What will Computer Implants do for our Brains?

at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in North Carolina. Their names are Sam Deadweiler and Robert Hampson, and they've been studying rat brains for a few decades now. But one of their studies on what's going on in these tiny rat naggins suggests some fascinating implications for the future of adding technology to the human brain. How's that? Well, all right,

so let me set this up here. So, in a study, they got two sets of rats that are trained to run between two areas of their cage and on one side of the cage, they learned to press these levers at a certain sequence and that helps them get a reward. However, over time, one set of these is trained to wait for up to thirty seconds before they could press the appropriate lever to get their reward. Now, the second set

didn't have a wait. But when the second set was forced to experience a delay of their own, they were completely thrown off and they forgot which lever they needed to push. So here's where the crazy part comes in. The brain activity in the first set of rats. You know, these are the ones that had to learn to wait.

They had been recorded, you know, once they'd learned the lever to push, and then using electrodes dead Wilder and Hampson stimulated this same series of brain activity for the second set of rats, and this time they began behaving as though they had been trained like the first set of rats, and began choosing the right lever despite the fact that they had not actually been trained to do this. That's insane. Yeah, It's as though they had memories and

planet of things they had not actually experienced. And this got me thinking, you know, as this evolves, what will it mean for humans? And how are scientists currently using machines in the human brain? And what are our brains capable of when computers are built in These are just a few of the questions will be asking him today's episode.

So let's get started, hey, their podcast listeners, welcome to Part Time Genius I'm Will Pearson and as always I'm joined by my good friend Man Guesh Ticketer and on the other side of the soundproof glass, eating but apparently not sharing a big old bag of Smarties as our

friend and producer Tristan McNeil. And that seems fitting because in today's episode we're going to be talking about the incredible advances and understanding the human brain, as well as hacking the brain with technology so that we can treat diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's as well as those who have been affected by stroke, but also just to see how much more the brain is capable of if given

some additional firepower. Yeah, I'm sure this is just the first of a ton of episodes we'll do on the brain, but there's just something so fascinating about the research happening right now, and so many things that once seemed like science fiction that are now possible. So that's what we decided to focus on. Yeah, and I'm so excited to have a real superstar in this field on with us

in a bid. His name is John krak Our, and he's a neuroscientist and neurologist at Johns Hopkins and he's also the director of the Brain Learning, Animation and Movement Laboratory, also known as BLAMAM. The best aconem in the business, and obviously he's so interesting. I can't wait to get him on the line. But before we do, we need to back up just a little and and talk about how we got where we are in terms of the technology being added to our neural systems. I mean, not

our specifically, but humans in general. Right right, Well, you know, it's crazy to realize that two thousand seventeen marks sixty years since the first human trials for cochlear implants. These implants were designed with electrodes positioned in the inner ear to transmit sound to the brain, and then in nineteen sixty four, after those trials, the first cochlear implant was

tested in a human volunteer. This was a huge step in helping us to see that electronic devices could be built to take sense reinformation and you know, such as sound, to translate it into a language that the brain could then process. So I really had no idea than that long and and of course today they are much more sophisticated cochlear implants helping tens of thousands of new patients every year. Yeah, we should probably quickly note that there

are two general types of neural implants. First, you have input devices, you know, like we described with cochlear implants. These are the kind that takes sensory information from the outside world and pass that along to our nervous system via electrical signals. And then you have retinal implants, which are also pretty amazing and they're another form of input device. And then you'll also find devices that are used to help control seizures, you know from epilepsy or maybe tremors

caused by Parkinson's against signals brought in from the outside world. Sure, and and the progress they're making on treating things like Parkinson's through deep brain stimulation implants is incredible. So I didn't realize that there have now been over a hundred thousand people treated with these. And for our listeners when Will and I were at Mental Floss, we have really teamed up with National Geographic to help demystify brain surgery.

We did the show called Brain Surgery Live, where we followed the story of this wonderful man who had been suffering from Parkinson's tremors for over a decade and we got to see how when surgeons inserted electrodes into the patient's basil ganglia, which is this area of the brain that's most affected by Parkinson's, and then when they stimulated those electrodes with a battery, the patient's tremors stopped completely. Like it was one of the most miraculous things I've

ever seen. This gentleman who couldn't easily hold a piece of paper because he was shaking so much, suddenly had these tremors turned off, and he had so much dexterity, Like he sent a message to his family from the operating room on an iPad and it was just incredible. Yeah, it definitely was. Alright, So so those are all examples of input devices. So now let's talk about output devices,

which have come along more recently. And you know, these are the devices that take information in the opposite direction. They read and record brain activity and then translate that into signals for some outside use. You stay controlling a prosthetic arm, for example. And I know this is much more recent, but we're still talking to a couple of decades, right, Yeah, I'm pretty sure it was. Which is the your most people associate with the release of Mariah Carey and Boys,

Two Men's One Sweet Day. I mean, you remember what a huge year that was because of that, But you know, it was also the year that researchers first and planted electrodes into the brain of a monkey and then helped it use a prosthetic arm. And as we mentioned earlier

back in our will We Ever Live Without Sleep? Episode, we talked about how we've gotten so much better at observing brain patterns and can actually see the same areas of the brain light up as we run through those memories again during sleep, and that helps us consolidate those memories well in a similar kind of observation. When they place electrodes on the motor cortex of these monkeys, they can then observe spikes in the activity of certain neurons.

And as they observe these of the course of several studies, they began to figure out what patterns of spikes corresponded with certain our motions, and over time the researchers figure about how to teach the monkeys to control a robotic arm, you know, just using their brain signals. And of course the next step was then to figure out how to

do this, you know, for people. Yeah, so I actually read a good bit about this, especially as it related to helping those dealing with paralysis, and I think the first person to use a brain implant to both use certain functions on a computer screen and to gain some functionality from a prosthetic hand was this guy named Matthew Nagle back in two thousand four. So he was paralyzed from the neck down. So this was a big step, and though with the brain being such a complicated organ,

there's clearly a long way to go. So researchers are still working on ways to improve this technology, and as of now, patients still have to be connected to a computer for it to work. But it's still pretty remarkable what's happened in efforts to help those fighting paralysis. Yeah, we were talking about some of these yesterday, and I actually think it would be helpful if you would just walk us through some of the most recent progress in this area. Sure, well, several things have happened in the

past year or two. On the communications front. We've placed electrodes inside the brain of woman with a LS, allowing her to communicate simply by using her thoughts. Basically, she uses an eye tracker to spell words on a screen. But at some point, like many people with a LS,

she may lose that ability as well. So she's participating in this other study where they've implanted an electrode system over the region of the brain that affects hand movement, and after a bit of training, just by imagining moving her hand, she was actually able to make selections on a screen, And she's apparently gotten this down to accuracy, which is just unbelieved. I just have a hard time wrapping my head around how this is even possible. Yeah,

it's really is amazing. So in recent years we've also seen some major leaps in terms of motion and touch. So last year, this partially paralyzed man was able to pour liquid from a bottle, and even more impressively, he was able to play guitar hero because they had an electrode sleeve that was connected to the motor cortex in

his brain. And in another study, scientists helped this quadriplegic man feel as though he was touching certain objects through a robotic arm, like he could actually yield objects all by tapping into a somatosensory cortex. I mean, I can only imagine how strange and guessing overwhelming that was to regain this sense of touch. Definitely, it all just seems so unreal. And there's also this electrode cap that's actually

helped some paralyzed people begin walking again. It's a little different than the others because the cap is connected to this exoskeleton which is on the person's legs, and as signals get sent from the cap to the exoskeleton, it allows the legs to move, which is awesome. But there's actually been some cases that paralyzed people learning to walk without the exoskeleton in recent years. Like the cap sends signals to electrodes implanted into the person's own legs, that's

so cool. A Alright, so we've talked about input devices and output devices, and you might be wondering what the next step in the evolution is, and it's something called bidirectional interfaces, and these combined the input and the output and they could be huge and helping those deal with damaged nervous systems. So, well, let's say somebody had a stroke and as a result of that, there are parts of their nervous system that are not really communicating or

appropriately connected anymore. And so through the use of a bidirectional implant, you might be able to re establish this connection and give them the ability to use a body part that had effectively been paralyzed due to the stroke. But what's even more fascinating is that there's a developing area that's still very very early days. So what's that. Well, it involves playing with memories, and apparently we might be able to restore memories by using an implant to replace

the input and output flow from the hippo campus. And and this is the area of the brain that's responsible for memory formation. Well, let's talk a little bit more about memory and some of that research you mentioned at the very top of the show. I mean, the idea that scientists could basically transplant the memories of a bunch of rats into a single rats brain and then watch it behave as though it learned certain things through experience, even though it hadn't. I mean, that's just so crazy

to me and also just so hard to believe. And that's pretty much what Deadweiler said about the science community's response to his five findings at first. I mean, he said, no one's going to believe this until I do a

hundred control experiments. But play this out for me a little like what does all of this mean for people, Well, there's obviously a long way to go to apply this to the same type of neural and plant and humans, but you know, the thinking is that something like this could play a very real role in helping somebody with Alzheimer's or someone who out of stroke, you know, get

some of their brain function back. I mean, the problem of memory losses that it often results in damage in the brain that prevents the flow of information between two locations. And so if you could essentially create a way to bypass the damaged areas, you might be able to create both new memories and hopefully regain the ability to access

old ones, which is a fascinating idea. Though obviously memories this super complicated thing, right, I mean, while the hippocampus is where long term memories are formed, you still have to consider all these other areas of the brain that are working together. And that's true, so it's it's a very difficult task. But there are many researchers that believe at some point it might be possible to put in implant in the hippo campus and actually be able to

record memories as they come together. Of course, they then have to figure out that you know, the neural signals or the codes that are the indicators of certain memories. Yeah, and and of course no one's saying this will be an easy task, but I was reading about some researchers that are working to try and figure out how to crack the code around certain memories and understand this has to happen among the millions and millions of neurons firing.

But scientists like Theodore Burger at the University of Southern California are actually making real progress towards this. Yeah. And actually Burger was one of them that teamed up with dead Wilder and Hampson on some of their rats studies, so specifically in studies where they drugged rats to mimic amnesia so they wouldn't be able to remember the whole lever pushing thing. But then after using electrodes to stimulate the same neural pattern, the rats were able to remember

what to do. Yeah. So, uh, I don't know about roofy rats, but the potential applications of this are truly staggering. But but I guess one question I have is whether there's a neural code that applies to everyone, or whether everyone's is different. That's a very good point that they're still trying to figure out all the specifics of this. But I have to be honest, I can't wait to get our guests on the line to get his thoughts on some even more mind blowing possibilities of this brain

machine connection. Yeah, let's do it. So our guest today is a neuroscientist and professor at Johns Hopkins. He's also the founder and director of the Brain Learning, Animation and Movement Laboratory or BLAM as mango and I love to say, and his work in helping treat stroke patients is just fascinating and we're thrilled to have him on today. John Krakauer, welcome to part time Genius. Thank you. I certainly I'm only a part time genius. So you're joining us from

a cafe in Lisbon, Portugal, Is that right? Yeah? I mean Portugal. I spend a month and you know too, usually a month and a half every year. Yeah. So that a visiting exhibition of a fantastic place. It's talking about names. It's called the Shampolo mo Center for the Unknown. So, John, knowing that stroke is the leading cause of disability in the US and often causes complete arm and or leg paralysis and people. This is obviously very important work to

many many people. Yeah, but you've explained that one of the things we failed to understand for so long was just how critical it is to begin rehab as quickly as possible. So can you talk a little bit about this and the studies that led to this realization. Yeah, so, Um,

it's a it's a long story really. In other words, Strokes has been really interesting to neurologists over a century, and they were very much interested in studying animals, particularly primate non even primates sort of guests some of the

mechanisms of the deficit office Strokes. And it's ironic that if you look at the very early study in the early twentieth century, there was evidence that the animals had the potential to get better early on after the lesions were into and especially if you encourage them with training.

So it was there in the early literature, um, and then it's not clear that ever sort of got through to the clinicians and the therapists, and a certain nihilism and a certain pessimism seconds um, and the general impetus was to try to make people better early but not with very high doses or to help people cope with what they had left. So, John, your team developed a system of therapy. They're involved in exo skeleton, robotics, brain stimulation,

and a game where you control a dolphin. Can Can you tell us a little bit about the game you developed and how things are going in you're testing well, I should stay stay right from the beginning, it's been a painful, low process. We are hoping to be able to look at the data by the end of the year. I cannot tell you any results. I don't know that yet. Um Now, in terms of why, it's actually a bit of a bit of a story, the major answers, how do you get people to make hundreds, if not thousands,

of continuous movements day in day out. In other words, the animal egg suggestive you needed thousands of movements of titrated difficult movements. You know, you're not going to get somebody to pick up a glass of water five hundred times in a row. You're not going to get someone to use in life and fork, you know, thousands of repetitions,

so it's not a trivial thing. How do you get people into a context where they're going to be making the kinds of movements you want them to use in everyday life, but in a way you trick them into making them in the under conditions. But there's so much fun they don't realize they're practicing one. I mean, I don't know if any of you've ever had the abilitation for anything, you know, elbow surgery, shoulder surgery, and I have, and it's so boring that I was a terrible patience.

I didn't even do the ten minutes quite a day that I was meant to do. It was so dull. Now imagine that in the conditions of strokes. So one thing we know is having an illness, being brain damaged business in it of itself an incentive to go to the gym or the equivalent. So we had to find a way to make people do stuff that was fun, and we also wanted to do something that the movements they made were general, they were useful for everyday life.

Because there's something, you know, the learning that's called the curse of charte specificity. But if you practice task A, you only get good at tak A, and it doesn't make you any better at task B, two or D.

And how do you guys, come up with a dolphin concept. Well, okay, so there's a lot of data to show you if you put wraps after brain injury into enriched environment and as you put them in a little cage full of ramps and spinning wheels and balls and friends, they do much better even if you don't train them on the top to test him on. So that was the final sort of clue it needs to be in an emotional, immersive,

motivated environments. And then I met these remarkable to people to meet Roy and o'barmage who were both graduate students, well they've both been undergrad and grad ad Hopkins and they were doing beautiful gaming um where they were simulating

animal movements. And I had gone to the Hopkins campus looking for young gamers and I found them, introduced to them, and they showed me what they had done, and I realized that I wanted to go a step further and not to have people watch beautiful movement on a game, but the to take the execlusive step of controlling it

if you became the character in the game. So basically imagine gaming meats Pixar meets new controlling the characters using into the idea that if you had a dolphin, which is a beautiful animal that we love to watch moves. That's why we love dolph, which you love their acrobatics and they love continuously in the water and there's no

stopping is starting. I mean you can be moving your arms around continuously without starting and stopping because eused to you stop moving your arm, the animal will continue to move through the water. Bribesmen, So we thought that we could make patients babble like children do, moving in this cloud of everyday life. We'll tell us what else you

guys are focused on it blam right now. So you can actually take somebody who's locked their hands through an actiment soldier for example, so they can have just a stump where their hand was and the using prospect for years. And you can take the towns of someone who died and basically reconnected to someone else's body, so you can basically have someone else's hand. There are many many ways that you could basically expand the the repertoires in the

movement by actually having more than just your hands. In other words, the irony right on the one hand, you want to use this app to training just to have a hand like everybody else it is healthy people. You could go beyond the hand. Yeah, that was one of the things that Will and I were both fascinated by in that article, the idea that we could almost like upgrade our boring old hands. We don't know what the upper limit times. What if you what if somebody was

to be born in eight homes? Because in the minute, each of your muscle fibers might be the admit you see many many, many many muffles make up your arm. And we talk about just controlling, but you're actually controlling much the d of your muscles in your heart. So you can you start thinking the way I'm laying out now, imagine what the range of its impacting, the words you could have if you were to st combinatory slow in that way. Yeah, it's so crazy to think where your

brain might max out. Yeah, instead of we could have a New Yorker cartoon where the the conductor, instead of having all the musicians in the orchestra is all the musicians. That's pretty incredible. Well, John, we we really appreciate the work you're doing. It's both fascinating and obviously, you know, life changing for a lot of people. So thank you for that work and thank you for joining us today on Part Time Genius. It was an athlete pleasure and

you guys are wonderful. A pat to welcome back to Part Time Genius, no Ango. Before the break, we were talking about the possibilities of using devices in our brains to assist with memory. Yeah, and there are actually a few other things related to this field that I wanted to talk about before we move on. All right, we'll

go for it. Well. The first is something I was reading about a new scientist, and this is the possibility that we could one day and plan a chip in people who had suffered some sort of brain damage, and this chip would include code that would help these people accomplish some of the basic things lost after a stroke

or some other form of damage. There's a quote from Justin Sanchez, who works in neuroprosthetics at the University of Miami and Florida, and it goes, before we can get someone with brain damage back to work, we want to return their capability to form those fundamental declarative memories. Yeah. It's fascinating to think of that being a possibility, and I can't even imagine how life changing it would be for people struggling to tackle some of the basic life

skills they may have once had. Sure, and and then you take it a step further right, because Sanchez also told new scientists, think of the guy coming back from war who can't remember his wife's face. And that's heartbreaking to think about. But the science behind it and how they're approaching the science, that's fascinating. And we can actually come back to more studies from dead Wilder and Hampson on this sod did you read about their studies on maccas, Yeah,

I did so for the listeners. This is a study where they showed the maccas and image on the screen and and then have them pick out that image once it was part of a much bigger collection of images. This happened a minute or so later, and and during this the researchers were martyring their brains and observing the signals involved in this process. And then they added drugs and these were to prevent the macaques from turning this event into a long term memory. It effectively made them

forget it happened. But then the scientists had them performed the task again, and when they did, they hit the neurons with the same pattern of signals they observed earlier, and the macaques seem to know exactly what to look for. You know, there are a couple of pieces of us that are just super interesting to me. So one is what Deadwiler and Hampson and other researchers believe about how memory works, and and that is that the brain patterns

they observe aren't necessarily attached to an exact image. It's really more that our brains tend to break things down into features, so you know, like by shape or color or size, and then this collection of information, when that's piece together, that's what helps us recall an object or a person specifically. That's crazy, like I never would have thought about that. Well, and the other thing that's so interesting is our brains plasticity and its ability to learn

to work with these devices. So so let's go back for a minute to the neural implants used to control a robotic arm. The interesting thing is the way that the neurons are working to control the robotic arm, that that they're not identical to the way it would move a typical arm. But our brains adapt and they observe and they learn, and then because of this neurofeedback, they master attack ask, even if it means doing that task

in a slightly different way. Yeah, and the same thing happens with the stimulation used to assist with memory, Like our our brain's plasticity helps us work with these devices to learn. And now DARK was getting more and more interested in this type of research, and I always forget what it stands for US. I wrote down, that's the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and they have something

they're calling the Restoring Active Memory Project. They're basically investing significant sums to try and develop technology that could be implanted to help a range of people dealing with brain injury. So that means like the soldiers were turning home with injury, to to those battling Alzheimer's, to those who suffered strokes. You know. And while the applications are truly incredible, I do think we have to at least note some of the ethical concerns and risk involved in all of this.

I mean, think about what it means to be able to implant memories, especially memories that might not be our own. I mean, some would argue that our collection of memories is really at the core of who we are, and if our memories at some point, are are more of a computer algorithm than you know then something our own brains are producing. Are we still us? I mean that's kind of deep to me, Mano, I don't know how you feel about it. Well, I had to drop out

of a philosophy course for too deep. Another concern is just the possibility of certain flaws or downsides to the way the chips work. So let's say they don't just bring up things we want to remember, but things we really don't and have moved on from. I'm not saying it's not worth doing this for the people who we've talked about. I mean, I think we absolutely should, but they're definitely gonna be some hurdles ahead. Well, there's there's

one other weird thought about this. So so let's say we're using these devices and because of regained access to memories, we might behave a little bit differently for better or worse. Let's say in this case it's for worse, and then there are consequences for that behavior. Could you then have somebody that would argue that the memories that lead to that said behavior were you know, not really their own,

and therefore shouldn't be the ones facing the consequences. Yeah, I mean, the legal stuff is gonna be this other patch of problems. But I'm going to choose to be optimistic here and especially in the way it will help those dealing with brain injury and disease. And I just think it's going to be fascinating to watch. Well, you don't have to wait decades to be fascinated, because guess what time it is? Time for the PGG fact off. Yeah,

it's I'm gonna kick this off here. It turns out researchers are better at understanding why after a night of drinking, despite all those recent self promises you've made to eat better and lose a few pounds, your hungry brain goes into overdrive and you find yourself running for the border

to down a handful of Darrito's tacos. In a study of mice, of course, they booze them up and martyred their brain activity, and when the mice were completely pickled, they noticed a spike in activity in a group of neurons called a g r P and these are the ones that are activated when our bodies are actually facing starvation, and as a result, the mice ate more. But when the scientists got them drunk again and block the A g RP neurons. With medication, the mice didn't eat as much.

And the thinking is these same neurons are the ones responsible for our post drunken feast. You know, I feel like we've talked about drunk mice a couple of times in this episode. All right, where do I want to start. Let's see. Um. Well, as we've learned more about how the brain works, I find those little tricks or shortcuts that our brains used for making memories so interesting. And there's some other ways our brains take shortcuts that that I also find pretty interesting to look at. And one

of these deals with peripheral vision. So, according to a study in the journal Psychological Science, researchers found that our brains often make up things in our peripheral vision that that aren't actually there. And this is because our brains focus on our central vision intend to just make educated guesses about our peripheral vision. I love that. So, despite what your mother may have told you, it's a myth that we're born with all our brain cells will ever have.

This study out of Sweden in the late nineties help scientists prove that the hipocampus forms new neurons pretty much our entire lives. And in this other study, also out of Sweden, Wow, Sweden is really doing it. Yeah, they're killing it. A team of researchers show that new brain cells are formed in the striatum. It's a part of the brain involved in motor control and decision making, among

other things. All right, well here's another one. I think we've all heard that exercise is good for the brain. In fact, studies have shown that taking half hour walks a few times a week helps our abstract reasoning skills and even helps with the growth of new cells and the hippocampus. Kind Of like you were just talking about, but I didn't realize that the effect can happen in the reverse direction as well, That is, mental exercise can

be good for your physique. To one, study done at the Cleveland Clinics show that those who spent fifteen minutes a day thinking about exercising their biceps actually increase the strength of their biceps by over a three month period. I'm gonna start thinking so hard about my biceps. Yeah that's awesome. Uh so, do you know a bigger brain doesn't necessarily mean a smarter brain. Uh, the average human brain is three pounds and Einstein's was only two point

seven pounds, And I think that's pretty solid proof. Yeah, I would agree with that. Well, your brain generates twenty watts of power, which is actually enough to run a regular sized LED bulb. You know how we talk about people being auditory or visual learners. Yeah, well, well, while it may be true that we all have our preferences and how we learn, like you might prefer to read something instead of hearing it in lecture form, there really

aren't studies to back up this idea. I mean, when tested students tended to perform similarly regardless of whether they were taught in their preferred method or some other method. That is surprising. Yeah, I've always just assumed that we were either one or the other. So I think I'm going to give you this week's fact Off trophy. Congratulations, and if there any brain facts you feel we should know, hit us up at part time genius at how stuff

works dot com. You can also find us on Facebook or Twitter, or as always called our fact hot Line one eight four four pt genius. It's it's still seven fact hot Line. I think it's still all right. So call us there. Thanks so much for listening. Thanks again for listening. Part Time Genius is a production of how stuff works, and wouldn't be possible without several brilliant people who do the important things we couldn't even begin to understand.

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