To learn how an alien mind might think, the researching duo Consuelo De Moraes and Mark Mescher have researched the behavior of a parasitic vine known as Cuscuta pentagona. Cuscuta neither have roots nor photosynthesize; instead the Cuscuta attach to a host plant.
Mike D'Zmura at the University of California, Irvine has been researching the brain–computer interface (BCI). He has been looking for efference copies in his subjects' minds.
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Mike D'Zmura at the University of California, Irvine has been researching the brain–computer interface (BCI). He has been looking for efference copies in his subjects' minds.
Thanks for watching Follow for more videos.
#cosmosspacescience
#throughthewormhole
#season4
#episode4
#cosmology
#astronomy
#spacetime
#spacescience
#space
#nasa
#spacedocumentary
#morganfreeman
#aliens
Category
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LearningTranscript
00:01Do aliens think in ways we could ever understand?
00:07Do all forms of intelligence share the same underlying pattern?
00:12A pattern we are only now beginning to see?
00:18By studying the nonhumans in our midst,
00:22scientists are learning how alien minds function.
00:26They are discovering that emotions may be more important than logic,
00:32and bodies matter as much as brains.
00:36We may soon know how aliens think.
00:46Space.
00:48Time.
00:49Life itself.
00:50The secrets of the cosmos lie through the wormhole.
00:57We know that the stuff of life is spread throughout the cosmos.
01:14Odds are that aliens are everywhere.
01:19Will alien brains think like ours?
01:23Will they have brains at all?
01:26Without an alien to study,
01:29these seem impossible questions to answer.
01:32But we are not alone on this planet.
01:34If we want to know how aliens think,
01:39we can start by looking closely at the alien minds here on Earth.
01:46I used to look at my dog and wonder,
01:49what's going on in there?
01:51Did she think the way I did?
01:54At least my dog seemed part of the same world as me.
01:57Other creatures seemed utterly alien.
02:02Is it possible that all life possesses some form of intelligence,
02:08but sometimes so different from our own that we fail to see it?
02:13Could a form of alien thought be right under our noses?
02:17We believe plants cannot think or feel.
02:22But what if we're wrong?
02:28A groundswell of new research suggests plants possess a form of intelligence entirely alien to our own.
02:39Most plants can smell, taste, touch, and perhaps hear.
02:50And according to these two researchers, they may even talk.
02:55Consuelo de Moraes has doctorates in chemistry and biology.
03:01Mark Mesker's background is in animal behavior and evolution.
03:06The duo's experiments have proven that plants behave in ways we normally only attribute to creatures with brains.
03:16I think what's alien about the way plants engage their environments for us as animals is that it's just so counterintuitive.
03:23Animals, and particularly humans, we're very visually oriented, we're very cognitively oriented.
03:28We're these problem solvers that are used to sort of encountering our environments and thinking about them and coming up with ways to solve problems.
03:34And plants are solving problems, but in a very different way of interacting with their environment.
03:40Recently, Mark and Consuelo have used pheromone-detecting machines and time-lapse cameras to study a leafless parasitic vine called Cuscuta pentagona.
03:52Cuscuta exhibits a host of problem-solving behaviors we don't expect to see in plants.
04:00But this fascinating life form has a dark side.
04:04It may look like an ordinary vine, but in the plant world, it's a vicious serial killer.
04:12Cuscuta is a true parasite, so as opposed to most plants, they don't have roots, they don't really do for the synthesis.
04:22So in order to survive, they must attach to a host plant.
04:26They work like vampires in a sense.
04:29They will take the resources out of the plant and then grow, base all the resources from the host plant.
04:34So they would not produce anything. They're true parasites.
04:40As a Cuscuta vine grows, it probes its surroundings the way we do with our hands when we search for the bathroom light in the middle of the night.
04:49The vine bends and grows until it finds something tasty, say, a tomato plant.
04:57Then it probes downward until it finds the base of the stem, which it sinks its teeth into.
05:05It wraps itself around the plant and sucks out its vital juices.
05:10And strangely enough, Cuscuta can smell whether its potential victims are healthy or not.
05:19We accept that animals can find the host based on the smell.
05:24We see that all the time, right?
05:27It's just we don't think that plants have that ability.
05:30And I think that's what's fascinating because we just have this line that we have drawn that says animals can do this, but plants cannot.
05:44Plants can also use smell to communicate.
05:48Some use odors to defend themselves against predators and warn each other of danger.
05:54For instance, caterpillars are eating the leaves of this soybean plant.
05:58The plant calls for help by releasing chemicals that attract wasps.
06:04The wasps sting the caterpillars to death.
06:08While this is going on, other plants smell the distress signal and release their own chemicals to ward off attack.
06:18Plants live on a different time scale from humans.
06:22Their actions unfold so slowly, we think nothing is happening at all.
06:28But plants defend themselves, communicate with other plants, recognize injured neighbors by scent, and sniff out males.
06:40Plants predate the human race.
06:44They may well outlast it.
06:45So is it likely that their very alien form of thought and behavior could be found on other worlds?
06:56The history of evolution on different planets may unfold in very different ways.
06:59I think we would be very likely to find something that was very similar ecologically to what plants do.
07:04I think they're able to take energy from starlight basically and convert that into biochemical energy that they can then use.
07:10That's just the base of the food chain and it seems that that would be the logical place for ecosystems to start even on other planets.
07:17The question is, are plants on other worlds any better at thinking than the ones we know?
07:25Do alien trees contemplate their branches?
07:29Do alien flowers have nightmares about worlds with no sun?
07:33Perhaps alien plants have developed the complexity of thought it takes to become self-aware.
07:46This woman would say no.
07:48She believes that no life form here on earth or out in space can evolve complex thought until it has the ability to move and to sense the world as it moves through it.
08:03For cognitive scientist Saskia Nagel, the interplay of sensory input and bodily motion is the foundation upon which consciousness is built.
08:14For instance, I see this cup, I can feel this cup with my fingers and also I can sense the weight of this cup if I grab it.
08:23That's sensory input.
08:25But at the same time closely coupled, my eyes move when I look at it.
08:30I have to move my arm to grab it and I have to keep it like this if I want to sense the weight of it.
08:36And we think that the coupling of sensory processes and motor processes is what allows us to perceive.
08:42Our idea of what it means to be conscious is inextricably tied to our specific human senses.
08:50The ability to see, smell, hear, touch and taste.
08:56But Saskia believes that aliens could develop rich mental lives even if they sense their world in entirely different ways.
09:03To prove it, she's feeding an alien sense into the nervous system of a group of volunteers.
09:14By wearing a device called a field space belt, test subjects are learning how to feel the position of magnetic north.
09:21This gives them a perfect sense of direction.
09:27It's just a belt equipped with a number of vibrators.
09:30On the backside, there's a little compass, a very good one actually, and a little computer at the other side down there.
09:37And the compass and the computer always tell one element of these vibration elements at the time to vibrate.
09:44And it's always that element that points north.
09:48Today, Saskia and her team have taken three volunteers into a forest.
09:55The volunteers put on blacked out goggles.
09:59Next, they are spun around until they are disoriented.
10:04Now, they have to find their way to Saskia, who stands at a fixed position directly north.
10:12Ordinarily, they wouldn't stand a chance.
10:16But each volunteer has spent six weeks training with the belt.
10:21They have developed a built-in compass.
10:27Actually, it's interesting that they don't feel the tactile stimulation anymore after the training.
10:32It is as if this new sense has always been there.
10:37And they really develop a different sense of space.
10:41The day when we have solid evidence of how aliens think may be a long way off.
10:48But experiments like this give us a way of approximating what it's like in alien heads,
10:55with an alien way of sensing the world.
10:57They show us the ability to think is not dependent on the senses we know.
11:08Logically, aliens would evolve senses tailored to their own particular environments.
11:13On a planet where light is dim, having a built-in radar system would be more valuable than the sense of sight.
11:21An alien could have a completely different set of senses and still dominate its world.
11:28Mm-hmm.
11:32But how do groups of aliens think?
11:36How do they communicate with each other?
11:39Organize and form sophisticated societies?
11:42The answer may be right under our feet.
11:53Your brain is like a maze of twisting railroad tracks.
11:59As neurons grow, they make trillions of connections.
12:02And out of this incredibly complex network arises the miracle of your mind.
12:09But who's to say it works the same way for intelligent life on other planets?
12:14What if the neural connections of alien brains are spread across many different bodies?
12:19Professor Nigel Franks is looking for an answer by closely studying the dominant form of life on Earth.
12:33Insects.
12:35So I've been working on ants professionally now for about 30 years.
12:39And every day we have a successful experiment, they surprise and delight me.
12:42And I think the thing that's absolutely riveted me is now we know that ants are so much more sophisticated than we ever knew them to be.
12:50When ants get together, they form a super-organism.
12:55A large, intelligent life form made of small, not especially intelligent, parts.
13:02What's special, I think, is that the way the ants communicate with one another.
13:07So the whole colony emerges effectively as a brain-like structure.
13:12To see this mass brain in action, Nigel forces the ants to go house hunting.
13:20Right, so in this experiment, we've taken one of our ant colonies.
13:25We've been really mean to them because we've totally destroyed the nest that they've been living in.
13:29And what that means is they have to find a new home, and we've offered them a choice of two alternative nest sites.
13:35There's one over here, which is too light and got a very wide entrance, which is two things they don't like,
13:41versus this nest that they really should prefer because it's got a beautiful narrow entrance.
13:46It's got plenty of space for them to live in.
13:49And this red filter means that the nest is dark, and that's something they prefer as well.
13:53So we would expect them to be able to choose this nest, and the beauty of this experiment is we should be able to work out exactly how they go about making this kind of decision.
14:03Ants are picky shoppers.
14:06When they size up a new home, they carefully consider the height of the ceilings, the floor space, the width of the rooms, and the number of entrances.
14:16They will reject nests that have hygiene problems, such as the remains of a previous tenant.
14:22If an ant likes a particular nest, it goes home to the colony and finds a receptive nest mate, and it leads it back to that nest site.
14:36Basically, the leading ant teaches the single following ant the route to the new nest site.
14:42Then, if it likes it as well, go home and recruit yet more.
14:45So one ant becomes two, becomes four, becomes eight, becomes sixteen.
14:48And when they build a sufficient number of their nest mates in the new nest site, they achieve what we call a quorum threshold,
14:55and that's the decision point that makes them commit to that particular nest site.
14:59And then they'll start carrying their nest mates there rather than leading them.
15:06Recently, computer scientist James Marshall used Nigel's findings to create a sophisticated model of ant decision-making.
15:14Then, something remarkable happened.
15:18James came up on another computer simulation that looked very much like the one he was working on.
15:25A colleague came to join my department from Princeton where he'd been working on modeling primate decision-making circuits in the brain
15:32just around the same time I started making these computer and maths models of ant colonies making decisions.
15:37And we went to each other's talks and we were both really excited because we could see that each was basically looking at the same kind of system.
15:44Although one was an ant colony and one was a primate brain, they were both basically working in the same way to make decisions.
15:52James realized that individual ants in a super-organism behave like the neurons in a single primate brain.
15:59So I think ants collectively process information in a very interesting way. No individual ant needs to know all the details about its environment.
16:10But by having a little bit of information and aggregating it together at the colony level, the colony can be well-informed about the decision it's making even if individual ants are less well-informed.
16:19And that's analogous to neurons in the brain. No individual neuron really knows anything, but you stick a load of them together and collectively the brain does know something.
16:31So, given enough time, could ant colonies become conscious? Are they already conscious?
16:41Well, I think one of the great differences between the way we solve problems and the way ants solve problems is that the ants actually have to mingle with the problem
16:49to solve it. And the great difference we have is that we can often play virtual reality games in our heads to think about alternative scenarios and how we might solve the problem and what the consequences of that might be.
17:02So what we do is stand back and think about things, whereas the ants really roll up their sleeves and get on with it.
17:08Ant colonies can accomplish goals far beyond the capabilities of their individual members.
17:13But they can only think about things that are directly in front of them.
17:19They lack self-awareness and the ability to imagine.
17:24Perhaps alien insects have these abilities.
17:27On Earth, they do not.
17:32So is there a non-human intelligence on Earth that rivals us for thoughtfulness and innovation?
17:38This man says yes.
17:42He is studying a creature that may hold the secret to alien thought and the mystery of consciousness.
17:55Human brains are not the largest on Earth, but they are the most complex.
18:00Our brains don't just think.
18:04They also are self-aware.
18:07They are conscious.
18:10Is consciousness unique to the human brain?
18:13Or could a creature with radically different brain architecture also be self-aware?
18:21The answers may lurk behind these unblinking eyes.
18:26Octopuses are invertebrates.
18:30They don't have spinal cords.
18:32Yet, they exhibit a level of intelligence we usually associate only with mammals.
18:38They appear to be thoughtful, clever, even calculating.
18:44But they are utterly unlike us.
18:47Octopuses are truly the closest thing to an alien life form of any degree of intelligence on the planet Earth.
18:59Neuroscientist David Edelman studies the brain of the octopus.
19:04Or more precisely, brains.
19:07It has more than one.
19:09In the common octopus, we have half a billion neurons or nerve cells.
19:14More than half of which are in the arms.
19:17And those arms, in fact, are really, really interesting because you can almost characterize them as having their own miniature brain.
19:26The multiple brains of the octopus act as a distributed processing system.
19:35The arms feeding data to the head like a network of computer nodes feed data to a central hub.
19:42If one of the nodes is cut off, it can still function.
19:47She cut off an octopus's arm.
19:50That arm is actually able to execute a series of movements that are very, very coordinated, which is really intriguing.
19:57And you do not see that at all in any vertebrate.
20:04How do you work out what a creature with an alien brain is thinking?
20:09David's solution was to adapt intelligence tests made from mice and rats to octopuses.
20:18So what you see here is a barn's maze, which was originally designed for looking at memory and learning and actual visual navigation in rodents.
20:29And what we're doing here is we're checking the octopus's capability for visual navigation.
20:34And so what you see here is this fairly simple maze with 18 holes, but only one hole is a true hole that leads to an escape.
20:44The escape is into a container of its own seawater.
20:47But you also see these visual landmarks.
20:50And the idea behind this is to follow the animal as it learns the location of the various landmarks in relation to the one true escape hole.
21:00The octopus has no problem finding its way out.
21:05Trials have shown that when the markers are moved, it will head toward what it believes to be the exit sign, even if it's no longer above the escape hole.
21:17Clearly the animal plans, acts, and remembers.
21:22It's thinking at a high level of complexity.
21:26But is it conscious?
21:27I define consciousness as the stitching together of all of the diverse sensory input that's coming into my brain.
21:38Visual input, sense of touch, combined with auditory, what I hear, and the remembrance of all of that stuff stitched together as a unitary whole.
21:49So a creature with multiple brains could be conscious, but being conscious is not the same thing as being self-aware.
21:59And right now, we have no way of measuring either consciousness or self-awareness.
22:05If somebody were to ask me whether my dog is conscious, as a pet owner and a dog lover, I would say, well, of course, she seems to be aware of her world, she seems to respond in ways that look remarkably familiar to me.
22:20But as a scientist, I have to demand evidence of consciousness in non-human animals who cannot report to me their internal conscious states.
22:32The octopus's thoughts are a mystery and may forever remain a mystery.
22:39We may never know if it is self-aware or if it can contemplate its world.
22:45Can you think without words? Is there such a thing as thought without words? Well, you know, I might be in the minority, but I happen to think that you probably can.
22:55I think that there can be visual thoughts. It's very hard for us as humans to imagine that because, of course, every time we think, language breaks in.
23:06What will alien languages be like? Would theirs and ours have anything in common?
23:12Well, the evolution of language on Earth may hold the answers to whether humans and aliens can one day communicate or be hopelessly separated by our uncommon tongues.
23:27Human evolution has been going on for roughly five million years.
23:33And that's just a blip in the 13 and a half billion year history of creation.
23:38Chances are we are not the smartest creatures in the universe.
23:44If we met aliens far more advanced than us, could we communicate?
23:51Would we speak the same language?
23:54What would language be like for a species a million years older than us?
23:59Professor Simon Kirby sees language as a living thing that evolves over time.
24:10The sheer variety of languages on Earth, 6,000 unique tongues, are mirrors of how we think and how thought may change in the future.
24:21Right now we're doing something pretty extraordinary.
24:24I'm breathing out slowly while at the same time moving my tongue, jaw and lips in an incredibly fast ballet of movement.
24:34I can use this skill to take a thought that's in my head and transfer it into yours.
24:40Simon wants to know why this happens.
24:51How did we end up having a language with a particular kind of structure that allows us to talk about anything?
24:58It turns out surprisingly that we can get a clue to the answer by looking at a simple game like broken telephone.
25:04In the game of broken telephone, a sentence evolves as it's passed from player to player.
25:12But it doesn't evolve biologically, rather it evolves through a process of cultural evolution.
25:25Thanks.
25:26So the original sentence was, the survival of certain words in the struggle for existence is natural selection.
25:35And what you guys turned it into was, longer existence is not longer existence.
25:43The sentence seems to have mutated from sense to nonsense.
25:47But Simon argues what's significant is the sentence became shorter and easier to learn.
25:52That is how language evolves.
25:56So the broken telephone game acts as a kind of miniature version of cultural evolution.
26:03So what's happening is that each player in the game is hearing a sentence and mapping it somehow into their brains briefly,
26:11and then trying to reproduce it again.
26:14Because that process is imperfect, the sentence can evolve over time.
26:17So the sentence we get out at the end is different from the one at the start.
26:22And what's happened is that that sentence has adapted in some way to the brains of the people playing the game.
26:28Proving this scientifically is difficult.
26:33Because language doesn't leave a fossil record behind to study.
26:36Simon tackles this problem by creating alien languages word by word, then watching them adapt to human brains.
26:47So we wanted to see if we could recreate the cultural evolution of language in the lab.
26:53Whether we could study something that takes hundreds of years and see it happen in basically an afternoon.
27:00So what we did is we set up an experiment where we teach a volunteer an alien language that we've made up, and then test them on it.
27:10So in this setup we have a bunch of alien fruits that have names, but every name is different.
27:16And this language is essentially impossible to learn.
27:18Okay Adam, so now I'm going to ask you to try and identify some of these alien fruits for me.
27:24Pohumo.
27:26I have that one.
27:28Waguhuki.
27:30Virtually no one is able to remember the words correctly.
27:35Okay, I'm afraid you actually got none of those correct.
27:38Um, so sorry about that.
27:40But that's okay.
27:41Now, Adam will write down what he thinks the words were, and then this new set of words will be taught to the next volunteer.
27:50This volunteer would write down her version of the words, and then those words will be taught to the next person.
27:57So, towards the end of the experiment, participants that are coming in and learning the language after it has, if you like, been washed through the brains of some of our earlier participants, suddenly seem to do better.
28:11In fact, towards the end of the experiment, our volunteers can name all the fruit that we showed them, even ones they've never seen before.
28:19Well done, that's all of them correct. Congratulations.
28:23And what's happened here is that the language has evolved. It has evolved structure.
28:30And it turns out that the mistakes people make will tend to be the kinds of things that other participants can learn.
28:38So every mistake one generation makes, makes the language easier to learn for the next generation.
28:44So communicating with an ancient alien race may not be so difficult after all.
28:51If language evolution follows similar patterns on other worlds, an alien tongue could be easy to learn.
28:59But don't expect the aliens to be smart.
29:04If we look at how humans work today, we store information online, we share information online on these massive networks,
29:13and we basically find out any information we want instantly.
29:18So perhaps an alien civilization would have gone further down this road.
29:22I can imagine evolution taking us in a direction where less and less is needed of our brains, as it were, of our biology,
29:32because more and more of that is taken on by the cultural system that we're building around us.
29:37So perhaps we will get more and more stupid biologically and more and more smart culturally over time.
29:46Clever or not, aliens would need language to have civilization.
29:52But would they need speech?
29:54Why bother to talk if you can share your thoughts directly via metal telepathy?
30:04How might aliens communicate?
30:07We speak.
30:09Language lets us transmit our thoughts into other people's brains.
30:13But language might not come in the form of speech.
30:16What if complex life evolved on a planet where communication by sound was impossible?
30:25A different way of transmitting information might evolve.
30:29What if aliens are telepathic?
30:32It's already happening here on Earth.
30:40Today, this man's thoughts will be detected and transmitted by a machine.
30:49It's part of a revolutionary project led by University of California at Irvine neuroscientist, Mike Gizmura.
30:57We call it a brain-computer interface.
31:00We use EEG to measure the faint signals generated by the brain when a person thinks.
31:06Our goal is to analyze the EEG signals to determine what it is the person is thinking.
31:13We can then send the phrases to some other person using any number of means, including email or text messaging.
31:19Mike is testing whether this man can use the brain waves generated when he imagines two different syllables as a form of telepathic Morse code.
31:32There are two syllables presented at the beginning of trials.
31:37These are either woe or fit.
31:41If our subject hears fit, then he thinks fit.
31:46Fit.
31:47If he hears woe, then he thinks woe.
31:53Woe.
31:57Fit could be used to communicate the short element of Morse code, di.
32:02Woe can be used to communicate the long element of Morse code, da.
32:06The Metamorse code tests have been stunningly successful, with an accuracy rate near 100%.
32:18This synthetic telepathy technology exploits an error correction mechanism in the brain.
32:24When the brain sends a command to the motor cortex, it also creates an internal impression, known as an efference copy, of what the resulting movement would look and feel like.
32:36Mike and his collaborators realized that if they could read these efference copies in the brain, synthetic telepathy could advance to the next stage.
32:48Transmitting thoughts, not just in Morse code, but in common phrases.
32:55Finding and isolating an efference copy in the electrical jumble of the mind is no easy thing.
33:01The exact location of neural activity is difficult to discern, because the scalp, skull, and cerebral fluids surrounding the brain scatter its electric signals before they reach the electrodes of an EEG.
33:15The real problem is the signal-to-noise ratio.
33:22At the moment, I am speaking to you right now.
33:25You are listening, and this is generating activity in your brain.
33:29Let's suppose that this brain activity is what we would like to detect.
33:33This is the signal.
33:35Well, if it were the only thing going on in your brain, it wouldn't be so hard.
33:39However, there are many things that your brain is doing simultaneously.
33:42It's controlling your heartbeat.
33:47It's controlling the rate of breathing.
33:51We are constantly scanning our external environments.
33:56It generates thoughts that rise up into consciousness.
34:03Now, suppose that all of these things are going on simultaneously behind the skull.
34:08This is similar to all of these sources of noise in a recording studio behind a thick plated glass.
34:16Pretty soon, it's going to be impossible to hear about this sound.
34:21This is a great problem that we face in signal processing.
34:28So far, Mike's software is able to identify words in the subject's brain about half the time.
34:36But advances in synthetic telepathy are coming quickly.
34:42Someday, we may be able to project our thoughts through the ether.
34:46And if we can do it, it could be standard equipment for an alien species.
34:53I can easily imagine that there are other species out there who may actually be better at signaling things through interfaces such as EEG.
35:03So I can imagine, for instance, a species whose motor areas are not buried behind an extraneous piece of brain, but rather on the surface.
35:16This alien species could learn to pull its thoughts, much as ant colonies form superorganisms, but with vastly more brain power, augmented by machines.
35:29The thinking power of this alien mega brain could dwarf anything we can imagine.
35:39But could a society that communicates by thought endure?
35:43If you think you get too many texts and emails now, what happens when people don't even have to go to the trouble of typing?
35:51On Earth, instant communication seems to cause as many problems as it solves, perhaps because our messages are loaded with emotion.
36:01We presume that isn't an issue for mentally advanced aliens.
36:07Surely the illogical, machine-like beings beyond emotion.
36:11Beyond emotion.
36:12But this woman believes, with her heart and her mind, that thinking and feeling are two sides of the same coin.
36:22Like us, aliens may need emotions.
36:31Science fiction often depicts advanced alien species as cold, emotionless beings of pure intellect.
36:38Basically, computers with legs.
36:42According to this line of reasoning, emotions are primitive urges that merely cloud our thinking.
36:49But would a mentally superior species necessarily be devoid of feelings?
36:55Or could aliens have a heart?
36:57Psychologist Lisa Barrett's groundbreaking research reveals that language, memory, and even rational thought all depend upon emotion.
37:16When you feel angry, you experience this is very different from when you're having a memory, or when you're thinking something, or when you're perceiving something like a beautiful flower.
37:29Those seem to you to be very, very different kinds of experiences, but at the level of the brain, there are common networks that are active during all of those events.
37:39The notion that our emotional and rational minds are entirely separate dates back to Plato, who saw emotions as savage, brutish instincts.
37:51Charles Darwin argued that emotions are evolutionary holdovers from animals, which no longer serve in a useful purpose, like our vestigial tailbones.
38:04Humans of the future, or any alien species far along the evolutionary trail, will not be burdened with feelings.
38:11But according to Lisa, you can't separate reason from emotion.
38:22In her lab at Northeastern University, Lisa studies how emotions shape thought.
38:29She does this by altering people's core affect, the basic state of mind that underlies complex emotions.
38:36And she does this without their knowing it.
38:41So subjects come into the laboratory, and using specialized equipment, we present different images to the left and the right eye.
38:50To one eye, we will present slashing images, let's say, Mondrian-type image of artwork, embedded in visual noise.
38:57To the other eye, we present a static image of either a neutral face, a smiling face, or a scowling face.
39:07When one of your eyes is shown a flashing image and the other eye is shown a still image, you are only conscious of seeing the flashing image.
39:16But the still image nonetheless reaches your subconscious mind.
39:20By measuring skin conduction, heart rate, breathing, and vascular resistance,
39:32Lisa detects her subjects' unconscious responses to the hidden faces,
39:37and then measures how this affects their thinking.
39:40She's found that people exposed to the static smiling face are more likely to find the Mondrian-type image beautiful.
39:51But when the hidden face is frowning, they don't like the picture.
39:56It's not the case that we're impassively viewing things in the world and then having reactions to them.
40:02Our affective feelings are actually influencing what we see and how we make judgments about what we see.
40:12Whether we know it or not, emotions determine how we think and what we pay attention to.
40:20Your affect helps you to allocate your attention, for example, towards me,
40:25and ignore all the other sources of information that you could potentially be paying attention to.
40:32Affect also helps you to sharpen your perception of the thing you're paying attention to.
40:37If emotions are essential to consciousness and self-awareness,
40:43then aliens will certainly have them.
40:45They will use them the same way we do.
40:50To realize their goals.
40:53To define their personalities.
40:58To make sense of their world.
41:02The true nature of alien thought would probably defy our speculations.
41:08It may well be beyond our understanding.
41:13But by studying the minds of the aliens here on Earth,
41:17we have learned much about ourselves.
41:20And the gift of having brains that can think, feel, and communicate.
41:29One day, when we finally engage with alien minds,
41:33we will find out whether consciousness, emotion, and imagination are unique to us,
41:40or spread throughout the stars.
41:43Right now, we have no way of knowing.
41:46All we can do is imagine.
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