Neural Pixie Dust

of having these sort of neural prosthetics. I didn't call him that, but it's more like brain computer interfaces. And this was a wild idea in the seventies. But hey, let's let's get real here. I mean, this thing is happening. In two thousand and three, the world's first brain prosthesis was put into an animal, and then just this year there was an auditory brain implant in a toddler. So we can see that this is becoming more and more common. And I attended a panel at the World Science Festival

on this very topic. It's called cells to silicon your brain. And by the way, it always seems to be like the the year that all this stuff is going to be here for real. I don't know if you've noticed that, but they talked about the steps there that they're taking right now to make this more of a reality. And

we'll talk about that in a second. Yeah. Yeah, to your point, those are the new two thousand's, I guess, the years we can look to and say, this is the technology we're gonna have, This is the life we're gonna have because of these advancements. And to your point, we've seen some pretty impressive steps made thus far. I mean, the uh cyborg rat with the with the brain berth

thesis and cyborg Toddler. It's pretty great now not to not to to get too caught up in the idea of the cyborg, because if we've we've discussed before, technological adaptations on your body, inside your body are becoming more and more every day, you know, ranging from a pacemaker to a risk watch, and so we're just seeing the natural extrapolation of that idea. Yeah, you're augmenting your natural abilities, right. I wear glasses, so I'm augmenting my vision. Yeah. None

of this makes anybody less human. All it does is either makes up for injuries or or or some sort of shortcomings in one's biology, or it is it is gaming the system a bit, or maybe gaming the system a lot, depending on what the augmentation is well. And you would need this sort of gaming of the system quite a bit if you were someone like I say, stroke patient who have lost the ability to move your limbs. And neuroscientists John Donohue was actually talking about this on

the panel. Specifically, he referenced a stroke patient named Cathy, and he showed this film of her. She sustained permanent damage to her brain and as a result, the axons that run along her spine and deliver information from her motor cortex or her limbs were incapacitated, and so she was relegated to a life in a wheelchair with others

helping her to move and to feed her. And then she signed on to this five year experiment with Donna Hue and others other researchers, and there was an implant inserted into her brain that interacted with robotic arms that would do some things for her, like like get the coffee, like actually bring coffee to her lips, which she hadn't

done for years. Yeah, in the video footage, of this is pretty remarkable because, yeah, she has not in and over a decade, she has not raised a cup of coffee to her own lips, of her own volition, and now she's doing it. She's thinking the robot arm into action. It's there's nothing, you know, she's not moving anything with their tongue, it's nothing with their muscles. It's all inside her mind. She's thinking about the movement and it is happening,

and it's amazing. It's it's it's the stuff that you would often think, even today, you tend to think of as science fiction, the idea that I'm commanding a machine with my mind, I'm moving something other than my physical body with my mind, and yet here it is. Yeah, it is amazing. And so how do you get your thoughts externally out there to do something for you. Well, it turns out that what you do is you insert

a wire into the r motor cortex. And what this wire is doing, it's just it's not a very big wire, so it's not like she's got things, you know, sticking out of her head. But what it's doing is it's fishing for neural spikes. Now, what are neural spikes? Okay, every time neurons fire in the brain, they're shuttling ions back and forth, and there's an electrical potential change there.

So if you have a wire inserted into the brain that can detect that electrical change and when it does, uh, you know, changes in the ions when you're on stir about and meat Uh, it will actually transmit information out to a computer to say, I detect neural activity here right now, and it's measuring that. So we've talked about this before with the Jennifer anistone neurons. I think that's

what we called them. That when someone is thinking about Jennifer Anderson, some people I which I should say not everybody, you will see a spike in neuronal activity because there's a whole database of information and memory they are related to Jennifer Aniston and so the signal is really very strong. Well, the same thing happens when you're thinking and you're concentrating, like I would like to move my arm right now,

and I'm trying to think about moving my arm. All of those neurons which sort of coalesced together to give off a strong signal, and that's what that wire could detect, identifying what that signal looks like and then feeding it out to this machine. I I often in looking at this topic, I keep thinking of it in terms of the road, like a mountain road. The early examples we talked about that the rat prosthesis that had to do with the damaged hippocampus, or the the toddler um prosthesis,

which specifically was an auditory brain stem and plant. These are cases where you have point A, point B, and point C. All right, you know you have a road, imagine a road across the mountains from your house to the store. But then that middle point is is a part of the road that's washed away by by a flood. So what do you do? How do you get from

A to to C? Well, you put a bridge over it, right, And that's what a lot of this technology is figuring out how to fill in that that gap, to how to bridge that gap from from one from a healthy part of the brain to another healthy part of well, let's just say, a healthy part of the chain of of of action and reaction to to bridge that gap, you know, in a way that lets you function again. And then in this we see we see a situation

where we're not only bridging the gap. We're building the bridge out of the organism itself into an external system, an external robotic system. You're right, because in this case,

point A is the neuronal activity. Point B would normally be those acts on in her spine, but because they can't send the signals to the body, what we're doing here are what researchers are doing is they're taking those signals out externally, out of the organism, as you say, into the computer to decode that neuronal activity, and then points C would be the robotic arms instead of her

own arms. And what is so amazing, so fascinating about this is that what they're doing is that they're taking the sounds that that these neuronal spikes made and they're decoding them. So you might have like five blips that that really mean move the arm to the right. You might have seven blips that are decoded as move the arm to the left, and that is then being put

into the robotic arm as a command. So the fact that they can even take the information out and decode it in a way that makes sense um and then obviously matches up to what Cathy is thinking because she can corroborate that. Yeah, you really get the sense. It's almost like listening to a conversation through a wall, and they're making sense of it through uh in sort of indirect ways, but they're getting enough information out of it.

They're getting they're they're getting enough of the points they get their high highlighting those neural spikes and then figuring out what it's it's asking for and then reproducing it. Now, the crazy thing about this, it's that they are getting this neuronal activity from just a sampling of the neurons. So maybe about fifty neurons out of the billions of neurons in your brain, uh or the billions of synapsis.

So that's I mean, that's tiny, that tiny bit of neural activity can be picked up and then acted upon. I believe in the in the in they talk to you you attended World Science Festial Robert crow which Um compared it to to voting, where you have like a small portion of the population that's voting and the rest are not voting, but you're you're figuring out what the public wants as a whole based on this small sample. And that's kind of what's happened here with the with this situation. Yeah,

definitely check this out. You can go to RORLD Science Festival to their website and just look for cells to Silicon and you can see this talk. It's really great. Um, so there are drawbacks this of course. There's the idea that it may not be something that you could have in your brain long term. Kathy has had it for five years. She hasn't had any problems. But we know

that the body doesn't like foreign objects in it. That's true. Also, it's worth noting that the robotic reach and grasp actions are not going to be as fast as or as accurate as those of the enable bodied person. I think that's that's that should be pretty obvious. We're not at the point in the technology where it's going to be a one for one, but but it's it's a step in that direction. Yeah, and uh. Donny Hue says that the neural spikes are not always the same from trial

to trial. In other words, there's five blips, might be six flips the next time or seven, and so they have to figure out the pattern each time. And he said that it's very likely that those neural spikes are influenced by other conditions at the time, so it could be hunger, it could be a particularly emotional state or

a physical state. UM, which is all really fascinating because we've talked about a propri reception before, and we talked about it and people who have lost the ability to move their limbs and um, and how all of this influences the body, the physical state of the body. So um. Obviously it's not something that is perfect right now, but it's the beginnings of something that could be really important, that kind of neural pixie dust of the future. And

we'll get to that later. Now. Another fascinating example of this technology can be found in the work of HeLa Nuremberg, who is a neuroscientist working on technology for a prosthetic I yeah, because she says that more than ten million people in the US are blind or facing blindness because of diseases like macular degeneration, and for the vast majority of them, it's the prosthetic devices that are available right now that are their best hope, but the ones that

that are common right now are not necessarily the best. And she has created a neural prosthetic device that is amazing. Yeah. Now think back again to that analogy I'm made about the road point A, point B. In point C and point B that middle point is washed out by a flood. How do you get across it? How do you build

that bridge? So, when when you're looking at something just with normal vision, normal healthy vision, you have the image that's going to your eye, it's hitting your retina and then the middleman that point B that it is the retinal circuitry, and this essentially extracts information from it and converts it into a code. And these are electrical pulses that are sent to the brain. So to your point, what do you do when the photo receptors die? What

do you do when one link in the chain vanishes? Yeah, because that's what happens with macular degeneration. Those photoreceptors on the retina die off, and then over time all the other cells and the circuits that are connected to them die off to renderingly you effectively blind. So the only thing that you're left with are those put cells, and those are the ones that send the signals to the brain. But because of all that degeneration, they're not sending any

signals anymore. And if you have a regular prosthetic for eyesight, um you could allow a person to see bright lights or high contrast edges, but these are shadowy with like really no real detail. And what you're using in this regular prosthetic for eyesight is an encoder that takes in light,

but the firing pattern is all over the place. So what you need then is a device that can mimic the actions of that the front end circuitry of sight send signals to the retina's output cells and and and in this you're you end up mimicking the actions of that front end circuitry, so you're taking the image converting them into the retina's own code. Yeah. What Nuremberg has created is um this prosthetic device that has two parts,

an encoder and a transducer. Now that encoder mimics the actions that you say, that front end circuitry, and then the transducer makes the output cells send the code to the sin and the result is this retinal prosthetic that can produce normal retinal output. And we're talking about is is a set of equations that they can implement on a chip. And so she's saying, hey, it's just math here. And that's the exciting part is that if you take these two components of the prosthetic device, then you can

mimic real eyesight in a person who is blind. Yeah, it's pretty pretty, pretty phenomenal. And we're talking about that the individual would wear a sort of camera that has an encoder of a device that's taking that information from the camera and translating it into the retinas code, translating it into a version that the brain can make sense of. You're talking about a real direct link between mechanical artificial

sensory and organic reasoning of that sense information. Now, to get a sense of this, you should definitely check out the talk because she shows two different examples of how this works with a regular prosthetic device and with this new one. And what she shows is sort of a readout of the neural firing activity and regular eyesight um the regular prosthetic and the new one. And you will see that in the new prosthetic and regular eyes eyesight,

those patterns are almost identical. It's not perfect, but that middle part, the regular one right now that just has the encoder that just takes in light, is very imperfect. And then she gives the second example of she said, you know, we wanted to take a snapshot of what people were seeing or what these primates were seeing, because I believe they're in human trials right now, clinical trials. But what those um images that we're seeing. You see

the regular eyesight, you see a baby's face. It's perfectly rendered, of course, right because you have perfect eyesight. Then you have the regular prosthetic and it's very shadowy. You can't even make out the pattern, which is amazing because you know, you and I have discussed before how humans are pattern recognition machines and yet there's no not enough data points

here to really make a clear picture. And then you have this new device that she came up with, and it is plain as day that that is the baby space. It is not exact, but can you imagine being someone who has lost their sight and you all of a sudden are hooked up with this neural prosthetic device for your eye and you're able to see something is I don't know, iconic and recognizable as a tree or a

baby space. Again, yeah, I mean you would have have some level of detail as well as just you know, an abstract idea of your environment just for navigational purposes. So it's pretty pretty amazing stuff. Yeah, And as you had said, this sort of washed out areas, um, you know, from points A to C. This is something that Nuremberg is is imagining for the rest of the brains, and not just eyesight, but for stroke victims. So in the cortex of trying to create this sort of communications center

using the same sort of device. Yeah, figuring any any kind of situation where there's a there's a gap, where there's a missing link in the chain or a damage link in the chain, then we could conceivably go in there and build that that bridge, that neural bridge from point A to point C. All Right, we're gonna take a quick break, and when we get back, we're going to talk about it. Just sort of neural dust that we may all have sprinkled into our brains in the year.

All right, we're back. Uh So, if you were not future shocked by the earlier information about sort of the current state in the in the depending state um of these these neural enhancements, then hold onto your bridges, because we're about to look at where this could go, where this is going, and how it could dramatically change not only our lives, but but but what it is to be human. Yeah, Okay, so think back to Kathy and think about that wire in her brain time I believe

is referred to as brain gate. UM. Michael Maharbits has created a new kind of prosthetic in the form of these cubes as small as neurons. Okay, we're talking about fifty microns across. Now. The thing is is that they don't um they don't work with electromagnetic frequency because they're too small, so you can't have something like a wire detecting them. But you can use sonogram to detect these.

And what they're thinking is that you could have these sprinkled throughout your brain and you would have all these different data points measuring that neuronal activity, and you could have a far more robust system that not only exports the sort of neural activity, the sort of thoughts that

you're having, that maybe even imports information. So when you start to think about this, this neural dust as it's called, and you start to see how you could have these prosthetics not just external to you, but implanted in you, and you could have this this really very uh sophisticated system of information coming in and going out of your body,

out of your brain. Yeah, I mean, we're talking about the ability to to have more of a hands on, real time idea of what the brain is doing just throughout the course of the day, not just when you're hooked up to some machines or or your run through an fMRI. I. This would be like a daily constant understanding of what your brain is doing. Yeah, and I

mean you you see this. That the fact that you could have more of this neural dust spread throughout your brain again, more data points of collection, more ability to import that data. But not only that, you could have this stuff in there maybe for the rest of your life, because as we discussed before, the brain is not like foreign objects. But if you have something as tiny as a neuron, it's very possible that it could pass in

the body as something that's uh supposed to be there. Okay, so at conceivably then at even an early age, you are injected. Your brain is injected with this dust, and this dust is spread out through the brain and it's

all reporting and receiving information from the outside. Well. Right, So for someone like Cathy for instance, um, she would get sort of an upgrade here because again let's assume that there's some sort of implant here or a prosthetic device that could easily allow her to to move her body around um, and maybe even she could receive directions UM. And that's where this thing gets really weird, because you

could effectively use this as a brain upgrade. And we talked about this before, and I think it was in monkeys that they had their neural path at ways tinkered with when they were making decisions, and the idea was you could increase neural activity in one direction so that they made spec scific um movements or decisions about what they were about to do the right decision, right. So what if you have this neural pixie dust and it could bolster your memory, It could create stronger neural pathways

to information. I mean, you wouldn't have to study so much, right.

It's it's pretty fascinating because we're talking about not only not only using this technology to bridge gaps and to service a bridge where an area was damaged, but just to speed up the connections, to improve the the the overall road to where you have you know, just imagine again to use the analogy of the mountain mountain roads where you have lots of bridges, not because the the road is unsafe, but because this makes the transportation, faster, smoother,

uh and uh and and altogether more effective. Right, It's a kind of true all because not only would it be helpful for say, struck victims or someone with you know, immacular degeneration in this case, UM, but because conceivably it could work in the same way that nurembergers to be sing her system. But yeah, it could just give you that sort of lift that everybody has been fantasizing about and thinking about in terms of upgrading your brain in

a way that it runs faster and smoother. As you say, yeah, and you could have like a daily or weekly email that you received telling you what you're almost like you would web traffic for your website, except you would have a readout saying, hey, this is how your brain is doing. This is your your neural activity for a given day,

a given week. Yeah. And here's the thing again, this is that we're not just talking about um output here working with an implanted prosthetic devices, but we're also talking about input. And while this doesn't work on an electromagnetic frequency, it does work on that that sort of ultrasound. In fact,

these neural pixie dusts are called tuning forks for ultrasound. Uh, the idea is that maybe you could still kind of hack into this system, and that would be a problem, right, you could hack into someone's neural circuitry and have them doing things. So, so you don't mean just in the sense of life hacking where I'm improving my brain by

having the neural pixie dust. You're talking about an outsider hacking into the device that's it's it's attuned with my neural pixie dust and essentially hacking my brain, hacking my my memory, even hacking my my perception of reality or

my my actual consciousness. Yeah, now, of course this is this is all predicated on the idea that we have a much better idea of how the brain works in twenty or thirty years, and we have a kind of technology, technology that's so pervasive that people would have access to these systems. But what if all of that came together and we all had neural pixie dust spread throughout our brains to help us, right, to help us remember things,

to help us do things. And I could say, go and hack the system for you and say I would really love for Robert to do ten cart wheels today. And who knows that you should get that sophisticated. Um. But that's a possibility. I mean, that's that's the wonderful and the horrific thing about this kind of technology, as you can really go off the deep end, um and kind of go to the dark side and imagine all

of these things. Of course, we know that science has a lot of integrity and that technology so far has been uh not used really that much for ill will. But oh no, I can't think of a single example of technology being used to hurt anyone. Um. Well there, yes, you have a point there, But I guess what I'm saying is that I so far have not been able to pick up on the black market yet an exco exo skeleton that can sort of let me U rampage

through the streets of Atlanta. It's true. So you know, maybe this will be a technological advancement that society will be able to stay abreast off instead of letting it get ahead of of of society as we often do with technological advancements. That would be the hope. But here's

something I want to say to any kids listening. If you guys are interested in neuros science, um, and you're also interested in engineering or even chemistry or mathematic mathematics, you might want to consider joining up with neuroscientists on this because, as they were saying on the panel, they need people who are coming from these different disciplines, even like physics, to help figure out how some of these technologies work with the brain and how best to do this.

It's not just neuroscientists figuring out. They need other disciplines

to really make this work. Yeah, otherwise, how are we going to get to the point where you can actually download a copy of your brain and have that stored away potentially for safe keeping, and we could reach the point where, um, I instantly think of the book Altered Carbon by writer Richard K. Morrigan, in which you have individuals who have are certainly individuals who can afford it, the super rich, for instance, who have copies of their

brain backed up so that if something happens to their body, they can just have their mind re sleeved into a new body. Or you want to explore another planet, you just have you a copy of your mind sent, uh, you know, at the speed of light to to this location where it can be put into a new body or a robotic body to do whatever needs to be done. Yeah, but before all this happens again, they they need to put the rubber to the road here and figure out

how the brain works. Also, technology they need to upgrade here because you know, using fMRI I too to look at these neuronal spikes, it's not a perfect science because the neuronal neuronal activity is happening at something like one thousands of a second, but the imaging itself is only happening it one second, so it's not a true picture of the brain and what's happening. Right, But through this technology, well we were conceivably having much better idea of what

the brain is doing. Yeah, and and Maha Ribbits said that where we are with the brain is a lot like where we were with cosmology right before the Hubble telescope, right and and just like the Hubble telescope allowed us to really peer into uh into space and get an idea of the breadth and depth of it. He suing, there are technologies coming online now that will allow us to do the same thing with a brain that middle

space that we don't know much about now. You know, you're talking about hacking earlier, the idea of someone hacking into your personal thoughts in India, the inner workings your brain. Um, I can't help it, wonder So, so right now we're as we as a civilization or we as a culture anyway, are obsessed with the lives of celebrities and or not even necessarily celebrities, but sort of the the reality stars just some sort of ordinary persons thrust in the limelighte.

We get to watch everything they're doing. But imagine a future where it would maybe not even be there just their lives, but their actual thoughts we could tap into. Or someone's a great thinker, perhaps their thoughts would be considered art thought art And for that matter, then is there such thing as hate thought? Could you be prosecutecuted for hate thought? Well, that's the idea, right, because all of a sudden you have would have access to neuronal

activity that would point to your subconscious. And we know the subconscious is all it's down under there making all of these diabolical decisions for us, things that we aren't really aware of until it reaches the surface of consciousness. So if you were able to peer into your subconscious via this technology, would you become super aware, a really self aware of person, or would you become super paranoid that you know, someone was able to predict your movements

before you could even complete that thought. Yeah, what if Google ends up selling your subconscious to advertisers in the future. What if hackers what have you turned in the news one day? Sorry, hackers got into Amazon and they stole everybody's subconscious and their credit cards. But don't worry, we'll monitor your credit card for a full year. Dark stuff, my friend. But fascinating and wonderful in the current abilities

to actually help people who need that bridge from a tocy. Yeah, and I mean that's the bottom line here, looking at, especially in the near term, ways that this technology can drastically improve the lives of people who need to have uh that that gap bridge that need links in their neural chain reforged. Alright, So there you have a neural

pixie dust. I'm sure everyone has some thoughts on this particular topic, be it the the near term health applications that we're talking about or the long term science fiction e stuff. Uh. Either way, we'd love to hear from you with your inside on this um. You can reach us out to us in a number of different ways. As always, go to stuff to bow your mind dot com.

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So whereas the Monster Science series might be a bit to um cotton candy and gummy worms for some listeners. Uh, some viewers rather uh the the the the information Elevator, I feel like it's more what's a refined but creative ice cream flavor? M m, maybe a lemon timebet yeah yeah, Or I had this one the other day, an actual ice cream. It was dates and the salmon vinegar. Uh yeah. But now I feel like you're like, we're talking about park Avenue here. Yeah, yeah, park Avenue. We can some

of our stuff is Park Avenue. Monster Science is not Park Avenu. This is sort of like I feel like Elevator information elevator might be. This is sort of like someone who might hang out in your elevator on Park Avenue and they're not really paid to be there, but they hang out there. That's that's perfect. And they stopped. Yeah, yeah, thanks for the call. Yeah, and guys, if you haven't checked out moll the scientists got to do it because it is a wonderful like gummy worm packed full of

ice cream, super normal stimuli shot of science. That's right, that's what that's what we're trying to do to all right. Uh, you guys have thoughts, We want to hear them and you can send them to blow the mind at how stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com