Marc Salem claims to reads people's minds by closely observing their body language; he calls this information leakage.
Alpha waves show mental concentration while theta waves are indicative of relaxation. Freeman explains that the fusiform gyrus lights up whenever we see color.
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Alpha waves show mental concentration while theta waves are indicative of relaxation. Freeman explains that the fusiform gyrus lights up whenever we see color.
Thanks for watching. Follow for more videos.
#cosmosspacescience
#throughthewormhole
#season4
#episode6
#cosmology
#astronomy
#spacetime
#spacescience
#space
#nasa
#spacedocumentary
#morganfreeman
#canourmindsbehacked
#humanbrains
#brains
Category
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LearningTranscript
00:00Our minds store our entire lives, our memories, our talents, our deepest
00:12desires, tell no one and our thoughts remain our own. But that might be about
00:22to change. Our brains are biological computers, vulnerable to data theft.
00:34Computer hackers can read our email. Brain hackers may someday read our minds
00:43and even rewrite our thoughts. Can our minds be hacked?
00:57Space, time, life itself. The secrets of the cosmos lie through the wormhole.
01:11We live in a world of data. We all know how vital it is to protect our personal information,
01:28our passwords and credit card numbers. But what if hackers learned to read or tamper with
01:35our most precious and private store of data? The contents of our minds. Can the brain be
01:43hacked like a computer? The data in our brain is not stored as simple ones and zeros.
01:50Hacking into our thoughts requires decoding the logic of our neurons. Science is getting
01:57close to achieving that goal. One day soon, our innermost thoughts may no longer be our own.
02:14I once tried to hide the truth from my mother. I lied. But when she looked into my eyes,
02:22I knew that she knew. How could she know?
02:29How you doing? Please turn off your cell phones. I'm going to put your hands together for the one and all.
02:38Mark Salen, join the show.
02:40It's only me. Good evening, everybody. I'm delighted to be here. What I'd like to do is choose somebody at random.
02:59Mark Salen is one of New York's most prominent psychologists, but he also has a remarkable talent,
03:05one that has catapulted him into show business.
03:10All right. Here's what I want you to do. I want you to say stop at any point.
03:13Say stop at any point.
03:14Stop.
03:15Okay. Look, the first word on the first line. Have you got it?
03:18Yeah.
03:19Okay. Hold on to this.
03:22All right. Say nothing at all to me. Say nothing at all to me. Just think of the first letter.
03:28A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z.
03:36Okay. It's an S. Is that correct?
03:37Yes.
03:38Okay. Good.
03:39See the second letter, probably a vowel. A, E, I, O, U. A, E, I, O, U.
03:44It's an A, isn't it?
03:46Mark's mind reading ability is not magic.
03:50He's reading tiny physical clues his subjects are unwittingly giving him.
03:56C, E, and the word is second. Give a round of applause, please.
04:03What I'm looking for, first of all, is some kind of difference in the way that they're expressing themselves.
04:09Should I get rid of this one or this one?
04:11That one.
04:12Get rid of this one.
04:13I think every mental thought that we have has some physical corresponding emission.
04:20There's something that we could tell about that thought. We literally could see people thinking.
04:25My friends, let me just say, once again, nothing that I did this evening is supernatural.
04:31Nothing that I do is a cult. Thank you so very much.
04:34From his stage shows and from his academic research, Mark has learned that it's almost impossible to keep a secret.
04:47What our brains are thinking can't help but leak out into our physical bodies.
04:53Now this light board is really somewhat like your brain, in a simplistic form, where you have impulses traveling out interdependently.
05:04That is, each relies on the other one.
05:07Just as your brain controls every muscle in your body, a theater light board sends signals to every light in the house.
05:14And just as the light board operates groups of lights with a single command, so does the brain.
05:21For example, Clarissa, show what would happen if we switched switch number one.
05:26A single button triggers a complex set of actions. Lights turn on, lights turn off, others move or change color all at once.
05:36In the same way, when we think a thought, our brains trigger a whole set of movements in our bodies.
05:43Let's say suddenly it occurred to the person that they look ridiculous. Hit number two, please.
05:49Suddenly that thought would change. And the physical would also change.
05:55Perhaps a sly smile would come on someone's face.
05:58Psychologists like Mark call these involuntary muscle reactions information leakage.
06:05He believes there's no way to stop it, even if you have the perfect poker face.
06:12Hi, guys. I'm glad you're here. I know that you're, among other things, gamblers.
06:18And we're going to try a little bit of an experiment with how you think and information you may be giving off.
06:24What sometimes you may call tells what we're really looking at as nonverbal communication.
06:29Could everybody look at their card, please?
06:36Remember it and put it down.
06:38To play a game of poker, you need to prevent everyone at the table from guessing your cards.
06:44But Mark believes he can see through any player, no matter how blank their expression may be.
06:50Let's try you.
06:52Think red, black.
06:54Focus on it.
06:56Black, red, black, red.
06:58Black, black, black.
06:59Red, red.
07:00I think it's definitely black.
07:01Is that correct?
07:02Yes.
07:03Okay.
07:04Spades, clubs.
07:05Spades, clubs.
07:06Okay.
07:07There's a rapid blinking.
07:09Um, discomfort at the spade.
07:12So, is it a spade?
07:14Okay.
07:15Um, age two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.
07:19Jack, queen, king.
07:22There was a very tight blink onto Jack, so I would think Jack.
07:31There are ways to know what people are thinking.
07:33You have to learn to pay attention to the subtle differences, the subtle nuances.
07:38And that's what I do.
07:39I try to look at what's normally done, and then what those subtle nuances are, and plus what are universal.
07:45Natural mind readers like Mark can decipher thoughts from involuntary muscle movements.
07:51But cutting edge technology could give brain hackers direct access to our thoughts, even if our muscles never move.
08:06Augie Nieto is a fitness industry entrepreneur.
08:10In 2005, he was diagnosed with ALS, and soon became almost completely paralyzed.
08:17The only parts of his body he can move are his feet.
08:22He uses them to control a speech computer.
08:25Even these muscles will eventually degenerate.
08:29But he may not lose the ability to communicate.
08:34Neurotechnology pioneer Dr. Philip Lowe is hoping to hack into Augie's mind,
08:39before it's too late.
08:42Philip and a team of engineers are building a state-of-the-art brain reader.
08:47A device they call the iBrain.
08:50I'm wearing, you know, the first portable brain monitor I've ever built.
08:54And what it is doing is that it is recording my brain data.
08:59It is actually sending it over to our servers, and our algorithms can crunch on it.
09:05Every time we decide to move our muscles, billions of neurons fire miniature bolts of electricity inside our brains.
09:16Philip's electrically sensitive iBrain can detect these electrical pulses by measuring the small changes in voltage they produce on the surface of the scalp.
09:26By seeing the activation of particular brain structures, we can tell, ah, this person is trying to move his hands.
09:37Philip thought the iBrain might help patients like Augie, who, despite their paralysis, have healthy, functioning brains that can still send signals to their muscles.
09:47ALS patients do not have problems when it comes to their own brains.
09:53The areas that his brain is using in order to control these limbs, these areas are still working perfectly fine. They're just unemployed right now.
10:04Hi, Augie. Nice to see you again.
10:09If the iBrain can pick up Augie's mental intention to move, Philip could create a new means for him to communicate.
10:18You will have a prompt that will ask you to, ah, imagine to, you know, move your, your right hand, ah, for four seconds at a time.
10:27And, of course, we're going to be monitoring your brain waves very, very closely during that time and, and having all our algorithms crunch the data in the background as well.
10:37The test is successful.
10:40Philip's iBrain recognizes whenever Augie is thinking about moving his right or left hand.
10:49Augie had a very successful first test.
10:50We will use these brain patterns in order to control a virtual hand on the screen, which will enable him to just pick these words and pick these letters and enable him to communicate.
11:02So this gives us a lot of hope and encouragement that, in fact, we have a system that will work for everybody and that will enable individuals to use their brain patterns in order to communicate.
11:13The biggest fear for someone with ALS is to be not able to communicate. That is called being locked in. With the iBrain, I will never, never be locked in.
11:26Soon, Augie may not even have to think about moving his hand in order to communicate.
11:33Because a laboratory in California has already begun to translate thoughts into pictures and words.
11:41We all have thoughts we'd rather keep to ourselves.
11:48When computer scientists want to keep something secret, they encrypt it.
11:54But it's just a matter of time before any code is cracked.
11:58The electrical activity buzzing between the neurons in our brains could be the next code we decipher.
12:05In fact, some neuroscientists are already translating the language of the brain into plain English.
12:14Neuroscientist Jack Gallant is on a mission to translate the flurry of activity inside our heads into plain English.
12:23You might say, he's writing the book on it.
12:30You can think of each part of the brain as translating between the world and whatever the brain activity is in that part of the brain.
12:36So there's some sort of language you can think of that's going to mediate between the world and the brain.
12:41And if you had a list of all of the things that related the world to the brain, you would essentially have a dictionary.
12:48The first brain dictionary Jack set out to build was for the language of sight.
12:53There are about 50 or 70 brain areas that are devoted to vision.
12:59So there's going to be essentially 50 or 70 different dictionaries that are going to have to build one dictionary for each region of the brain.
13:06Now that's going to be a really big dictionary.
13:07It's going to be much thicker than this because the number of things you could see in the world is really, really large number.
13:13To build a brain dictionary, Jack and his colleagues Shinji Nishimoto and Alex Huth use an FMR eye scanner to measure exactly how the brain responds to a long series of video clips.
13:34So this is a viewer that allows us to visualize the blood flow while the movie plays.
13:38Blue means relatively less blood flow and red means relatively more blood flow.
13:43And you can see that the blood flow is changing quite dramatically as the scenes in this movie play.
13:50And the problem that we have in modeling the brain is to try to understand what the relationship is between each individual point in this brain and these movies.
14:00But as they compiled thousands of scans of brains reacting to thousands of frames of video, Jack and his team found that certain objects trigger predictable patterns of blood flow.
14:14And they began to build a dictionary of objects in the world defined as particular patterns of blood flow in the brain.
14:21And then once we have this world brain dictionary, we can actually take it and we can sort of run it backwards and we can create a brain world dictionary.
14:30To test that dictionary, they send their test subjects back into the FMRI to watch more movies.
14:40Except this time, they don't see what the subject sees.
14:44Jack and his team have to guess, using only the raw data from the brain scans and an advanced computer algorithm.
14:51So there are probably say, 10,000 points on the brain, 5,000 that are being used in this model.
14:59And each point in the brain has a predicted brain activity that it generates when you stick an image through it.
15:06And then we aggregate information across all those 10,000 points and to come up with the best prediction.
15:11This is the image that only the subject could see.
15:15These are the top choices the computer selects from the brain world dictionary.
15:23And this is the composite average.
15:27No matter what the subject sees in the world, the brain world dictionary can produce a rough copy.
15:38But this algorithm does more than just guess what images people are watching.
15:42It can also guess what they are thinking about those images.
15:49Here on the left is the movie that the subject saw.
15:52And on the right, you can see 2,000 nouns and verbs.
15:56And they change their size.
15:58And the size of the word indicates the probability that that concept appeared in the video at that time.
16:04You can see here it gets talk, face, woman, man.
16:07Here, talking, man.
16:08You'll see here's hand, room, face.
16:13So this is a complicated scene.
16:15Here we go.
16:16We switch to an ocean scene.
16:18Cloud, sky, vegetation.
16:19This is Waikiki, body of water, building, sky, people walking, tree.
16:25These are all really very accurate semantic decodings.
16:29Jack's team has built a dictionary of 2,000 emotionally neutral concepts that people might think when they watch their series of videos.
16:39Calibrating their computers to decode more personal meaning is only a matter of time and increasing the level of detail in the brain scans.
16:47We're constantly surprised by how much information we can recover, especially given that the measurements we're taking of the brain are still at this point really, really primitive.
16:58That's one thing that I think is really exciting about this field and really interesting.
17:02And I also think it raises a caution flag that I think we're going to have to deal with these ethical issues involving brain decoding sooner rather than later because we don't know how fast this technology is going to progress.
17:15And that opens up a big ethical can of worms.
17:17You know, when is that going to be used and what can it be used for?
17:21And I really think this needs to get addressed right away.
17:24Brain hackers may soon be able to read your every thought.
17:26What then?
17:29If your thoughts can be decoded, could they be altered?
17:33This neuroscientist and entrepreneur is pushing the boundaries of brain manipulation with a device that could turn amateurs into experts in a single day.
17:50We'd all love to be truly great at something.
17:53Maybe a physicist like Einstein or an artist like Picasso or a great leader like Nelson Mandela.
18:05Most of us have to settle for simply good instead of incredible.
18:10But what if we could change that by hacking our metal software and giving ourselves capabilities we weren't born with?
18:20Chris Berka is a neuroscientist, engineer, inventor and CEO of a neurotech startup company.
18:32It's a workload that would crush most of us.
18:35But she handles it by getting into a high performance, high output brain state.
18:41It's what athletes call the zone.
18:43Being in the zone, it's essentially just focused attention and the ability to not be distracted.
18:52It's what allows you to really develop perfection in any skill.
19:00Getting into the zone is a full time obsession for Chris.
19:03Her company is developing a device that she claims can train your brain to work like the brain of a highly skilled expert.
19:11Chris Oosterlink is a California state archery champion.
19:29He has a small band around his head that has four sensors for sensing the brain's electrical activity.
19:38We're going to be looking for the particular state leading up to the shot that we know as the peak performance state.
19:44So Chris, do you want to get ready and go?
19:45Inside Chris's brain, billions of neurons are firing, creating waves of electricity.
20:01Different states of mind have different frequencies of waves.
20:05When people are in the zone, two frequencies dominate.
20:08Alpha waves, which indicate a state of meditative concentration, like those of a Zen master.
20:16And lower frequency theta waves, which show extreme relaxation.
20:22The red line indicates the EEG theta activity, and the green line indicates the alpha activity.
20:28And we see both of those, alpha and theta, increase just prior to taking the perfect shot.
20:32Chris brings in a group of amateurs. She wants to see what will happen if she coaxes the amateurs to take their shots while in the same brain state as a professional archer.
20:58So what we're doing is monitoring the brain's electrical activity.
21:05We do that by putting sensors on the scalp.
21:09And as you move through different cognitive states and mental states, the electronic frequencies of your brain will change.
21:15And we can record those in real time and analyze them.
21:18Each amateur focuses and relaxes to reach the zone.
21:21Chris's monitor records their brain waves, and a small haptic buzzer on their collar lets them know when they've achieved the same brain state as the professional.
21:33We're seeing the EEG alpha increase and theta increase.
21:37The haptic buzzer stopped, and now he's ready to take the perfect shot.
21:41Go ahead, Shane.
21:42That was perfect. That was perfect. That's exactly the goal.
21:55By the end of only one day of practice, Chris's technology hacked the minds of a group of amateurs to shoot at, or close to, a professional level of expertise.
22:05And what we were able to demonstrate is a 230% increase in the speed and accuracy of marksmanship training.
22:15Chris sees no end of potential customers for her brain hacking device.
22:22A corporate board that needs to make smart group decisions.
22:26A president who needs peak performance, or a special forces operative whose split-second choices make the difference between life and death.
22:39What we're trying to do is to give you the ability to control your mind and your mental state.
22:45Your ability to deal with even the most challenging environments.
22:49And just by training you to control your brain, you get this kind of metacognitive awareness that allows you to be much more resilient and adaptable to stressful situations.
23:04If we can hack into our own brains to amplify our talents, what's stopping us from hacking into the brains of other people?
23:13Could one mind reprogram the reality of another?
23:20Let's experiment.
23:22Close your eyes.
23:24Keep them closed.
23:27Now imagine you're alone in the desert, and your throat and mouth are swollen with thirst.
23:34Now think about drinking a cool glass of water.
23:39Open your eyes.
23:44Do you feel refreshed?
23:47If you do, I just hacked into your mind and altered your perception.
23:58Stanford's David Spiegel is not your typical psychiatrist.
24:01He helps his patients overcome their struggles through a technique that is controversial for a university doctor.
24:09Hypnosis.
24:11Hypnosis is a form of highly focused attention coupled with an ability to dissociate or put outside of conscious awareness, things that would ordinarily be in consciousness, and a heightened response to social cues or suggestibility.
24:25And hypnosis is highly focused attention. It's been called believed-in imagination.
24:36David wanted to know how people perceived the world when hypnotized.
24:41So he has designed an experiment to look at the brains of people who have the ability to hypnotize themselves.
24:52Okay, Katie. You're doing all right?
24:54Yep.
24:55Good.
24:56All right, now we're going to go into a state of self-hypnosis now.
25:01So now I want your eyes to be relaxed and closed.
25:05Imagine your body floating somewhere safe and comfortable, like a bath, a lake, a hot tub, or just floating in space.
25:12Each breath deeper and easier, body floating safe and comfortable.
25:16Once she is under hypnosis, David shows Katie a grid of colors.
25:23What colors do you see now? Just name a few.
25:26Well, there's the yellow square and there's a couple of green squares of this square.
25:33Good.
25:35Katie perceives the color grid and her fusiform gyrus lights up.
25:40This part of the brain becomes active whenever we see color.
25:45But because Katie is under hypnosis, David can now tamper with her senses.
25:53And now I want you to drain the color from the image in front of you.
25:59So that what you start to see is just gray, white, and black.
26:05Just drain away the color.
26:06Now, again, remaining in this state of concentration, Katie, please tell me what the image looks like to you now.
26:17Good.
26:20Physically, the color image has not changed.
26:33But David now takes another scan of Katie's fusiform gyrus.
26:42So we're looking now at the regions of the brain that actually light up because there's more blood flow when they're looking at color than when they're looking at black and white.
26:50Here is what the blood flow was when they were really looking at color.
26:54And here's the blood flow when they were looking at color but drained it of color and saw it as black and white.
27:00Even though she's still looking at a color image, the blood flow to Katie's fusiform gyrus is decreasing.
27:07It is proof that her brain is turning off her ability to see color at David's suggestion.
27:17The image she perceives is becoming black and white.
27:20David believes that hypnosis opened up Katie's brain for reprogramming.
27:28His thoughts hacked into her mind and became her real living experience.
27:34We tend to think that the brain processes raw information and we make sense of it afterwards.
27:43But it turns out, especially in studies of hypnosis, that we can reset the brain, that we can change the way the brain actually perceives information.
27:52So it's not that it reacts differently to the same input, it changes what the input is.
27:56David's work suggests that while under hypnosis, the way our brains perceive reality is altered.
28:06I had a student who was doing research with me on hypnosis, who was also a really talented athlete for the football team.
28:15He was terrific and he was very hypnotizable.
28:18And I would say to him, so what's going on when you're playing like this?
28:21He said, Doc, when I'm having a good day, I'm aware of two things.
28:26I'm aware of the football and the defender.
28:30And he said, and there's 20 other big guys on the field.
28:33I don't know they're there.
28:34There's 60,000 people yelling at me from the stands.
28:38I don't hear them.
28:39Clearly, our minds are programmable.
28:42We have hardware that allows us to take in input, process it and do something with it.
28:46And that input can come from ourself or from people around us.
28:51Hypnotism opens our minds to brain hackers.
28:54But we have to make a conscious choice to enter a hypnotic state.
29:00Like a computer that can accept or reject another user logging on.
29:05There may be a hole in our neurological security, however.
29:10A team of researchers in Tel Aviv claims to have found an exploit that could open our unconscious mind to hackers.
29:17Think back to your childhood.
29:18What do you recall?
29:19Your mother's perfume?
29:20Fresh cut grass?
29:21Oatmeal cookies baking in the oven?
29:22A familiar scent can flood the mind with images, memories and emotions, whether we like it or not.
29:26Computer hackers write programs called cracks to break into secure systems.
29:27Could your sense of smell be a crack for a brain hacker?
29:28Could your sense of smell be a crack for a brain hacker?
29:29Could your sense of smell be a crack for a brain hacker?
29:30Could your sense of smell be a crack for a brain hacker?
29:31Could your sense of smell be a crack for a brain hacker?
29:32Who would you recall?
29:33Who would you recall?
29:34Who would you recall?
29:35Could your sense of smell be a crack for a brain hacker?
30:02Elana Hairston is a research psychologist in Tel Aviv, Israel.
30:09Elana is fascinated by what happens in our brains when we sleep.
30:15It began with an experiment she did in her student days.
30:19At the time, I was working with animals,
30:21and I could see that I would train animals on a maze,
30:24and they would not learn.
30:26Clearly, I thought these animals are very stupid,
30:29and they would go back, put them in the cage,
30:31and come back the next day, and boom,
30:33they perform like they've been practicing the whole night.
30:36And it just blew my mind.
30:38It made me realize we spend a third of our life asleep,
30:42and there's so much going on while we sleep.
30:46Elana thinks that our minds must be able to learn
30:49when we lose consciousness.
30:51To prove it, she's plotting to break into the sleeping mind.
30:56It's a job that requires her to first get past the brain's night watchman.
31:00The thalamus.
31:03There's a part of the brain called the thalamus.
31:05What it typically does is going to clamp down on sensory information
31:09and stop you from waking up.
31:11Or if it says, okay, this is important information,
31:14you need to wake up.
31:15It will cause you to wake up.
31:17But Elana believes there is a back door into the brain when we sleep.
31:21Our sense of smell.
31:24Smell goes first to the cortex.
31:27And so it kind of bypasses this relay station.
31:32Basically, you can enter the sleeping brain without going to this relay station.
31:37When we fall asleep, the thalamus acts like a watchful nanny.
31:43Our senses try to deliver information to the brain but are turned away.
31:48Input from our sense of smell, however, has direct access.
31:54And once inside, sensory signals that are normally tuned out during our sleep can be snuck in.
32:05Elana teamed up with research partners at the Weissman Institute to hack into the minds of sleeping test subjects using odors.
32:15They hook a test subject up to a machine that can produce a wide variety of scents and then measure how deeply the subject breathes.
32:28The subject falls into a deep sleep and Elana and her colleague go to work.
32:34They release a pleasant perfume and immediately play a high-pitched tone.
32:41Later, they release the smell of rotting fish and play a low-pitched tone.
32:57The process repeats throughout the night until morning arrives.
33:09So we just got our participant out of bed and he's not hearing or smelling anything.
33:15And we're going to present the tones alone without the smells to see if he responds to the tones.
33:20So now we're just watching him breathing.
33:24The subject had no conscious awareness of the odors presented throughout the night and has no memory of them now.
33:31But Elana wants to see if his breathing patterns reveal an unconscious visceral reaction to the high and low tones.
33:41She first plays the tone linked to the perfume.
33:46The inhale was much bigger and wider compared to his normal inhales.
33:52We paired this tone with a pleasant odor.
33:55Then she plays the low-pitched tone, the one that was paired with the foul stench.
34:01So again, you can see the trigger of the tone, and it's literally holding his breath.
34:08The subject does not smell anything, but his mind reacts as though he does.
34:14He associates the high-pitched tone with pleasant, breathable air, and the low-pitched tone with foul, nauseating odors.
34:25The key issue here is also that he doesn't actually remember anything that happened during the night.
34:30So he's not actually aware that this tone was associated with a bad smell or a good smell.
34:35So he's just responding to the tone without any knowledge of what we expect him to do.
34:42Elana believes that this brain-hacking technique can be refined and used to manipulate any unconscious mind.
34:52And then the question is, can we do this with a more subtle paradigm, like training people during sleep?
34:57And I think the answer would be yes.
35:00Take, for example, politics.
35:04Your support of one candidate might seem to you to be unswervable.
35:11But while you are sleeping, scent hackers could train your mind to associate pleasant or foul odors with just about any sound, even the sound of a particular person's voice.
35:27The next time you hear that voice, your newly-learned subconscious reaction could turn adulation into disgust.
35:40Because odors are emotional, I think we could modify our emotional responses to stimuli.
35:47So I think you could modify emotional responses and thereby modify behavior.
35:54Someday, how we react to anything in the world around us could be manipulated by a brain hacker.
36:02It's a future that may come sooner than you think.
36:07Because this scientist is already building the ultimate brain hack.
36:12This technology could put any thought into our heads with a flash of light.
36:22Today, we can manipulate human brains by tempering with the senses, bathing the brain in chemicals, or by playing psychological mind games.
36:31But all these methods influence the brain from the outside in.
36:38A true mind hack, one that opens us up for reprogramming of any kind, may require something more audacious.
36:48Reaching inside a living brain and picking a switch.
36:54MIT engineer, physicist, and neuroscientist Ed Boyden has spent his career figuring out how complex machines work.
37:07He's now working on the most complex machine of all, the human brain.
37:14A cubic millimeter brain tissue has 100,000 cells, and there are a billion connections between them.
37:20These cells compute using electricity, and if all these little electrical computers could be recorded, perturbed, controlled, and analyzed,
37:27then maybe we could understand how the brain computed in the same way that computers are engineered to do all the things that they do in our phones and on the internet and so on.
37:35So if you have a complex system, whether it's a computer or a city or the economy or a brain,
37:40one of the ways that you can figure out what's going on is to actually put little inputs into the system and see what happens.
37:46It's easy to test the components on a computer circuit board, but brain cells are a little trickier.
37:53So Ed set out to find a natural switch that can turn individual neurons on or off.
38:00And he found one, swimming around in a puddle of pond water.
38:06This kind of algae actually is this light sensor. It sits in a little eye spot in the back of the algae.
38:11And basically, these are little light-activated proteins known as opsins that sit in the membranes of cells and serve as photosynthetic or photosensory protein.
38:20And this is a molecule that converts light into a very specific change in electrical potential, the exact same kind that occurs in neurons when they're active.
38:28Ed and his colleagues extracted from the algae the genetic code that produces these light-sensitive opsins.
38:37They then inserted this gene into a virus that could splice itself into the DNA of living brain cells.
38:46The neurons in the brain will manufacture the protein because now the genome has been incorporated into the nucleus of those cells and then express those proteins all over the membranes or boundaries of those cells.
38:57Ed's virus instructs any infected neurons to build a light-sensitive on-off switch.
39:04With these switches, any brain circuit from our senses to our emotional state and memories could be controlled with this.
39:14So this is a laser that we developed here, which will then split that laser light out into an array of optical fibers so that we can enter information into the brain into many different points that are distributed in a three-dimensional pattern.
39:27The brain doesn't feel pain, so we can implant little probes into the brain, deliver light out the end of these probes, and then we'll turn on or off parts of the brain just by pulsing this laser, turning the laser on and off very rapidly.
39:40Ed and his colleagues first put their technology to trial with animal subjects.
39:47Ed wired his light-sensitive switches into a mouse's pleasure-reward brain circuits.
39:54We put in an optical fiber into the brain such that it could deliver light to those cells.
39:59Then we programmed a computer such that whenever a mouse poked its nose into a little sensor, it would get a pulse of light.
40:05Each pulse of blue light activates the same pleasure-reward circuits that turn on when the rodent eats a piece of food or finds a mate.
40:14The mouse keeps poking its head into the hole, convinced that this simple action is the source of the reward.
40:23And so what we found was that mice would actually work for light.
40:28They would poke their nose into a little sensor, get a pulse of light, say, hey, you know, that was interesting, and then do it over and over again.
40:34Basically doing tasks in order to get a pulse of light.
40:37And so what this tells us is that very brief activation of this set of cells with a pulse of light is enough to reinforce whatever the animal was doing just before.
40:47Ed has hacked the mind of a mouse and changed its behavior.
40:52And he believes it won't be long before we are ready to use the technique on the human brain.
40:59Arguably humans have been, you know, hacking the brain for a very long time.
41:03You know, beer, coffee.
41:04Those are examples of neurotechnologies that their main role is to change what the brain does.
41:10Drugs, pharmaceuticals have been very, very impactful in treating brain disorders.
41:14But if you think about the brain as a circuit, then a drug that goes throughout the entire brain is going to affect circuits that you want to leave intact as well as circuits that you want to fix.
41:22And so that's where our technologies come into play.
41:26We really can make a subset of those cells activatable or silenciable with our tools.
41:31Ed's technology could be a cure for the nearly one billion people who suffer from mental illness by turning off only unhealthy cells.
41:43It would be a revolution in psychiatric medicine.
41:47And one day, it could give us all complete control of the workings of our brains.
41:54The rewards for hacking into our brains could be momentous.
42:00Mental diseases could be eliminated.
42:03We could unlock the highest levels of talent.
42:07And we could truly understand what another person feels.
42:13But there is a dark side to this technology.
42:17We could be creating a future where no one is sure of who they are.
42:22No secrets could ever be safe.
42:25And where we might all lose our minds to brain hackers.
42:30No secrets.
42:31No secrets.
42:32No secrets.
42:33No secrets.
42:34No secrets.
42:35MEMBER了吧
42:38No secrets.
42:47I can dream.
42:48NO metaphor!
42:49No secrets.
42:50human makers...
42:51ogrom
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