ashley, So before the break, you explain how neuroscience is starting to inform the way tech companies design AI systems. So I guess this means it's a very good time to
be a neuroscientist. Yeah. So these people that used to be in academia or working at universities for their whole career are now finding tons of job opportunities in Silicon Valley. Companies like Google and Apple and Amazon are all snatching them up, including a lot of these zebra finch experts that we've been talking about. It's how the company that probably makes the chips in your laptop won't say exactly how many people it has working in AI, but it's
a lot, and many of them have this expertise. Intel helps its customers soup up machines to get them to behave smarter and in more uman lake ways. That could mean maybe working with a self driving carmaker, and that carmaker needs its vehicles to make lightning fast decisions on the road, and they have to be good decisions. A promising way to do that is to build computer systems that imitate how the human brain works. In a human brain, the systems are called signapses and pathways. In a machine,
they're called neural networks. We talked to a mirror because Shahi, the chief technology officer for Intel's AI products divisions of architectures having wildly successful and uh sends around two thousand eleven UM, and while wider and excreted vision, m navigation, reforcement learning things that are car related to neuroscience becauses are also tacit humans doing pretty well. A mirror is
a computational neuroscientists by training. He got his PhD at UC Berkeley, and he ended up hiring another Berkeley PhD grad, Tyler Lee, to work it into and helping virtual assistants understand human speech. Tyler spends a lot of time thinking about how speech works in different environments like cars. Knowing context simple things like if the speakers the driver, or the passenger makes it a lot easier to understand what they're saying. For example, a driver is more likely to
ask about directions. Some of the work on context he does actually reminds him a lot of his PhD work studying you guessed it zebra fitches. The bird has to recognize what type of call is being being omitted by by the one it's hearing, uh, and then then it can go and recognize who that bird is. Is that is that a family member of mate? You know? Is it another zuber fringe or a different type of bird?
Should I be concerned? The vocal identification is one thing where it's it's context specific, and recognizing the context would let you better understand the vocal signature. Mostly, Tyler says his studies help him big picture stuff. Neuroscience teaches you how to think about complex problems of signal processing. Where I take some something from the world that comes in.
It's an image, it's uh, it's sound, and it's it's noisy, and it's high very very high dimensional, and I have to like break it down into into features that I can then use to to like do something with, solve a task with. That's what the brain does all the time, and that's sort of the abstract level. Tyler's boss a Mirror says he's no zebra finch chauvinist. He's got people on his team who studied flies, rats, locus, even worms.
These very simple organisms exhibit really complex behaviors that are still a challenge for us to to simulate and silicon using our neual networks and machine and learning. So even a simple worm inchworm is a really complicated robotic machine that's really miraculous. So we look for inspiration from simple to humans. So I guess Intel and all these other companies must be developing products which incorporate AI developed with
the help of these zebra finch experts. Besides commands to self driving cars, is there any area where knowing a lot about sound itself is helpful? And I guess when when do all these years of studying zebra finches finally pay off? You can think about features on your phone or computer that let you unlock the device with your voice, or stuff like noise reduction and phone calls and on video calls. I can't wait till I can sing a little Zebra Finch song and my phone unlocks. But anything
beyond gadgets, yeah, absolutely. Animal neuroscience connects to a lot of fields, especially health. Somewhere could be relevant for Parkinson's research because animals help researchers figure out how to stop tremors. They also help in areas like how to handle prosthetic limbs. Outside of medicine, the work might grow even more futuristic. This is where we get into dystopian scenarios. I suspect
what what else exactly like Neuralink. I mentioned that company earlier because Ellen Musk get hired a Zebra Finch scholar, and it's one of the companies that we believe is working on very futuristic technology. Ellen Musk keeps dropping hints on Twitter that the company is about to announce a big breakthrough. Nobody knows exactly what, but it's going to have something to do with brain machine interfaces. So I'm trying hard not to think about some Star Trek episodes
on this topic, which all ended quite badly. But help me understand actually what a brain machine interfaces about. I mean, at its most basic level, is this idea that you have a two way interplay between humans and computers where
you could actually funnel information back and forth. We already have examples of stuff like this with the implants that help people here or stop Parkinson's tremors in this case, I think people are looking at much more futuristic applications where you might even have like a mesh that's attached to your brain and you could full on download your brain to a machine or learn Japanese in five seconds.
There's another company called Colonel that's in this same field, and like Neuralalink, it's also very mysterious, and in some ways that's kind of the best part. When we don't know exactly what they're doing, we can imagine all kinds of crazy stuff. Going back to Elon Musk, he's been talking about where neurally could go, maybe allowing people to have this kind of superhuman cognition where you could you could think on par with a machine, are certainly much
better than we do today. That means basically stuff like you could download an entire FOURGN language directly into your brain, or maybe instantly grabbing encyclopedia. People like Timachi have been thinking about exactly these scenarios for years and can really nerd out on the possibilities. Trivia would be over, Jeopardy would not be a thing anymore. Um, Alex Trebek would be out of a job. He has some more serious
thoughts on the topic too. I find the idea that we could, you know, pretend one day in the maybe just in future, you know, really right information directly into the brain, that we could actually have a high bandwidth way, uh to get really sci fi about it, kind of a matrix E like, Um, I think that would be amazing. We are nowhere near knowing anything about how to get there. We can barely even scratch the surface of what that would be like. But you know, in terms of fantasy,
what would I like to do one day? I would love to be able to contribute even a small way to figuring out how we can have this sort of bi directional interface with the brain. Oh my god. So yeah, this is While the evocation of the matrix does not make me feel more comfortable about this, what do the skeptics say about about it all? Well, there are plenty of skeptics out there. I checked in with one scholar
at the University of Chicago, Dan Margolias. The idea that we're going to reverse engineers, not reverse engineer, uh, forward engineer or the human brain, so we can download tons of material into it very rapidly. And I don't know what pick up a language overnight or something. I it's it's the way people make progresses to dream and so I'm I'm a scientist. I'm for that. But that really sounds more fantastical than realistic. It ignores it ignores the
remarkable ways we learn, and it ignores our evolutionary history. Um, so I would, I would. Uh, it'll be interesting to see what progress they make for sure. So guys, the possibility of super human cognition sounds appealing. Um, you know, if we're up to you two and and somebody was offering to put a chip or an apparatus and in the year brains like they're doing to the to the poor little zebra finch, would you do it? I mean, you know, in some sence, we're already doing this stuff today.
If you have an implant to help you here, or things to stop Parkinson's tremors, yeah, if I had one of those conditions, I would absolutely get one of these implants and supercharge myself. When you start going into this this next wave of stuff. It gets I think, far more philosophical and complicated, because you're talking about changing humans from what they are, some sort of weird next step
of evolution where we're kind of half man half machine. Um. You know, in some ways there's people I talked to, like the guys at Colonel, who argue that this is the only way humans will be able to keep up with machines. And we always hear about losing jobs artificial intelligence and and seeing what humans can do going away. And so you know, if you're half and half, you can you can keep up, but maybe keep some of your humanness as well. Sarah, what about cyborg? Sarah McBride,
will we ever see? Will we ever see that? I already hate myself, so I doubt it. But um, what about this idea of keeping up with robots? And and yeah, there are people who think that AI could help us solve problems like climate change. I think that's too optimistic. The funny part about doing the story for me was that that in the AI camp you tend to have I feel like people who think the technology is really far along. You know, if you're talking about specifically computer
scientists and the Silicon Valley kind of crew. Um, they're very impressed what they've come up with over the last few years. When we went to talk to all these brain researchers, the ones who are down in the box, down at the neurons, they seemed, on the whole to me much more skeptical about when we would see huge breakthroughs.
They seem to think that a lot of this stuff was years and years away, and and I felt like they had this sense of how complicated the brain really is and that unlocking its secrets is going to take along. But given the fact that they are taking the first steps to what will ultimately be very transformative and challenging, controversial technology. Sarah, did you get the sense that they
were wrestling with the ethical complications of their work? You know, a lot of them actually turned out to have studied philosophy at some point in their careers, which I thought was pretty interesting. And yeah, they talk about the decisions that a carmaker might have to make. Is it more important to preserve the life of a passenger or a pedestrian, stuff like that. So, yeah, they're thinking about these big problems. That doesn't mean they know how to answer them though,
any more than we would. But they say that it means these systems will be very human one day. Do they understand that they have now found themselves right at the center of this next wave in in computing. I mean they do to a degree. They're definitely excited. I mean, just in very crass terms. A lot of these people get much better job offers than they would have in the past. You know, there used to be far less neuroscience graduates. It wasn't that appealing of a field. We
didn't know much about the brain. All these promised breakthroughs weren't happening at all. In Now you can go to a university do this amazing work, or if you kind of get tired of that, or you want to poke around somewhere else, you can go work for one of these tech companies and get paid I don't know, like ten times what you need to make at one of these labs. Well, to bring this all the way back to the beginning, Sarah, is it too early? When I talked to Alexa or Sirie or Google Voice to thank
the little zebra finch? Can we can we see any of the zebra finch and that research in today's AI. We see some of it already and things like voice recognition and making better audio quality, but I think some of the biggest stuff is uh yet to come, and we can always check in with Timachi. And that's it for this week's episode of Decrypted. Thanks for listening. We always like to know what you think of the show.
You can write to us at Decrypted at Bloomberg dot net or I'm on Twitter at McBride s G, I'm at Bradstone, and I'm at Valley Hack. And please help us spread the word about our show by leaving us a rating or review in your favorite podcast app. This episode was produced by Pierre Gadkari and Lindsay Cradowell. Our story editor was Aki Ito. Thank you also to Ann vander May and Emily Buso. Francesca Levi is head of Bloomberg Podcasts. We'll see you next week.