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Speaker 1: Well, can digital machines emulate human behavior?

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Speaker 2: No, not a chance, not ever, never, actually.

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Speaker 1: And why is that?

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Speaker 2: Well, because we are not machines, and our brains do not work through algorithms,

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and we don't work in binary logic. So we have components of our minds that are analog, very important components.

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And we all know that digital processes, they can approximate, but they cannot emulate analog processes,

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particularly processes like the ones that take place in our minds.

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The brain is a very complex system and is formed by 100 billion elements connected to each other,

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which are continuously adapting to the statistics of their outside world.

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And this adaptation, that we call plasticity, makes it impossible for a digital machine that needs code to run.

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So there is no software and hardware in the brain, that's the other thing.

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Speaker 1: It's like an organic computer.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, it's an organic computer, the brain computes with the organic tissue that it has,

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and that kind of computation is not reducible to an algorithm. So there is no singularity coming for the human race.

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There are other problems that computers can bring to the human race, but not replacing our minds.

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Speaker 1: Because it would deny us evolution of the brain.

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Speaker 2: Absolutely,

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a brain is a system that is a product of an evolutionary process that involved millions of random steps that cannot be

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simulated in a laboratory or in a machine. And my concern is not that digital computers will reproduce the brain.

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My main concern is that because the brain is so adaptable, so plastic, and it absorbs everything that is relevant,

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that gives the brain an evolutionary advantage and a survival advantage, that we may,

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because we are continuously exposed to computers, digital machines,

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and now this exposure is becoming almost overwhelming, that we may start reducing our human condition to mimic machines.

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And what is going to be rewarded out there is behaviors that are similar to machines.

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And so the brain would simulate machines and behave like machines, produce behaviors like machines,

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eliminating the most important things that define our human condition.

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Speaker 1: Yep, I understand that, and when you look at the brain, when did your fascination for the brain start?

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Speaker 2: Actually, my fascination started when I read a science fiction book by Isaac Asimov

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when I was in high school here in Brazil.

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And it was a kind of boring book, because I like Isaac Asimov for the science fiction books.

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But then I found his book, The Brain, and it was one of a few books that he wrote that is not really science fiction,

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and it was a description. And in that book, there was no dynamics, there was no physiology, there was mainly anatomy.

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But I realized that I was, for the first time, introduced to the thing that really creates everything.

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And then when I went to medical school, I started working with computers, microcomputers.

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They were just coming out in the 80s here in Brazil.

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And I thought, for a moment, okay, I'm going to work on applications, on computers in medicine, because I liked,

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very much, that.

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And then I thought, well, but the ultimate computing device is the brain,

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and at that time I didn't really know much about either computers or the brain.

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But I decided that I wanted to understand the brain first, and that was 35 years ago.

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I'm still trying to understand the brain first.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, because first, you are fascinated by brain, you are investigating the brain, but then the next step,

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also, you start to understand the brain.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, well, when I came to neuroscience in 82, 83, again, there was no dynamics,

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there was no time in the brain. Most of the descriptions were very static.

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We talk of maps, columns, areas, subareas, secrets, but there was no flow, there was no changing.

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Plasticity was reported in 83 by, now one of my heroes and my good friend, Jon Kaas, and his colleague, Mike Merzenich,

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two papers that were rejected everywhere,

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and they only got published in a new journal because people didn't want to see it.

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Proof that the adult brain was changing, it was adapting to lesions in the periphery, that's how they showed it.

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And I wasn't aware of this paper until 85, but when I saw the paper, two papers, actually, I start wondering,

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this is totally different that what I have been reading.

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And that's when I went for my PhD here in Brazil, after medical school.

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And I realized that what I wanted to look into the brain was the dynamics of the brain, because I had a hint.

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It was very faint, it was not a very concrete thing, that there was much more to plasticity than just what Jon

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and Mike had reported.

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It turned out that plasticity is pretty much what matters in the brain, it's the central concept of the brain.

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So I'm absolutely shocked that these guys have not won a Nobel Prize yet.

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People have won Noble Prizes lately for minute, tiny things.

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These guys discovered the essence of what the brain is about.

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Speaker 1: And when you look, because when you start to understand the brain,

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I suppose you can also understand the immense possibilities when you combine brains, when you think in brains.

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How does that work with you, because you're one of few experts?

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Speaker 2: Well, when I went to the US, I met another phenomenal guy, John Chapin, and we had the same idea.

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We were one of the few people in the world at that time, today it's common ground, but at that time, in fact, people,

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when they heard what we wanted to do, record from multiple neurons,

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multiple brain cells simultaneously in behaving animals so we could look at the dynamics of the circuit.

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Some of our colleagues, more senior colleagues thought that we were nuts, that we were crazy,

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that there was no point in moving from recording the electrical signals of one neuron to many neurons.

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So John and I had a lot of opposition, and our careers were on the fringe at that time.

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And he was already an established guy, but even so, he was young, and I was just a nobody coming from Brazil,

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a postdoc.

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But it turned out that what we discussed in the early 90s in the studies that we published then, I think,

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are now pretty much at the center of neuroscience, at the edge.

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And in, almost, desperation, in 97, we had many papers published, but people are now really paying attention to them.

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We discussed, one day,

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that we needed a new preparation to convince our colleagues that this thing that we were talking about,

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population coding, was much more relevant than anything that had been done before, in terms of single neurons.

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And that's when we came up with the idea of brain-machine interfaces, of linking brains to devices.

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It was a preparation, an experimental paradigm that we created to test the notion that to control a device,

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either a real limb, a leg or arm, or an artificial device, the brain requires lots of neurons, not a single cell,

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and we proved that quantitatively.

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When you let the animals use only one neuron to control complex device, nothing happened.

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But when you get a population of cells working together,

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they were able to use just the brain activity to control devices.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, and you did that with rats?

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Speaker 2: We did with rats first.

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And a year later we did, that was the first paper and pretty much interfaces in modern age, with the constitute,

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define the term.

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I publish a paper in Nature in 2000 that actually started with a description of this goal that you see here.

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To explain what a population code means because this was a goal scored in which eight players touched the ball without

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any Italian being able to touch it.

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And none of the individual players knew the outcome of the play until Carlos Oberto kicked the ball

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and the goal was scored, so that's what I was trying.

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The message, the metaphor, was to explain that none of the individual neurons knows what is going on.

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It's the population, it's the team, that knows the outcome.

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So I started a paper and in the middle of the paper I said, well, what John and I have proposed a year ago,

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we call it brain machine interface, and the term was created in there.

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A year later we did it on monkeys, in our monkeys, and in Rhesus monkeys.

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In 2004 we did a first human demonstration of this concept in an interoperative procedure in Parkinson patients just

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for a few minutes. It was the first human demonstration that everything we had seen in monkeys was applicable.

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Speaker 1: And what was it that you saw then?

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Speaker 2: Well we saw this symphony, this neural symphony.

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The dynamic properties that we saw in rats and monkeys were there in humans. It was the same thing.

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And the same mathematical computational approach that we used to link the brain with a device would work in humans.

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And so that is when we realized that we had something gigantic and that it was not just a basic science apparatus

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or paradigm.

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We had touched something that could have clinical relevance

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and it could advance neuroscience to realms that we never thought about before.

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Speaker 1: And what, when you look beyond 2016-2017, where are we headed for?

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Speaker 2: I don't think anybody can answer that.

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Nobody can answer that question honestly because every day things are changing,

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but it's a completely different neuroscience. It's a completely different brain research.

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If you look at the Brain Initiative in the United States, that I'm not part of, never got invited to be,

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everything that initiative's about is what John and I did.

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It's about recording more and more neurons, studying only circuits, paying attention about dynamics, elasticity,

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creating technology to visualize thousands, millions of neurons.

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However the emphasis is mainly on technology and I think the emphasis should be in the questions.

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It should be in the real science. Curiosity should be the emphasis I think.

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But as you know technology in the US has become a monster,

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almost a religion to the point that some people predict that we will be replaced by technology.

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Which is against the idea that no derivative of a biological system can be more complex than the biological system that

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created that derivative.

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Technology is just a projection of our mind, it can never be more complex than the mind who created this technology.

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Speaker 1: When you look at the framework, okay I can understand that you don't want to be a part of it I can imagine.

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Speaker 2: Yeah.

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Speaker 1: But you, yourself, are developing in the neuroscience, big steps. Can you explain?

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Speaker 2: Well, sure, we first started with pretty much an interface concept right.

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We discovered that we could link brains of rats, monkeys and humans to a upper limb robotic device.

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There was a physical robot. A seven degree of freedom industrial robot and it worked. That was the first thing.

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But then we said why it need to be upper limb? Why could it be lower limb? Nobody went for it.

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We are the only lab, one of the few labs in the world, perhaps two or three labs in the world that said okay.

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Let's try for legs and it works. And then we say why it has to be a robot? Why can it not be a virtual device?

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Can a brain incorporate a virtual device as if it were a part of the subject's body? A real flesh and bone.

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And it worked.

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We put an avatar of limbs and legs or arms and the monkeys treated that after a while as if there were a third

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or a fourth so we had monkeys with four limbs. Two biological and two virtual, same thing with legs.

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Then we said well the actuator doesn't need to be next to the monkey. So we put an actuator in Japan.

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A robot in Japan and we had a monkey in the United States controlling across the globe.

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And, lo and behold, the monkey assimilated the legs of the robot as if there were his own legs.

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And you could stop the treadmill when the monkey was walking at Duke.

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And he would still keep imagining movements for the robot to work in Japan as long as it give reward.

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You know, monkeys are like us, they need a bribe to work.

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And as long as it keep giving them juice or grapes they will do that.

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So then we went further and said why does it need to be just one brain?

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Could we have multiple brains collaborating mentally to achieve this movement? So that's what we call a brain act.

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And we just published a year ago showing the three monkeys that don't even know that they are next to each other

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because in different rooms they don't know the existence of the other guys.

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They can mentally collaborate to make a virtual arm,

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make certain movements that inform the monkeys how they should do it.

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And so if you give monkey one the job of controlling the x and y dimensions of the movement,

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this is a 3D movement so x, y, and z.

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Monkey one does x and y, monkey two does y and z and monkey three does the x and z.

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You need at least two monkeys to get a 3D out of this, but if you get a third guy it looks much better,

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the results much better and they can get all reward very quickly and at the same time.

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Well, the monkeys get together, they synchronize their brains and they work as if they were part of a single brain.

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And this experiment, I think our colleagues have not seen it, they thought it was just, some of them,

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thought it was just a trick, just some kind of a Hollywood kind of thing. It's not.

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We actually used that to show how a single brain may synchronize to operate. Because there's a big mystery.

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How multiple areas of your brain actually come together, at the precise moment in time, to do a job.

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To make my arms move, to make me speak, to make me reason. Nobody knows. Nobody knows how this synchronization happens.

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Well, it turns out that if you put multiple brains separately and you give a common feedback to them, they synchronize.

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So I think we found a very profound rule of when millions of people watching TV, the same TV show around the country,

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around the globe and they all synchronize.

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And when your in a stadium, seeing the same match, the fans, they all synchronize.

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So I think we found what is going on, what happens when multiple individuals are recruited to be part of a structure.

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And that's the reason why I'm calling this the structure being that multiple ants working together, bees

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or birds flying together in a flock, fish swimming together to many humans in a movie theater or a stadium.

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I'm calling these our organic computer because it's a synchronized device that is computing In a domain analog,

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that digital computers cannot get there.

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So that's how we have evolved of this, and of course, five years ago,

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we decided okay there's clinical relevance of this thing.

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And we make people benefit from brain machine interfaces by restoring mobility to them.

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That's the reason you see this lab here, that's why we came to Brazil and decided to this for the World Cup first,

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but the project has continued.

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And our biggest discovery with brain machine I think in a decade is that if apparently through exposed chronically,

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to a user of a brain machine interface or paradigm in which you are controlling with your mind something

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and you're getting rich visual and tactile feedback.

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You start getting for a paralyzed person with a lesion in the spinal cord, you might start getting recovery of motor

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and tactile behaviors below the level of the lesion, which has never been demonstrated with other techniques.

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So these are chronic patients, many years after the accident and yet in almost 80% of them, after two years,

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we are seeing that they are recovering control of muscles in the legs.

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They now can feel their bodies below the level of the lesion.

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I think is related to the training that they were exposed to.

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Yeah what I'm saying is we did create an exoskeleton, a robotic vest controlled by brain activity.

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And we instrumented this exoskeleton to deliver feedback back to the subject.

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So the subject, every time he steps on the ground,

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there are sensors in the surface of the foot to the exo that detect the pressure of the contact.

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That pressure signal is then delivered to the skin on the arm of the patients because it's one of the few parts of the

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body where they originally had tactile sensation.

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And by adapting the parameters of the speed and the magnitude of this pressure wave on the skin,

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we induced the phenomena of phantom limb sensation.

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So we fooled the brain of these guys to feel through their arms their legs.

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So they report to use they're walking with their own legs and they are touching the ground

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and they can even tell you what the ground is.

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They can tell when the ground is grass or the ground is sand or if it's hot asphalt,

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so the street floors they can distinguish with this system. But then we only wanted originally to restore mobility.

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Put them in a device link the device to their brains and get them to walk again.

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That was original game, but we always did the neurological examination as a routine,

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and we didn't expect to see any change.

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Well six months, a month after the World Cup, six months after the training started we started,

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we start seeing that these guys were having motor contractions of muscles below the level the lesion.

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And seven of these guys had a complete clinical lesion, which means after ten years, that you shouldn't see anything.

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You shouldn't see motor contractions, voluntary motor contractions and muscles,

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they should not have tactile feelings and they should not have visceral feelings.

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So they couldn't feel, for instance, the women could not feel when their period days of the month are.

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Well, we're still getting reports from the two women in the project, look, I can feel one of my periods coming.

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I actually can feel that I need to go to the bathroom now, I can control my bladder now,

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several of them start telling us. And then when we did a motor test, we measure quantitatively the contraction force.

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All the sudden we had a woman with 20 newtons of force,

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which is the little kind of force that you need to make to start moving.

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And we start looking at individual muscles and we could detect the contractions.

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So we redid the classification, it's called ASIA.

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ASIA is the American Spinal Cord Injury classification standard,

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gold standard of classifying patients all over the world.

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These guys were, seven of them were ASIA A, which means complete paralysis, and one was ASIA B,

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which is sort of intermediate.

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Well, in six months 50% of them were promoted to ASIA C, which is partial spinal cord injury. Two years later.

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Speaker 1: We're now talking?

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Speaker 2: Yeah, we're now talking about guys that can.

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Speaker 1: 2017, 2016, 2015?

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Speaker 2: Yeah, we started training them in November 2013.

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So six months after the training started, one month after the world cup, after we lost to the Dutch,

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and I shouldn't say that on camera and lose my passport but it was something in the food to sick.

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But in any event, one month after the World Cup ended and we had done our demo, which was seen by 1.2 billion people,

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we re-did the neurological test.

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And lo and behold, half of the patients had muscle contractions that they could control,

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they could actually generate movements that visual, you can see the movements.

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And when you put them upright they could simulate walking, and we keep doing it, we keep doing the training.

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Now this December we completed two years of training.

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We redid the neurological exam, and now 78% of the patients have recovered movement.

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So, six out of eight have muscle control below the level, it's not complete,

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but it's something that has never been seen.

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So, the hypothesis that we have based on studies that were forgotten in the 60s and 70s,

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an Australian Pathologists had done a lot of autopsies in Australian spinal cord injury patients that died of natural

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causes.

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And he realized that in about 60% of the patients there are classified clinically as being complete paralyzed,

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there is at least 2 to 20% of fibers of nerves in the spinal cord that is still connected.

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They're not totally destroyed but they're quiet very likely, they went blank.

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I think our training, now when I read this paper, my hypothesis is that the training,

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the intensive training that we did with brain interface of the patients, turned on neurons again in the brain

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and these neurons they start sending messages down to the spinal cord to these axons they required.

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But it's still there so it's plasticity, it's what John Carls and Mike Merzenik predicted.

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Speaker 1: So what would that mean when you think through that and look at future? What are the possibilities?

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Speaker 2: The possibilities are tremendous because there are 25 million people in this condition,

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spinal cord injury paralysis in the world.

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Imagine now if a large percentage of them can recover some movement, some control, because for instance,

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one of our patients, one of the women in the group.

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Since now she had perineal sensation, she decided to become pregnant and she actually could feel the delivery.

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She had bladder control, so she went to work, two of our patients got jobs because now they could get out of the house,

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they didn't need to wear diapers anymore. We don't think about it, we had one patient that was hypertense.

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He's normal tense now, because the cardiovascular system performs better when we are upright.

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And since he's one house a day,

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two days a week is enough for the kind of vascular system to recover the blood vessels to open up,

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so his blood pressure went down. So being up and walking is a major behavior for we humans.

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And this guy's lost weight, and some of them were overweight because of being in a wheelchair too long, a decade or so.

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Speaker 1: And when you look further, because it's very important, I understand that, and it's major breakthrough.

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But then you look further, when you are able to understand the brain, connect brains, What holds the future for us?

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Speaker 2: There are many things. I mean, you saw the prototype of our brainette for humans.

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So we are about to get a patient, a naive patient who hasn't been trained yet in our paradigm.

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Which takes some weeks, but we want to reduce this training time. Because the beginner, the training is very difficult.

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The patient has to really concentrate and in the beginning is a little frustrating,

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because the brain has forgotten what is to walk.

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Actually the brain has forgotten what is the concept of having lower limbs.

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So to virtual reality training we need to re-introduce to the brain the concept, yeah, you have legs.

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This body has legs and they move, and we do that by having the patient try to control a avatar of himself, or herself,

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walking on virtual space, and it takes many weeks for the patients to get this done.

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Well, we are going to start linking the brain of this patient, in non invasive way, with EEG, as you saw,

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with a physical therapist that is really well trained in that task.

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A normal person would now, I wouldn't say normal, but a person that can walk by herself.

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And we are going to link the brains.

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And in the beginning of the training 90% or 95% of the signal comes from the healthy physical therapist.

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And 5 or 10% comes from the patient who has a spinal cord injury.

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So he's going to, his brain's going to, get rewarded faster.

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And he's going to have the impression that he's controlling the device.

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And I think that motivation, the context, is a driving force for plasticity.

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My prediction is that we are going to accelerate the learning curve, because we are going to accelerate plasticity.

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So the brain map is going to have a very practical, clinical application almost instantaneously.

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Speaker 1: But then also you can use it for different things.

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You can start steering things in the world just by thinking.

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Speaker 2: Yes, the problem is that a non-invasive technology that we use, EEG, the one that you just put in this,

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doesn't have the same resolution in the same information content, it's not as rich in information.

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We have to play so much magical tricks to get information out of the signal.

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So, it's not as rich as implanting things in the head.

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I'm not suggesting that we implant people in the head just so they play video games, but yes,

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it's proof of concept the mental collaboration If we get better non-invasive techniques that become portable.

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I mean, EEG now is wireless, as you saw, you can have wireless broadcasting.

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We have a paper coming this week, although that uses invasive technology in monkeys.

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Showing that monkeys can learn to drive wheelchairs in an open space in our lab mentally.

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So you see a monkey sitting on the wheelchair and she is driving,

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or he's driving the wheelchair to the pod where we are delivering grapes.

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But every movement of the wheelchair is coming from the mind of the monkey, via a wireless link.

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So it's 500 neurons firing wirelessly, broadcasting the signal wirelessly,

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so the motors of the wheelchair turn around and go to the pod.

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Speaker 1: But then in that space you can also connect several brains together.

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Speaker 2: Yes, we already have an experiment in the lab where two monkeys are collaborating,

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each monkey has its own wheelchair. And they only get rewarded if both of them get to the pod.

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So the faster monkey helps the slower monkey to get themselves together at the pod at the same time.

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So we are already showing the brain working between two monkeys.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, but not between humans?

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Speaker 2: No in humans we are using for clinical rehab at this point.

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But yes, it's conceivable that if we improve the bandwidth

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and we improve methods to extract information from the brain, in a non invasive way,

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you could have over the Internet millions of people collaborating on a common task.

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Speaker 1: So how does the future of your neuroscientific work looks like and the effects of it?

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Speaker 2: That's a very good question. I think in one direction we are going to increase the clinical applications.

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Because what we saw for spinal chord injury, I think, may be applicable to stroke victims.

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It may be applicable to other neurological disorders that require plasticity.

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And in fact, I have a theory that I'm about to publish and I'm going to put in my new book, that most neurologic

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and psychiatric disorders, independently of their etiology, or the cause of this disease, let's say Parkinson's Disease.

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We know that you develop Parkinson's if the cells that contain a particular chemical, dopamine, start dying, okay?

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But once they start dying, what we discovered in animals, and then in humans,

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is that the lack of dopamine produces like a epileptic seizure, a low level chronic seizure that explains the tremor

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and the difficulty to move.

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Well we discovered if we put a microchip in the spinal cord and send electric pulses at the right frequency,

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tiny electrical pulses that are very high frequency, we disrupt the seizure and the animals

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and the patients seem to get better.

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So I think this kind of concept that neurological disorders are disorders of neural timing, how they fire together.

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If they fire too much, it's not good together.

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So I think that I'm going to, in one part of my work, increase the scope.

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Use the brain machine interfaces to treat neurological disorders.

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That's one, from a basic science point of view, I have two other branches.

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One is to push very hard to understand the kind of computation that the brain does that is different from digital

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machines.

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So I'm building models,

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analog models of the brain to particularly study more detailed interaction of the brain magnetic fields.

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With the neurons and see if this analog digital interaction, what I like to say,

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a recursive analog digital interaction, explains why the brain is different from a digital machine as one line of work.

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And the other is to continue to push the envelope on trying to see how large secrets in behaving animals operate.

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So, our lab is has now the world record in number of neurons recorded simultaneously.

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We getting close to 2,000 neurons now,

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but I think we need to increase this to about a 100,000 to a million to start getting close to a picture.

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It's like when you do a camera, a movie, and you have just a few pixels of the image, you cannot see it very well.

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But if you increase the number of pixels, you start seeing the granularity, you start seeing more

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and more of the image, but you're not necessarily need to have all of the pixels of the photograph, or the movie,

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to see what is going on.

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So I think if we cross the barrier of a million neurons recording simultaneously,

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we're going to see a lot of the movie that goes on in the brain.

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Speaker 1: Recording simultaneously?

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Speaker 2: Recording simultaneously. Yeah, exactly. That's what I mean.

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Speaker 1: Yeah and the.

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Speaker 1: [INAUDIBLE]

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Speaker 1: Can you take me through steps in this lab we filmed?

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Speaker 2: Sure, what you're filming, in reality,

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is a simulation of the five different steps that our patients undergo when they do the training.

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Okay so first, as I said, we need to reinsert in the brain the concept of having legs. So that's basically what we do.

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We put them in a virtual reality environment that you're going to see in a moment.

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And the patients start interacting with the avatar. We started just with the global concept of walking.

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But now we are actually simulating control of the specific muscles of walking,

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which we never thought these patients would be able to do with their brains.

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They're getting specializing control individual legs with one side of the brain,

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for instance the right side controlling the left leg, left side controlling the right leg.

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But we discovered that we can do physical therapy by simulating muscle contractions on the video.

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So they see a muscle of the leg contracting, and we develop the ability to contract individual muscles,

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which is we never thought that would happen. So that's the first step, is the virtual reality.

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Then they go to that robotic device, the robot standing on the treadmill.

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To learn what is to be inside of a robot,

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because you should not underestimate how different it is to be encased in a robotic device.

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It's a complete different feeling of what you are.

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And since we are providing tactile feedback,

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they are getting tactile feedback from their legs inside of a stand-alone robot.

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So that takes several months of feeling at ease, normal.

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So then we have an intermediate step, where they go and stay in this system that we call zero gravity, zero G.

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Where they are upright without a robot and they are practicing with just to be upright.

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And trying to move with some orthosis that we fabricate and we give to them to practice,

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because they're going to be in an exoskeleton.

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We have another step that is just a mix of virtual reality and a stand-alone robot.

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And finally, they get into the exoskeleton, just at the end of the process.

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And it takes a few months for them to get to that point.

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And in the exoskeleton,

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they now are using everything they've learned in the previous steps to use the brain activity to control, to trigger,

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the movements of the exoskeleton. Now they can trigger individual legs.

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And they are getting the feedback from the feet as they walk on the ground.

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And sometimes they walk on the ground just looking at a mirror to see their bodies walking upright,

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because that helps shape the brain's image of the body.

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Sometimes they have goggles because they walk in a virtual reality environment, even though they are in a exoskeleton.

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And sometimes they are just walking, doing about 50-some steps back and forth in this laboratory space.

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Speaker 1: By thinking, by using their brain.

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Speaker 2: By thinking, yes. And that's exactly what we did. This is the third prototype that we have.

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The first prototype was used during the demo of the World Cup.

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But of course, we had to struggle with FIFA, because FIFA never gave us the conditions to actually do what we wanted,

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and I don't need to go into the details.

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But from a three minute demo we are down to 29 seconds,

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which is almost virtually impossible to do a robotic demonstration.

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But what's important in that is that Juliano Pinto, the guy who actually delivered the opening kick of the World Cup,

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he trained on the pitch, on the grass for days, and he delivered 57 kicks.

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Speaker 1: In the exoskeleton-

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Speaker 2: In the exoskeleton, he had 57 attempts and he got 56 correct. Which show that we're in the right direction.

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That people can get used to these devices, and they can actually start performing at a very high level of accuracy.

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And of course, we just started slow, just with walking straight.

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Now we are going to think about, we are already planning turns and other movements that the patients want to have.

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But we are learning very quickly now.

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So the beginning was very difficult, because some of these patients that you saw were in a wheelchair for a decade.

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With no hope of nothing. And I can show you some of the movies that they have of the movements that they can make now.

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You would be shocked what a paralyzed-

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Speaker 1: By using their brains.

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Speaker 2: No, no I'm talking about their own movements without the exo.

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When you put them up now in the zero G again, and in the beginning you put them up and say move,

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and nothing would happen. They would stand and nothing would happen.

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Now you put them in here, and some of these patients can actually, you see them doing this with their own legs.

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Suggesting that we reconnected the brain to the spinal cord. Not reconnected anatomically.

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Anatomically, there were some nerves that survived there probably. We reconnected it functionally.

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The brain can send a message, and the message is getting to the muscles somehow.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, and when you look outside the lab to the world, I'd really like the way that you,

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how you look at the world and materialize your knowledge and your love for the brain and painting and writing

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and looking at software. How do you see that?

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Speaker 2: Yeah, well this is something that happened the last five years or so.

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What I taught in all my six years, my study of neuroscience was too limited to what most neuroscientists do.

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Electrical signals of the brain, computational strategies and behavior.

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And then I start thinking deeply with the help of my good friend, Ronald Cicurel, a retired mathematician

411
00:37:21,78 --> 00:37:23,35
and now a philosopher in Switzerland.

412
00:37:24,29 --> 00:37:32,3
And I just came to a realization one day in Montreal when I visit him, while we do our work together and walking.

413
00:37:32,3 --> 00:37:39,23
That actually, when we talk about the brain we should not be limited to the kind of neurophysiological,

414
00:37:39,23 --> 00:37:43,49
neuroanatomical, or neurolingual that neuroscientist talk about.

415
00:37:43,49 --> 00:37:51,83
Certainly I realized that the brain is the center of the human cosmology. The brain is the true creator of everything.

416
00:37:51,83 --> 00:37:59,96
And I start thinking about the whole universe as just raw information, like an empty canvas.

417
00:37:59,96 --> 00:38:06,95
And the brain as the true painter, the human brain. So I don't know if there are other brains out there.

418
00:38:06,95 --> 00:38:15,03
But everything that we have, the history of the planets, the history of the cosmos, the history of the human race,

419
00:38:15,26 --> 00:38:23,27
the theory of evolution, everything that we have conceived since the first human came out of the trees

420
00:38:23,27 --> 00:38:24,51
and started walking.

421
00:38:24,7 --> 00:38:28,97
If you could somehow sum the amount of information

422
00:38:28,97 --> 00:38:37,37
and knowledge processed by every single human brain that ever existed or exists, or will exist, that's the universe.

423
00:38:37,37 --> 00:38:43,48
That's the human universe. And I start thinking about a changing viewpoint.

424
00:38:44,06 --> 00:38:46,85
So first, we thought the Earth was the center of the universe.

425
00:38:46,86 --> 00:38:51,27
Then we thought it was the sun, and then we thought it was the Milky Way.

426
00:38:51,49 --> 00:38:55,19
But then we thought, no, no the center of the universe is the big bang where everything came.

427
00:38:55,28 --> 00:38:58,17
Of course there was something like the big bang, there must have been.

428
00:38:58,17 --> 00:39:04,00
I actually started thinking that the center of the universe, at least for our reference, is our mind,

429
00:39:04,42 --> 00:39:11,5
is the human brain. And I start thinking about everything around us as information, as raw information.

430
00:39:12,08 --> 00:39:18,24
And information that, to get any meaning, to get any description, needs a brain.

431
00:39:18,24 --> 00:39:21,54
And it so happens that the only one that we know is the human brain.

432
00:39:21,94 --> 00:39:31,55
So I have a theoretical experiment we've run on that if some other intelligent lifeform would come in contact with us,

433
00:39:31,85 --> 00:39:34,05
and we actually could talk or communicate somehow.

434
00:39:34,38 --> 00:39:35,38
That lifeform,

435
00:39:35,38 --> 00:39:43,86
assuming he had a brain that evolved through completely different laws of evolution in a different environment,

436
00:39:43,86 --> 00:39:48,94
would tell us a story of the cosmos that is not necessarily ours.

437
00:39:48,94 --> 00:39:53,4
And a complete different cosmology would be confronted with ours.

438
00:39:53,97 --> 00:39:58,39
So I actually think the neuroscience in this century may give us hope.

439
00:39:59,1 --> 00:40:03,24
To bring humanity, the human condition to the center of our lives.

440
00:40:03,66 --> 00:40:10,7
In a position, not in a position but to balance another movement that exist in the world right now.

441
00:40:10,7 --> 00:40:14,6
That seems to say that technology may be able to solve everything.

442
00:40:15,02 --> 00:40:22,3
That technology may be able to educate our kids, take care of the elderly. Run our air ports, run our universities.

443
00:40:22,7 --> 00:40:32,76
Run our knowledge gathering and eventually some loonies say, may replace us. And I think this is crazy, this is insane.

444
00:40:33,18 --> 00:40:39,23
Technology is projection of a much more complex thing called a brain.

445
00:40:39,49 --> 00:40:45,77
When we create a machine like this or create a car, a plane, a computer, or a robot.

446
00:40:46,2 --> 00:40:56,8
We are just projecting our abstraction to a tangible device that is infinitively less complicated than the creator.

447
00:40:56,91 --> 00:40:59,97
So the creator is the mind, the human mind.

448
00:41:00,11 --> 00:41:03,77
And that's the reason I start thinking and I'm not talking about philosophy.

449
00:41:03,77 --> 00:41:07,61
I'm not a philosopher, I know nothing about philosophy.

450
00:41:07,61 --> 00:41:12,6
I'm talking about as a neuroscientist trying to use what I know about the brain to actually say that the brain has a

451
00:41:12,6 --> 00:41:17,69
point of view. The brain is not a passive decoder of the environment.

452
00:41:17,69 --> 00:41:23,1
The brain shaped through evolution, was shaped through evolution by an environment, by our genes, by mutations

453
00:41:23,1 --> 00:41:33,17
and everything. But as we are born and we grow in the early phases of our lives, we start developing a model of reality.

454
00:41:33,23 --> 00:41:46,12
And an interpretation of reality, and we start painting this empty canvas and we give a meaning to it

455
00:41:46,12 --> 00:41:46,66
and we create a story. And we create history too.

456
00:41:46,75 --> 00:41:55,26
And that's a much more profound in my opinion view of the brain and the role of neuroscience then we taught before.

457
00:41:55,3 --> 00:42:03,37
And it changes I think the balance. If we believe in this, the human condition becomes a much more precious.

458
00:42:03,44 --> 00:42:08,38
A single life becomes much more precious than we thought before.

459
00:42:08,59 --> 00:42:17,12
Because, the epic of a single life first of all, can not be reproduced ever and it will never happen again.

460
00:42:17,28 --> 00:42:20,54
It's like a book that will never be written again

461
00:42:20,94 --> 00:42:30,7
and I think it gives us a little more recognition as human beings than currently I see the world going on.

462
00:42:31,17 --> 00:42:35,96
And if I can just to finish, if you read the Iliad or the Odyssey,

463
00:42:36,67 --> 00:42:43,28
which are considered the pinnacle of human condition, a description of the human condition.

464
00:42:43,29 --> 00:42:51,33
When a soldier, a Greek soldier would die in Troy in a battle, Homer describes who he was.

465
00:42:51,33 --> 00:42:54,2
Who are the parents, who are the children that he's leaving?

466
00:42:54,2 --> 00:42:58,73
What is the whole history of that individual that will never be recovered?

467
00:42:58,73 --> 00:43:06,05
So, compare that to the news of a death in the newspaper today which is just a number, nothing.

468
00:43:06,38 --> 00:43:16,37
Homer, God forbid, 3,000 years ago knew better what the human condition is than we probably know now.

469
00:43:16,72 --> 00:43:25,94
We are losing that and I think that process of losing it is part of our brains thinking that it is really nice

470
00:43:25,94 --> 00:43:34,22
and good. And is worth it to mimic computers instead of maintaining our integrity. Our human condition integrity.

471
00:43:34,22 --> 00:43:44,19
Speaker 1: So in your neuroscientific field with several neuroscientists working, are you unique at this?

472
00:43:44,19 --> 00:43:44,82
Speaker 2: No.

473
00:43:44,82 --> 00:43:45,65
Speaker 1: In looking at-

474
00:43:45,65 --> 00:43:48,26
Speaker 2: In terms of the way I look at the brain?

475
00:43:48,26 --> 00:43:48,48
Speaker 1: Yeah.

476
00:43:48,48 --> 00:43:50,61
Speaker 2: No, no, I think there are many people.

477
00:43:50,61 --> 00:43:51,61
Speaker 1: Yeah.

478
00:43:51,61 --> 00:43:54,31
Speaker 2: Of course there are nuances.

479
00:43:54,35 --> 00:44:04,29
It's a big field and the brain is very complicated and there are subtleties from a neurophysiological point of view.

480
00:44:04,29 --> 00:44:09,92
For instance, people believe that we should go deeper into the molecularly structure of the brain.

481
00:44:09,93 --> 00:44:14,69
I find this fine from an intellectual point of view of course studying individual synapses and everything.

482
00:44:15,17 --> 00:44:19,54
I just don't think any of this will allow us to explain how the system works.

483
00:44:19,54 --> 00:44:25,8
The system is truly non-linear and if you start studying just a molecule,

484
00:44:25,92 --> 00:44:28,94
you're not going to be able to track it back to the system.

485
00:44:28,94 --> 00:44:31,85
It's gonna be impossible, the number of non-linearities that you have to face.

486
00:44:32,42 --> 00:44:36,59
So but there are many people that are realizing what we are discussing just now.

487
00:44:36,59 --> 00:44:41,63
It's not just I would say honestly, there is not a mainstream yet.

488
00:44:41,8 --> 00:44:45,55
But neither was population coding 30 years ago when I started.

489
00:44:46,55 --> 00:44:53,63
People gave me no hope of having a career in studying populations of neurons, and here I am.

490
00:44:54,03 --> 00:44:59,34
So I'm used to the idea that you may start with notions and concepts that are not mainstream,

491
00:44:59,67 --> 00:45:04,21
and you need to demonstrate that they're worth. That's part of what science is about.

492
00:45:04,21 --> 00:45:09,42
The problem is science is becoming extremely conservative. And it's very difficult to break through with new ideas.

493
00:45:09,49 --> 00:45:14,91
It's much more difficult than when I started, when I was a kid but we're stubborn.

494
00:45:14,91 --> 00:45:21,24
Speaker 1: Yeah, what are you standing in for? Your ratio works standing in five years.

495
00:45:21,24 --> 00:45:23,03
What is the future of your neuroscientific field?

496
00:45:23,03 --> 00:45:27,12
Speaker 2: Well I think as you can see here, this is going very quickly.

497
00:45:27,33 --> 00:45:31,82
The clinical applications I think are going to grow tremendously.

498
00:45:31,82 --> 00:45:36,29
I think that basic science is going to evolve in the sense that we are going to.

499
00:45:36,29 --> 00:45:40,97
I mean we are accelerating the curve of the number of neurons that we can record simultaneously.

500
00:45:40,97 --> 00:45:47,92
It used to be a very flat, straight line. It took us 30 year to get to 1,000, 2,000.

501
00:45:47,92 --> 00:45:54,64
But now things are accelerating cuz we are learning better ways to do this.

502
00:45:54,9 --> 00:46:00,33
My ambition to the end of my life is to be able to actually formulate this theory.

503
00:46:00,33 --> 00:46:08,03
A comprehensive theory of the mind of the brain, the way we talk just a minute ago.

504
00:46:08,55 --> 00:46:13,43
And that's what I'm doing right now. I'm spending a lot of time writing and reading.

505
00:46:13,43 --> 00:46:17,02
I'm reading literature on communication, Marshall Mcluhan for instance,

506
00:46:17,02 --> 00:46:24,41
I became fascinated by what he used to say in the 60s and 70s about the media being the message.

507
00:46:24,85 --> 00:46:29,38
And how communication has changed our nature.

508
00:46:29,39 --> 00:46:38,83
And from the moving from the oral tradition of poetry of the Greeks, to written manuscripts, then to the print,

509
00:46:39,21 --> 00:46:46,54
to the radio, telegraph, telegraph, to the radio, TV, Internet. I think that actually he got it.

510
00:46:46,54 --> 00:46:50,57
He didn't know anything about the brain, but some of his writings in the 60s

511
00:46:50,9 --> 00:46:56,45
and 70s actually got how relevant communication is to synchronized brains.

512
00:46:56,45 --> 00:47:02,52
Speaker 1: I understand that and the human brain net, is that going to be a fact?

513
00:47:02,52 --> 00:47:08,81
Speaker 2: Well, we're doing as a clinical application that's what we are doing right now

514
00:47:08,81 --> 00:47:10,8
and I want to see how that goes first.

515
00:47:11,13 --> 00:47:15,99
I want to see if it is advantageous to the patients because that's a very concrete

516
00:47:15,99 --> 00:47:18,25
and tangible problem to improve training.

517
00:47:18,46 --> 00:47:25,9
But suppose you have a phasic patient, a patient that suffered stroke that destroyed the left side of the brain,

518
00:47:25,9 --> 00:47:30,52
the cortex and he cannot talk. But the right hemisphere is there.

519
00:47:30,84 --> 00:47:34,18
And there's some language capability left on the right hemisphere.

520
00:47:34,63 --> 00:47:38,05
Suppose you can connect this guy with someone else who can speak.

521
00:47:38,59 --> 00:47:44,42
And you can synthesize voice by having a brain net, working with that stroke patient.

522
00:47:44,42 --> 00:47:50,31
Maybe you can improve the training on the right hemisphere, by plasticity because we know it happens,

523
00:47:50,31 --> 00:47:51,63
even in an adult patient.

524
00:47:51,89 --> 00:47:55,83
If you didn't have any lesion on this side, just this,

525
00:47:55,83 --> 00:48:04,25
you may try to improve the language skills of the right hemisphere. So that's another thing that I want to start soon.

526
00:48:04,25 --> 00:48:10,53
Because they are ten times more stroke victims in the world than spinal chord injury victims.

527
00:48:10,54 --> 00:48:16,72
So you're talking about a quarter of a billion people in the world with stroke consequences.

528
00:48:16,72 --> 00:48:24,36
Speaker 1: So when you develop what you are doing in the way that you can see that more

529
00:48:24,36 --> 00:48:32,93
and more you can have parts of the brain that people for some reason compute or it's almost dead,

530
00:48:32,93 --> 00:48:34,11
you can reactivate it by somebody else?

531
00:48:34,11 --> 00:48:39,48
Speaker 2: Exactly, either by combining the brains with someone else. Suppose you're sibling.

532
00:48:40,36 --> 00:48:47,18
Your wife or your daughter or your son help you in the training. And eventually, it becomes a surrogate.

533
00:48:47,18 --> 00:48:51,06
Now you can talk through this combination or you can communicate.

534
00:48:51,06 --> 00:48:56,22
Because there are lots of patients also that become totally detached from the world.

535
00:48:56,5 --> 00:49:00,03
They're concious, their brains are working, and so they are absolutely conscious.

536
00:49:00,03 --> 00:49:09,07
But for instance, all the muscles, Lou Gehrig's disease or ALS, all the muscles of the body are paralyzed.

537
00:49:09,07 --> 00:49:10,7
So they cannot blink, they cannot talk, they cannot breathe, but they're conscious and their brain is fine.

538
00:49:10,7 --> 00:49:16,91
Their central part of the brain is totally fine. And these patients can barely communicate.

539
00:49:18,16 --> 00:49:21,47
There is a brain machine interface for those patients that my friend in Germany took

540
00:49:21,64 --> 00:49:26,78
and use brain bomb were created by the same time that we were doing experiments with rats.

541
00:49:26,78 --> 00:49:33,53
We didn't even know each other at that time. That works, but it's phenomenal. In news he's a hero for this community.

542
00:49:33,53 --> 00:49:41,81
But it can be improved, and then things can be better, faster. So I think that's where we can go.

543
00:49:41,81 --> 00:49:47,14
Speaker 1: When you look at the brain, the importance of creativity, of intuition.

544
00:49:47,14 --> 00:49:54,54
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that's one of my concerns. Computers are not creative, computers don't generate knowledge, we do.

545
00:49:55,04 --> 00:49:58,79
We get raw information and combine it in ways that cannot be predicted.

546
00:49:59,06 --> 00:50:01,93
And that's the reason, as we talked before, I like painting.

547
00:50:02,33 --> 00:50:07,78
Because painters, I loved when they asked Picasso what the painting meant,

548
00:50:08,22 --> 00:50:13,98
one of the particular paintings that he had that day. And Picasso said, well, if I knew I would not have painted.

549
00:50:14,24 --> 00:50:20,81
And this is it, this is deeper than probably he meant for me as a neuroscientist because it's true.

550
00:50:21,24 --> 00:50:27,58
I think his painting is more of an analog description of what we're thinking and what we're feeling.

551
00:50:27,58 --> 00:50:34,61
This is a projection to the outside world of some internal state of the mind

552
00:50:34,95 --> 00:50:39,46
and that's why I think this transition that we discussed.

553
00:50:39,52 --> 00:50:44,89
The impressionist and in modern art, it was an explosion of form, form disappeared.

554
00:50:44,89 --> 00:50:54,16
While the old guys tended to be very careful about reproducing every corner, every shadow of a scene, of a person,

555
00:50:54,59 --> 00:51:02,75
modern art removed the concept of shape from painting and sculpturing because it didn't matter anymore.

556
00:51:03,25 --> 00:51:07,05
That was a completely different expression, surrealism, cubism.

557
00:51:07,05 --> 00:51:16,38
This is totally linked to the mind view of the brain in the sense of trying to project what is inside rather than

558
00:51:16,38 --> 00:51:19,18
taking a shot of what is out there.

559
00:51:19,54 --> 00:51:24,8
In photography of course, good these guys are business, the guys who painted everything.

560
00:51:25,12 --> 00:51:34,18
As poor amateurs like to still paint this thing. But art, you talk about creativity, art.

561
00:51:34,21 --> 00:51:41,37
My concern is that if we become just computers, art will disappear. Computers don't do art. They tried to mimic.

562
00:51:41,37 --> 00:51:49,93
They can compose artificial music, they can do some text, but they don't carry the human condition in those letters

563
00:51:49,93 --> 00:51:51,86
and those brushes, no?

564
00:51:52,11 --> 00:51:58,32
We do, and I fear that a complete total allegiance

565
00:51:58,32 --> 00:52:06,51
and reliance on technology may destroy the human capability of being creative. Of doing art, of doing the unexpected.

566
00:52:06,51 --> 00:52:12,12
Speaker 1: And a conscious way of brains working together like in soccer or-

567
00:52:12,12 --> 00:52:18,12
Speaker 2: Well, when you saw the soccer fans in the stadium, I think they are.

568
00:52:18,45 --> 00:52:24,13
I created this metaphor and this operational definition of an organic computer.

569
00:52:24,13 --> 00:52:30,95
An organic computer is basically multiple brains that get synchronized in nature by whatever signal.

570
00:52:31,00 --> 00:52:33,29
Visual, tactile, auditory.

571
00:52:33,29 --> 00:52:41,45
That makes them operate as a whole so the flock of birds is my best metaphor or school of fish.

572
00:52:41,64 --> 00:52:43,55
The flock, if you look at the flock,

573
00:52:43,55 --> 00:52:52,85
it's very interesting because you're minimizing the chances of reaching individual to be attacked by a predator.

574
00:52:52,85 --> 00:52:59,6
But the birds change position in the flock. Sometimes they have to go to the front and break the air, they get tired.

575
00:52:59,6 --> 00:53:07,2
They move to the internal center of the flock where they are most protected cuz they're tired.

576
00:53:07,22 --> 00:53:11,06
But there are birds that have to fly on the edge, and at the edge they are more vulnerable.

577
00:53:11,07 --> 00:53:12,52
But they are always rotating.

578
00:53:12,52 --> 00:53:19,86
So there's dynamics in this thing that it seems to be minimizing the chances of being caught.

579
00:53:19,98 --> 00:53:25,23
If you're flying by yourself, a falcon may get you. An eagle may get you much easier.

580
00:53:25,61 --> 00:53:29,62
And as a flock, they are able to get to a source of food,

581
00:53:29,84 --> 00:53:40,17
and they may get there easier than just individual birds looking, so birds and fish have memory like we do.

582
00:53:40,17 --> 00:53:43,25
Speaker 1: So tell me about your other brain projects in Natal.

583
00:53:43,25 --> 00:53:46,59
Speaker 2: Well, Natal is a completely different thing.

584
00:53:46,59 --> 00:53:52,6
It's a parallel track on my life, that it started in 2002, end of 2002, beginning of 2003,

585
00:53:52,6 --> 00:53:54,95
when President Lula was elected here in Brazil.

586
00:53:55,17 --> 00:53:59,84
I was already for a long time in the United States, 14 years already in the United States,

587
00:54:00,01 --> 00:54:06,71
I saw an opportunity to actually return to Brazil and do something.

588
00:54:06,71 --> 00:54:14,53
Not just to do science in Brazil, but to use science as a completely different thing. As a agent of social development.

589
00:54:14,99 --> 00:54:21,51
In a part of Brazil that is well known for Brazilians as being the most underdeveloped part of the country,

590
00:54:21,79 --> 00:54:26,97
in the northeast of the country. And I wanted to prove that human talent is everywhere.

591
00:54:27,2 --> 00:54:36,02
That you could go and just drop from a parachute in a place and you start creating scientific infrastructure.

592
00:54:36,02 --> 00:54:41,99
And you invest in high level education. In a way, that will transform the social reality of the community.

593
00:54:41,99 --> 00:54:49,95
So I chose a small town in the outskirts of the capital of the human artist state and the capital is Natal.

594
00:54:50,23 --> 00:54:56,74
But the city's actually named Macaiba. And so it's the name of a palm tree that is typical division.

595
00:54:56,74 --> 00:55:05,05
And you have 65 inhabitants and the worst human and development indexes in the state

596
00:55:05,05 --> 00:55:07,36
and so we're going to launch here in one of the worst in the country.

597
00:55:07,9 --> 00:55:14,24
And what we did was to go there and to create in parallel to an institute to do neuroscience, like any institute.

598
00:55:14,79 --> 00:55:21,96
To use the knowledge we have as there are scientist who design an education program that actually starts in the

599
00:55:21,96 --> 00:55:26,43
prenatal care of the mothers of our future students.

600
00:55:26,43 --> 00:55:34,93
So because human mortality, women mortality rate was very high, particularly pregnant women mortality rate.

601
00:55:35,01 --> 00:55:38,66
So at that time about 90 women per 100,000 deliveries would die.

602
00:55:39,61 --> 00:55:44,73
So very high, 20, 30 times higher than you should have normally.

603
00:55:46,95 --> 00:55:56,39
We create a clinic, a women's clinic, to oversee the prenatal care of all the women in the region.

604
00:55:56,77 --> 00:56:02,71
And to give an idea, we start from nothing. Now we are doing 12,000 appointments a year.

605
00:56:03,21 --> 00:56:06,51
And we had already 60,000 appointments since we started.

606
00:56:06,72 --> 00:56:12,24
Which means that pretty much every woman in that city that got pregnant in the last six,

607
00:56:12,24 --> 00:56:15,33
seven years had gone through our prenatal care system.

608
00:56:15,33 --> 00:56:21,23
It's all free of charge, it's all public, and it's the best prenatal care you can get that medicine can offer.

609
00:56:21,75 --> 00:56:28,91
Because as neuroscientists we knew then if you don't provide the best possible prenatal care,

610
00:56:28,91 --> 00:56:33,6
any problems that a child will have during pregnancy cannot be fixed.

611
00:56:33,64 --> 00:56:36,03
It's very difficult, it's almost impossible right now.

612
00:56:36,03 --> 00:56:40,13
Any learning disability or any other malformation of the brain it will not be corrected.

613
00:56:40,47 --> 00:56:48,17
So how could you have a neuroscience based education program that doesn't offer these students a chance to be born with

614
00:56:48,17 --> 00:56:54,37
the highest possible neurobiological protection to achieve happiness.

615
00:56:54,43 --> 00:56:57,21
Because that's my definition of education is the pathway to happiness.

616
00:56:57,68 --> 00:57:00,81
So we created this education program that starts in prenatal care

617
00:57:00,82 --> 00:57:08,21
and then we start enrolling 1500 kids a year to three schools that we created.

618
00:57:08,21 --> 00:57:15,18
Two in that state and one in another state, in Viyella. Where the kids go in one part of the day to public school.

619
00:57:15,68 --> 00:57:25,96
Which in Brazil is not full time. It's just four, five hours a day.,

620
00:57:19,56 --> 00:57:25,96
But on the other period of the day they would come to our schools.,

621
00:57:23,3 --> 00:57:29,75
In our schools in Macahiba, Natal, [INAUDIBLE] Zaire are all lab science oriented.

622
00:57:29,75 --> 00:57:32,22
Even to learn portuguese you learn in a lab.

623
00:57:33,07 --> 00:57:39,95
We basically make these guys, these students from that time from 10 to 15 years old.

624
00:57:40,36 --> 00:57:47,31
When we open our new school in the campus, of the brain, that we were building is a 100 hectares campus in that region.

625
00:57:47,31 --> 00:57:52,05
It's taking us seven years to finish that. The school is going to be from zero to 17.

626
00:57:52,92 --> 00:57:59,71
So from the moment they are born, they can go to the nursery, to the moment they finish high school,

627
00:57:59,71 --> 00:58:02,93
they are going to be in our school, if they want.

628
00:58:02,93 --> 00:58:10,03
Then, we are going to have an undergrad program in the campus for kids that want to pursue a scientific career.

629
00:58:10,59 --> 00:58:14,74
Master's, PhD, and postdoctoral training.

630
00:58:14,74 --> 00:58:17,89
So we're going to have a program that means that a kid can be there for 30 years, if they want.

631
00:58:17,89 --> 00:58:27,33
But in the case of this science education program that we created on the opposite period of the day from public school

632
00:58:27,33 --> 00:58:29,99
these kids became Protagonists in their own education.

633
00:58:31,58 --> 00:58:35,87
They basically got involved in learning as a pleasant experience.

634
00:58:35,87 --> 00:58:41,3
And they develop an ethics of learning that we never saw in the region,

635
00:58:41,3 --> 00:58:46,84
in the most parts of Brazil because they don't go to our schools because they have to, they go because they want to.

636
00:58:46,84 --> 00:58:53,03
And that school became a school not only for science but for developing citizens.

637
00:58:53,05 --> 00:58:55,38
Citizens they are fully aware of their rights.

638
00:58:55,58 --> 00:58:59,62
Fully aware of their responsiblity in society and fully aware that science

639
00:58:59,62 --> 00:59:04,35
and knowledge can be the passports for their happiness, for their further education.

640
00:59:05,75 --> 00:59:11,7
And this thing multiplied to a point that we have already 11,000 kids that have gone through this schooling system.

641
00:59:11,91 --> 00:59:18,56
And for the first time in the place history, Macahiba, in the neighborhoods next to it,

642
00:59:18,56 --> 00:59:22,35
these kids are gaining access to the best universities in Brazil.

643
00:59:22,35 --> 00:59:28,71
In their vision, public universities where they could never make it cuz they never could pass the admissions exam.

644
00:59:28,71 --> 00:59:32,49
Even though our schools don't have exams, we don't do tests. We don't believe in tests.

645
00:59:32,49 --> 00:59:36,28
We don't believe in the Anglo-Saxon punitive way of teaching.

646
00:59:36,28 --> 00:59:43,31
We believe in the Finnish way, without knowing we have replicated a Finnish approach to a location in Brazil.

647
00:59:43,31 --> 00:59:49,9
Without knowing until very recently that we're very similar parallels with one caveat that the Finnish have not learned

648
00:59:49,9 --> 00:59:57,08
yet. We do the education since the prenatal care. So and now the women, our partners too.

649
00:59:57,08 --> 01:00:04,7
We created a community that is very supportive of everything we do because different from universities in the world

650
01:00:04,7 --> 01:00:08,35
that really are this beautiful paradises of knowledge

651
01:00:08,35 --> 01:00:11,29
but the surrounding parts of the university have nothing to do with the university

652
01:00:11,29 --> 01:00:18,38
and have no idea what is going on inside the doors. I see that particularly in United States and even here in Brazil.

653
01:00:18,38 --> 01:00:24,89
We create a campus that has no walls. It's totally powerless to the community.

654
01:00:25,34 --> 01:00:28,19
And the community has learned the value of science.

655
01:00:28,19 --> 01:00:32,33
Because science is not for paper, books, applications, acquisition, knowledge.

656
01:00:32,34 --> 01:00:38,79
Science in Matal, in Macahiba, we demonstrate that science can also be an agent of social and economic transformation.

657
01:00:39,59 --> 01:00:46,26
Because in addition to promoting education in women's health, we have created a whole cascade of jobs,

658
01:00:46,26 --> 01:00:54,56
an entire production line of suppliers, people that make construction work because we are building a campus.

659
01:00:54,69 --> 01:01:02,02
So it is very nice to see the fathers of our children building this campus, they work for the construction company,

660
01:01:02,02 --> 01:01:10,93
that has built. And the first build, they're gigantic buildings. They're 12000 square meter research institute.

661
01:01:10,93 --> 01:01:13,57
And then there are 12000 square meter school.

662
01:01:13,57 --> 01:01:25,73
Speaker 1: Very good, quite impressive. I think when I hear you, I think dreaming It's very important.

663
01:01:25,73 --> 01:01:25,76
Speaker 2: Yeah.

664
01:01:25,76 --> 01:01:25,79
Speaker 1: For science.

665
01:01:25,79 --> 01:01:27,03
Speaker 2: The soup title of my new book about the Natal, Macahiba project is how to be a utopia.

666
01:01:27,36 --> 01:01:39,44
A scientific social utopia because in our days utopia has become almost like a curse word, a negative word.

667
01:01:39,59 --> 01:01:42,4
And I disagree frontally with that.

668
01:01:42,45 --> 01:01:47,37
I think we have to have utopias and dreams, even if we don't fulfill them completely.

669
01:01:47,37 --> 01:01:52,75
It's very important to be engaged in one, because of the process makes us want to get out of our house

670
01:01:52,75 --> 01:01:59,41
and go out here in this pretty tough cruel world and actually do something complete.

671
01:01:59,75 --> 01:02:06,7
And in Natal, I think that's what happened. We had Brazilians coming from all over the country.

672
01:02:06,76 --> 01:02:14,46
Teachers, scientists, physicians, administrators, technicians who believed in the utopia

673
01:02:14,93 --> 01:02:20,85
and now they can put their hands on these walls and they can see these kids getting to the university.

674
01:02:20,85 --> 01:02:23,25
And so, it's a very rewarding experience.

675
01:02:23,46 --> 01:02:29,57
In fact, it's one of the things that when I go to Natal, I feel the real meaning of science.

676
01:02:30,00 --> 01:02:38,56
When I look and hear these patients and I go to Natal, I actually feel it was worth it, these 35 years of work.

677
01:02:38,56 --> 01:02:39,87
Neuroscience you also need dreaming, I suppose.

678
01:02:40,03 --> 01:02:44,46
Absolutely, yeah, we need dreaming for a variety of reasons but in neuroscience, yes.

679
01:02:46,06 --> 01:02:49,93
I think if you equate, as we discussed before, if we equate neuroscience

680
01:02:49,93 --> 01:02:55,34
or any science just with technology development, you're missing the most important part of it.

681
01:02:55,34 --> 01:03:01,88
It's this dream, it's this creativity, it's trying to answer questions that nobody has ever asked

682
01:03:01,88 --> 01:03:04,4
or nobody ever had an answer for.

683
01:03:04,42 --> 01:03:11,26
So the first time that John and I recorded 26 neurals simultaneously in a little rat, in our labs,

684
01:03:11,26 --> 01:03:12,68
in the middle of the night.

685
01:03:12,8 --> 01:03:13,34
First,

686
01:03:13,34 --> 01:03:18,8
he told me that there was a good thing we could share a lawyer for our divorces because we're there five in the morning

687
01:03:18,8 --> 01:03:23,59
recording a rat brain. And our wives will never believe that we're actually doing it.

688
01:03:23,59 --> 01:03:30,86
But the second thing we thought, both of us in Philadelphia in 91 was this is going to change everything

689
01:03:31,37 --> 01:03:36,01
and nobody knew. But we knew, we were the first one to see those 26 neurons fine together.

690
01:03:36,44 --> 01:03:43,37
And it may sound little but for us that was the universe, that was the thing that changed our lives.

691
01:03:43,37 --> 01:03:49,35
Speaker 1: You were talking about technology being, people that only believe in technology for a solution.

692
01:03:49,35 --> 01:03:52,34
And that sends off thinking of Silicon Valley.

693
01:03:52,34 --> 01:03:56,19
Speaker 2: Well yeah, I think those guys are living in a bubble.

694
01:03:56,19 --> 01:03:58,83
They're very interesting things that they have created

695
01:03:58,83 --> 01:04:03,09
and they're very interesting things that have changed the world that have created

696
01:04:03,09 --> 01:04:08,55
but they're not the gods of the universe. That they think they are And a lot of hopeless and arrogance there too.

697
01:04:08,55 --> 01:04:13,15
There's a very, a lot of talent people and a lot of gifted people.

698
01:04:13,15 --> 01:04:15,68
But you just need to go to San Francisco

699
01:04:15,68 --> 01:04:20,92
and ask the opinions of the people who live in San Francisco before this thing explodes, Silicon Valley,

700
01:04:21,35 --> 01:04:23,36
and what is going on there.

701
01:04:23,58 --> 01:04:28,52
Because a lot of people there believe that technology will solve all our problems, and that's not true.

702
01:04:28,88 --> 01:04:34,63
Our problems will be solved by the good old-fashioned way of humans interacting

703
01:04:34,63 --> 01:04:36,98
and trying to find a consensus to live together.

704
01:04:36,98 --> 01:04:42,11
Through democracy, through political engagement, through social engagement,

705
01:04:42,11 --> 01:04:46,63
through recognizing that the knowledge of the body is more With the same opportunities

706
01:04:46,63 --> 01:04:50,17
and work to increase the opportunities to everybody.

707
01:04:50,28 --> 01:04:58,81
And try to look for a way so everybody can seek happiness and achieve a good amount of it, not perhaps everything,

708
01:04:58,81 --> 01:05:02,48
but a good amount, everybody makes life decent for everybody.

709
01:05:03,1 --> 01:05:10,2
And to believe that we're going to solve all of the problems of the universe through Facebook, Twitter, or to robots,

710
01:05:10,2 --> 01:05:11,77
or artificial intelligence is iudicrous.

711
01:05:12,47 --> 01:05:23,25
Is in fact, in my opinion, a new wave of where you have to reduce human value,

712
01:05:23,25 --> 01:05:24,47
you have to devalue the human contribution.

713
01:05:24,78 --> 01:05:32,52
Because then, if you deduce human cost of labor, you increase profits to infinity as a very well-known equation.

714
01:05:33,56 --> 01:05:37,47
You cannot eliminate human value, it is obvious.

715
01:05:37,54 --> 01:05:47,97
But so in some senses, in a very main sense, some of the prophecies that is gurus like Kurzweil

716
01:05:47,97 --> 01:05:57,00
and others have made that we are going to be replaced are not only foolish and not based on any scientific data.

717
01:05:57,00 --> 01:06:03,72
They're dangerous in my opinion, they actually confront us with the fact that there has to be an answer to that,

718
01:06:03,72 --> 01:06:05,93
and the answer is that we are humans.

719
01:06:06,21 --> 01:06:17,26
And our most value, most precious capabilities are not out there for a digital computer to replace.

720
01:06:17,26 --> 01:06:19,2
Speaker 1: It's neglecting the value of the brain.

721
01:06:19,2 --> 01:06:22,74
Speaker 2: It's neglecting the value of the human species, in my opinion.

722
01:06:22,74 --> 01:06:31,13
Millions and millions, billions of years of evolution they took us from a piece of rock,

723
01:06:31,13 --> 01:06:39,91
or star dust to a thinking creative, non-conformist human brain.

724
01:06:40,23 --> 01:07:00,11
And it's destroying the fabric of humanity in my opinion. So, we need to be aware of it and confirm these guys.

725
01:07:00,11 --> 01:07:00,54
Speaker 1: [INAUDIBLE] I think.

726
01:07:00,54 --> 01:07:00,8
Speaker 2: Yeah.

727
01:07:00,8 --> 01:07:04,41
Speaker 3: Maybe it's a bit off track, but most of the time when you interview brain specialists. It's very brainy.

728
01:07:04,41 --> 01:07:04,65
Speaker 2: Yeah.

729
01:07:04,65 --> 01:07:07,14
Speaker 3: That when we look around here, all the metaphors, so to speak, or what we see,

730
01:07:07,14 --> 01:07:11,93
is actually very cooperate-able, very with the body, very connected to movement.

731
01:07:11,93 --> 01:07:31,73
And so, it's not, even when you say the brain is the center of the universe, it's so much acted out through all these-

732
01:07:31,73 --> 01:07:33,71
Speaker 2: Yeah, well that's the difference of a technician and a scientist.

733
01:07:34,83 --> 01:07:39,19
My professor here in Brazil, which was the father of neuroscience in Brazil, Cesar Te Maria.

734
01:07:39,48 --> 01:07:42,94
Always told me, there's a big difference between a technician and a scientist.

735
01:07:42,94 --> 01:07:46,41
A technician builds gizmos and runs things like a robot.

736
01:07:46,95 --> 01:07:54,05
A scientist thinks like a human, and thinks about science in broader terms than just a specific field

737
01:07:54,05 --> 01:07:59,02
or a specific area of his or her work.

738
01:07:59,13 --> 01:08:07,23
I think we scientists almost need, by default, to have a very profound and deep intellectual background

739
01:08:07,23 --> 01:08:14,4
and we need to think about the consequences of what we do. The legacy of what we do and the way our science is used.

740
01:08:14,4 --> 01:08:18,29
We didn't talk about this, but there's a very near danger of weaponizing the brain.

741
01:08:18,8 --> 01:08:22,55
And I'm totally opposed to it because this is the last frontier.

742
01:08:23,00 --> 01:08:30,13
And I don't want to see what I did, what I created, called brain meshing interfaces, being used to harm or kill people.

743
01:08:31,17 --> 01:08:31,65
So-

744
01:08:31,65 --> 01:08:32,13
Speaker 1: [INAUDIBLE]

745
01:08:32,13 --> 01:08:36,61
Speaker 2: Well, you can imagine this is happening now in some places,

746
01:08:36,61 --> 01:08:41,11
particularly in the United States where Department of Defense is thinking about using brain machine interfaces to

747
01:08:41,11 --> 01:08:44,55
create weapons. That humans can control just by thinking.

748
01:08:45,05 --> 01:08:54,38
And I firmly oppose this and I think that neuroscientists speak out against this kind of use of this research.

749
01:08:54,38 --> 01:09:05,21
Speaker 1: It's a good question. Or a good statement you're saying, because that is true.

750
01:09:05,21 --> 01:09:05,46
The moment you cross the border of knowledge again-

751
01:09:05,46 --> 01:09:07,73
Speaker 2: Yes. And our only hope is society.

752
01:09:08,24 --> 01:09:13,52
Because we scientists push the envelope to discover what is possible, but is society's duty

753
01:09:13,52 --> 01:09:18,81
and right to regulate what can be done with this knowledge around the world.

754
01:09:18,81 --> 01:09:30,17
Speaker 1: When you say the human brain interface concept, you said? That's more than connecting therapist and patient?

755
01:09:30,17 --> 01:09:38,95
Speaker 2: Yeah, what people are thinking there is totally, I mean, it's totally for me unethical.

756
01:09:38,95 --> 01:09:40,32
Speaker 1: What are they thinking of?

757
01:09:40,32 --> 01:09:40,62
Speaker 2: Well,

758
01:09:40,62 --> 01:09:45,92
they're thinking about implanting soldiers with electrodes to record brain activity we can use to control guns

759
01:09:45,92 --> 01:09:51,55
or weapons or whatever. I don't know the details because I refuse to even listen to the details.

760
01:09:51,55 --> 01:09:58,79
But this is a debate that has to be done among scientists and society not only among neuroscientists yes.

761
01:09:58,79 --> 01:10:07,47
Speaker 1: You mean, you create an exoskeleton, but you put it inside.

762
01:10:07,47 --> 01:10:15,63
Speaker 2: No no, you get signals from the brain to control a machine gun or a missile launcher device, god knows what,

763
01:10:15,63 --> 01:10:17,51
I don't know, or an exoskeleton for a soldier to go to war.

764
01:10:17,73 --> 01:10:26,68
And that's not what I had in mind when I created this technology. This is what I had in mind.,

765
01:10:23,47 --> 01:10:26,93
Speaker 1: Cuz when you envision, not this part, but [CROSSTALK] but

766
01:10:26,93 --> 01:10:38,62
when you envision a world where this brain nets with work, how far can it go?

767
01:10:38,62 --> 01:10:44,08
Speaker 2: Well, at this point I told you I don't have, it's just superstitions and hints,

768
01:10:44,08 --> 01:10:50,38
and gut feeling to describe it. I cannot tell you precisely what it could go.

769
01:10:50,66 --> 01:10:57,34
I think about as I told you, potential applications that can be beneficial to mankind,

770
01:10:57,83 --> 01:11:00,67
and to people that are suffering from disorders or diseases.

771
01:11:00,96 --> 01:11:05,97
But I don't even think of sci-fi scenarios that are harmful.

772
01:11:05,97 --> 01:11:06,64
Speaker 1: [INAUDIBLE]

773
01:11:06,64 --> 01:11:10,82
Speaker 2: Well, I think that if we could communicate better.

774
01:11:11,01 --> 01:11:14,36
If we could find a way of communication that is more natural

775
01:11:14,36 --> 01:11:19,16
and better perhaps we will figure it out that we all the same,

776
01:11:19,16 --> 01:11:23,85
that we have the same fears no matter where you came from, we have same aspirations, we have same desires,

777
01:11:23,85 --> 01:11:24,87
we are all human by the way.

778
01:11:25,31 --> 01:11:31,01
And I look at things like the refugee crisis in Europe,

779
01:11:32,04 --> 01:11:40,82
perhaps by brain to brain communicating we realize that we are all coming from the same place and, by the way,

780
01:11:40,83 --> 01:11:51,41
the place was Africa. And so, race prejudice, prejudice based on economic differences, on religion.

781
01:11:52,04 --> 01:11:59,77
All these things would disappear if we could somehow convince people that what goes through in our brains is the same

782
01:11:59,77 --> 01:12:04,57
thing, it's the same stuff. And what our brains produce is the same.

783
01:12:04,57 --> 01:12:08,58
Speaker 1: So, when you look in the future brain communication will be more and more elaborate?

784
01:12:08,58 --> 01:12:14,31
Speaker 2: I hope it could become more and more elaborate.

785
01:12:14,31 --> 01:12:22,52
In fact, if you read Arthur Clarke's 3001, the last book of his series that is titled 2001.

786
01:12:22,52 --> 01:12:29,83
He starts the book with something called brain caps in 3001 and people communicate by brain caps in 3001.

787
01:12:29,83 --> 01:12:41,35
He would be happy to know that we're a thousand years early in getting some of the stuff to work.

788
01:12:42,86 --> 01:12:54,27
Of course, what he described I don't think will ever happen,

789
01:12:54,27 --> 01:12:56,2
but it's interesting to see that neuroscience can even compete with science fiction.

790
01:12:56,2 --> 01:13:01,35
Speaker 3: Elaborating on that last one, the film Avatar came out in 2008 and it seems now 2015 we're already on that-

791
01:13:01,35 --> 01:13:04,23
Speaker 2: I always wanted to ask Cameron where he got the idea. Because he claims he had a dream.

792
01:13:04,23 --> 01:13:11,29
We had published many scientific papers before he had that dream I think.

793
01:13:13,11 --> 01:13:13,85
So,

794
01:13:13,85 --> 01:13:15,89
I always wonder where he got that idea of having a guy in a machine controlling an avatar because this was out there.

795
01:13:15,89 --> 01:13:22,38
I would be very, very curious to ask him where he really got the idea.

796
01:13:22,38 --> 01:13:22,47
Speaker 1: And he-

797
01:13:22,47 --> 01:13:24,36
Speaker 2: That's the director of the film, you know? Cameron.

798
01:13:24,36 --> 01:13:28,06
Speaker 3: But as far as the technical aspect is concern-

799
01:13:28,06 --> 01:13:34,76
Speaker 2: No, there are many things there that are not possible of course and he just made it up.

800
01:13:35,18 --> 01:13:38,63
Which is the advantage od science fiction to us, we cannot make it up.

801
01:13:38,63 --> 01:13:45,22
Speaker 1: Yeah, but when you really work, collaborate on what you are doing and what other neuroscientists are doing,

802
01:13:45,22 --> 01:13:54,56
we work on the frontier of knowledge in that sense. It's unimaginable what is possible when it works-

803
01:13:54,56 --> 01:13:58,9
Speaker 2: Yeah, as I tell all my students always, imagination is always the limit here.

804
01:13:58,9 --> 01:13:59,9
Speaker 1: Yeah.

805
01:13:59,9 --> 01:14:05,79
Speaker 2: And in this labs we're not here to do the mundane and the incremental things,

806
01:14:05,79 --> 01:14:08,79
we are here to push the limit of neuroscience.

807
01:14:08,79 --> 01:14:15,1
Speaker 1: So, the imagination is the only limit when you look at the possibilities.

808
01:14:15,1 --> 01:14:19,08
Speaker 2: Yes, but of course, the time scale is not tomorrow.

809
01:14:19,08 --> 01:14:29,48
But I like to work with people that likes the deal, the deal of thinking far ahead and trying to make it happen.