Arthur C Clarke wrote that, "any sufficiently advanced technology is
indistinguishable from magic." I love that quote I think a lot of
sci-fi nerds love that quote because science fiction is filled with things
like advanced prosthetics and robotic implants and cybernetic enhancements and
brain computer interfaces you know like Luke's arm in Star Wars which they
could just tap and it would it would twitch it could feel The Borg and Star
Trek they just had all sorts of things going on the matrix being able to just
jack-in Altered Carbon sleeves black mirror having tapped into your own
thoughts and all sorts of crazy stuff but the same magic it's advanced science
for centuries we knew that something important was up here in our skulls we
knew it was there then finally in the 1950s a Canadian neuroscientist named
Wilder Penfield tapped into it for the first time.
Penfield: now when we stimulated at 3 you
had a tingling in your thumb. To my astonishment you said I hear music! Tell
us what you heard…
D.F. : Well, I heard what sounded like an orchestra playing.
Penfield: Could you hum it now, do you remember?
Penfield: Yes, rolling along together
D.F. : Yes, that's what it is!
Penny stimulated with bit of electricity and it just seems like magic right? She was able to hear
music but they didn't play any music it was her brain playing it to herself but
it was prompted by him again not magic just physical science so can we upgrade
our brains oh yeah and over the next five episodes we're gonna dive deep into
the pool of biology and engineering psychology a little bit of ethics some
physics some neuroscience of course and I am gonna talk all about taking a human
brain and making it better come try out humans
let's kick into it
hihihihihi hide their noodle lures I am trace and thank you so much for tuning
in to my channel every few weeks I create a series of videos all about one
topic and I break it down so that everybody understands it including
myself this series is about upgrading our brains so make sure you subscribe
for all of the episodes there are five of them they will also be in a playlist
after the series has aired and they are every other week day almost every other
human being comes with a standard set of hardware and software there are some
variations but when you get a fresh human like out of the box yeah that
fresh human smell actually fresh human smells really nice there is no manual
there's no operating instructions it's run by this secretive mass of tissue
hidden inside a rigid bone box that you can't get to but let's say that you
wanted to get in there you want to upgrade that wetware flash a new BIOS
add a few i/o systems upgrade the whole thing you know first step cracking that
skull open tap the source this is rat probably knew that this is a human also
probably knew that and that is a human wagging the tail of a rat yeah that
really happened that really happened humans do not have tails
I mean furries yes but you know not all humans have tails but with brain
computer interfaces brains can actually speak directly to a computer and then
that computer can speak to maybe another computer and then that computer can
speak to a rat's brain causing the tail to wag doing something like this
requires a BCI or BMI a brain computer interface or brain machine interface the
brain is an extremely sensitive organ you can mess it up pretty easily it's
it's in there and it's hidden away from the world for a reason so you have to
figure out how to get in there safely tap into what's going on and understand
the chatter this is what a brain computer interface or brain machine
interface does the Internet is a network so think of it this way you got a
computer on one end and then a computer on the
and the internet is in the middle in this case you have a brain on one end
and you have a brain on the other end let's do some brain basics we'll review
brains contain lots of different cells that we call brain cells cuz we're not
that original they're also called neurons 100 billion neurons exist in the
human brain and they have 100 trillion connections to other neurons also within
the brain are 300 billion glial cells lille is greek for glue so it's like a
sober friend at the bar the glial support the neurons physically
chemically emotionally yes if you want to crack the puzzle you need to get an
engineer in here so I called one Lietsel Richardson that's my name I am a PhD
student at the University of Central Florida
I study newer mechanics and biomechanics in my lab and I absolutely love our
brain I mean I'm sure you've seen stranger things if anyone has seen
stranger things we remember 11 wearing this like really bulky EEG system and
all the spikes happening on a piece of paper that's that's like the crudest
form of EEG that existed but it started there because we wanted to kind of
understand how our brain works and what the language was as you know our brain
is it's separated into different lobes and cortices that are responsible for
different things and processing different kinds of information so this
has to do with motor control this has to do with processing and planning this is
sensory input that sort of thing in the 19th century Italian Luigi Galvani
realized that bodies bodies like ours run on electricity muscles twitch brains
think hearts beat and all of that is powered by power he touched the muscle
of one frog to another and the second one twitched he realized bioelectricity
was really the basis of everything that we do and that is so convenient because
computers great also run on electricity but in the brain we discovered that it
all comes down to this one little cell the neurons the neuron is the basic
component of the brain and it's what's responsible for knowing when something
is activated or not hello my name is Dr. Jessica Chen I am
neuroscientist and I'm studying regenerative therapies for spinal cord
injury the neuron itself doesn't do anything in isolation and needs to be
able to talk to other neurons and to think with other neurons and so when a
neuron it talks another neuron it uses what's called a synapse so the body of
the neuron would send information through the axon of the neuron which
would then go to the dendrites which are basically the outputs that then go and
talk to another neuron and so when you have all these different neurons that
are next to each other and they're creating synapses or points of contact
between each other you have a network the brain is like this huge complex
network of neurons and synapses with all these different areas talking to each
other we need to hack into that network and
then we use that information to upgrade the brain to hack into a network like
this we need to be monitoring the traffic on the network that means we
need to be monitoring what's happening in the network of neurons running
through our brains and bodies and there are six different tools to do that
there's EEG zemi jeez II cogs F MRIs and IR SS and intra cortical neuron
recording that is six different types two of those are invasive four are
non-invasive two are indirect four are direct all have the same goal though and
that is to understand the three-pound one-and-a-half kilogram mass of tofu
like tissue inside of our skull boxes so let's break them down they measure on a
few different dimensions and it's about how they suck up the info and the
resolution that they can produce over a period of time so first the two indirect
ones there's the fMRI which is a functional magnetic resonance imager you
hear this all the time in brain studies we talk about it all the time in science
communication fm our eyes measure metabolic interactions that is blood
flow it's an indirect access because it's not actually seeing what the
neurons are saying it's seeing where the brain is sending resources and it can
see it down to about a one millimeter resolution and it can see activity over
about one second it measures electromagnetic fields produced by blood
inside of your brain and it has some problems that even though it has a low
time resolution of only one second it has very high space resolution of
down to a millimeter now we can't use fMRI to control a computer it's a little
too slow we have to use a really big machine in order to make it work but
it's a really good study tool there's near-infrared spectroscopy or
nirs and that's again metabolic it's an indirect measure and it has a five
millimeter resolution over about one second five millimeter a little wider
but it is more portable it doesn't require us huge machine like fMRI does
and what it does is it uses IR light to detect blood moving through your brain
box the infrared light can only penetrate about one to three centimeters
into the head but it does do a good job so you can you know do some things with
this it's a little slow and hair can cause issues as can movement but that's
not unusual let's move on to the direct methods the main one that you're gonna
hear about is the EEG electroencephalography it's electrical
it's non-invasive it is direct and it is a ten millimeter resolution of 0.5
seconds so really wide view and really quick the cap that you see in the movies
that you know that measures brainwaves it's general activity outside the skull
and it sits on the scalp so it's not very precise it can be messed up by
blinks by muscle contractions any movement the wires themselves hitting
things or jaws being clenched literally eye twitches can mess up an EEG a lot of
these things get picked up by EEG it's very hard to find the signal but the
really good thing is in the past like two decades researchers have gotten
really good about the algorithms that they use to isolate what they want to
find in one particular brain area but we'll come back to that later the next
one on the list is magneto encephalopathy that is magnetic version
of electroencephalography it's non-invasive it's direct it has a five
millimeter resolution down to 0.5 seconds as well it's very similar to EEG
it senses the same patterns and it's a little more precise it senses the
magnetic fields of e/m activity in your brain but you need Meg
medically sheild rooms super cooling and a very expensive equipment to make this
work so there's also electro cortical a graffiti cock this one is really cool
it's electrical it is invasive which means you have to implant it into your
body it is directly measuring at one millimeter of resolution in 0.3 seconds
really really fast you have to put electrodes literally on
the brain they have great resolution inside of the brain but they're more
risky because you have to let somebody inject a giant sensor into your brain
box directly it's literally stuck on there so if Criers opening the skull and
it's usually what you see in freaky sci-fi movies when they got wires coming
out of it exposed brain you have to stick an array in or on the brain
there's also inter cortical neuron recording it doesn't have a fancy name
like the other one so ICN our neuro capture what do you think you can call
it that anyway neuro capture or into cortical neuron
recording is direct it's invasive which means you have to get inside the head
and it has a resolution of 0.5 millimeters 2.05 millimeters and point
zero zero three seconds it is so fast and can see such a small area it's
obviously the best in terms of resolution and timing but it's literally
touching the brain there are a bunch of different ways to do that there are
multi electrode arrays Michigan probes Utah intra cortical electrode arrays
which are very popular and they can measure individual groups of neurons
which is excellent for BCI's but like yikes a rule for people who do not want
to have their skull opened up Oh wild penny may have learned a lot cracking
skulls open in poking brains with electrified sticks but the brain is a
living piece of a human body which means it's constantly moving constantly
reacting to what's going on inside the person's literal head and it also has a
major issue the signal-to-noise ratio the noise could be a hum in the
background and if it's low than it's fine you can probably still hear what
I'm saying but if the noise gets to be a little too much it can actually
overwhelm the signal then the thing that you're looking for
will get lost and it's crazy that's a thing that it's a thing in the brain -
yeah there's there's a lot of noise there's a lot of noise from other areas
of the brain because our brain is constantly processing from different
inputs an example is if I am a participant in an experiment and there's
some kind of visual and auditory cue that I need to look out for and I have
to walk at the same time those are three different senses that our brain is
processing at the same time so that means there are three areas of the brain
that are being loud in that moment I know I'm going on and on about it but
there's like so much to just reading EEG data it's crazy right now one of the
best ways to tap into a human brain is with an electrode called a Utah array it
looks like this and it's got the least noise and the cleanest signal but it
does require cutting open the scalp getting into the skull and implanting it
directly on the surface of your brain organ that's some serious brain surgery
and it cannot stay in there forever your body will still develop scar tissue
around it the brain can move and it's very plastic so cells might move around
but if you want to upgrade you know like my girl Beyonce says right now you're
gonna need something like this for example let's say we wanted a robot arm
that I could control that could catch a ball there's a lot that goes into that
you got to see the ball you got a calculator trajectory you have to move
your arm in front of the ball you got to anticipate where the ball is gonna be
you got to move your fingers around it and since we're talking about a robot
arm I can't crush it with my robot arm but for that we need to know not just
that the brain is talking and what the brain is saying we need to speak brain
and I need to know if I've cocked the ball which means we need to write back
to the brain so for that you're gonna have to come back on Wednesday Congrats
to dr. Chen by the way she just defended her thesis at the University of Michigan
she became a doctor for the first time so exciting that's gonna be weird this
is the first time I'm gonna refer to myself as doctor
but anyway thanks again for tuning in to this episode of gunner dose of tres now
you know how the brain is read from next time how the brain is written too so
I'll see you in the future