SPEAKER_1: Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.
SPEAKER_1: StarTalk begins right now.
SPEAKER_1: Welcome to StarTalk Radio.
SPEAKER_1: I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson.
SPEAKER_1: I'm an astrophysicist and director of New York City's Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History.
SPEAKER_1: The following show is the third part of a live show we recorded on February 24th, 2014.
SPEAKER_1: Because that show went on for a long time and all of it was great, we had to create a third part.
SPEAKER_1: This is without precedent in the archives of StarTalk.
SPEAKER_1: Our show was recorded at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, known as BAM to the locals.
SPEAKER_1: And in addition to my co-host, comedian Eugene Mirman, we were joined on stage that night by neuroscientist Heather Berlin, Bill Nye, the science guy, comedian Michael Ian Black, the actor Paul Rudd and star of the hit TV show, The Big Bang Theory, Mayim Bialik.
SPEAKER_1: Some great science fiction storytelling involves power of the mind, telekinesis, mind control, mind reading.
SPEAKER_1: Is anyone working on this, is it in the future?
SPEAKER_1: Or is it just a pipe dream?
SPEAKER_3: Well, there are studies, let's say something like mind reading.
SPEAKER_3: There are studies now where you put someone in a scanner and you show them different pictures or even movies and you see what the sort of neural signature is of that.
SPEAKER_3: And then you again put them in the scanner, the experimenter doesn't know what they're looking at, they're only reading out their brain activation and they could very reliably predict what the person is seeing.
SPEAKER_3: And then if you take that a step back and you can even look at what a person is imagining.
SPEAKER_3: So over time, the more precise this gets, I can definitely envision someone just reading someone's neural sort of activation and predicting what it is they're thinking about.
SPEAKER_1: So you'd have to walk around with some kind of neuro map visor so that you can detect if someone is being turned on or turned off or highly useful socially.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, if you're autistic.
SPEAKER_4: You're describing like super extreme guesstimation.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, you could be wrong.
SPEAKER_3: The more we understand about the brain, the closer you will be to getting right.
SPEAKER_2: But successful charlatans or so-called mentalists or magicians, they have this ability at some very reasonable, probably through facials.
SPEAKER_5: That's not mind reading, right?
SPEAKER_5: That's a very subtle, fine tuning into body language, gesturing, shifting of basically the air around people.
SPEAKER_5: But there's nothing magical, mystical about it.
SPEAKER_6: Your grandmother is here and she agrees.
SPEAKER_1: I'm getting something.
SPEAKER_1: It came in on the headpiece.
SPEAKER_6: But I'm sorry, if we take what you're talking about, Heather, maybe 10 steps further, is it possible in the future, it would be possible to kind of record your consciousness and then market that as I would be able to live as you for a day through a VR virtual reality playback?
SPEAKER_3: I don't know if you could ever, that's a very-
SPEAKER_6: Just say yes.
SPEAKER_3: Philosophical question.
SPEAKER_2: I would buy that URL right now, man, ground floor.
SPEAKER_3: But actually another study that I'm involved in, we're doing something called hyper scanning or dual scanning where we can scan two people at the same time, having an interaction and kind of seeing what's happening in the space between two people.
SPEAKER_3: Because as I said before, I can never get into your brain or really know what you're thinking and that's what communication is.
SPEAKER_3: It's about the space between.
SPEAKER_3: And now we're seeing what's happening in your brain when you're actually really taking in what I'm saying and vice versa.
SPEAKER_5: And also as scientists, I'm sure we'd all agree, yes?
SPEAKER_5: There are things that we can't see and that we can't understand, but there are also things that we know now as scientists, things like pheromones.
SPEAKER_5: There are things that occur, for example, between two people that are not necessarily detectable in all the other ways we're looking, but there's something that happens that again, we don't need to write off as magical and mystical.
SPEAKER_5: We may not be able to measure it yet, but yes, I think we'll get there in more ways.
SPEAKER_1: Okay, so let me end the show with this exploration.
SPEAKER_1: Heather, you're on really, dare I say, dangerous territory, because the more you know what the brain is and what it does, as a scientist, what any scientist wants to do at the end of the day is control it.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, that's the evidence that you know what it is you're doing.
SPEAKER_2: You want to make predictions.
SPEAKER_1: Make predictions, have those predictions come true and you say, I know how this thing works.
SPEAKER_1: So, if the brain is your laboratory and you say, oh, I've just discovered what makes two people fall in love.
SPEAKER_1: Now, you make a love potion number nine and you control people's behavior and conduct.
SPEAKER_1: Do you have another team of ethicists behind you looking over your shoulder at your conduct?
SPEAKER_3: There's a whole field of neuroethics, which are talking about issues.
SPEAKER_3: But yes, I mean, ultimately, what we're going is from correlation to causation.
SPEAKER_3: When I say we're going into the brain and implanting electrodes for a good cause to treat psychiatric illness, we're controlling emotions.
SPEAKER_3: Well, emotions that are socially regressive.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, but if we know exactly what the right formula is for, say, love, I mean, you can stimulate an emotion in someone and they'll label it as love.
SPEAKER_3: But no one's there overlooking my shoulders saying, you know, there is an IRB, there's a board that like.
SPEAKER_1: IRB?
SPEAKER_3: The Institutional Review Board, yeah.
SPEAKER_4: That makes sure that you don't make people fall in love when they're not supposed to be in love.
SPEAKER_3: Exactly.
SPEAKER_1: Okay, so today would surely come where you can make someone smarter if they can afford to pay you.
SPEAKER_1: You could cure them if they can afford that.
SPEAKER_1: With all kinds of neurological disorders, I'm just wondering what is the dystopic future of this and what is the utopic future of this?
SPEAKER_3: Well, one issue is that it could be that only people who can afford, let's say, the neural implants get them and then they have an advantage.
SPEAKER_3: And then everybody will have to, so like performance enhancing drugs, you know, in sports.
SPEAKER_3: The reason they outlaw them is because if one person has it, they have the advantage everyone else has to do with them.
SPEAKER_5: Same with mental illness, right?
SPEAKER_5: In terms of access to mental health care and mental, you know.
SPEAKER_3: Exactly.
SPEAKER_6: I mean, one person has a mental illness, everybody else is like, they have a mental illness.
SPEAKER_5: No, but I think what you're getting at, there's a dangerous possibility of sort of narrowing the field of who is well, who is smart, who is desirable, who is accessible, who gets access to care, not to bring it down at the end, but that could be dangerous.
SPEAKER_6: Yeah.
SPEAKER_1: And so let me ask each one of you, what's the scariest future of neuroscience you can think of?
SPEAKER_3: Okay, we end on a positive note.
SPEAKER_3: What is the happiest?
SPEAKER_6: What is the greatest?
SPEAKER_1: You work in this field.
SPEAKER_1: What is 50 years in the future, what is that world gifted to us by you and your research colleagues 50 years from now?
SPEAKER_1: What is that?
SPEAKER_3: Wow.
SPEAKER_3: Well, what I would hope is that we can really have a full scale map of the human brain going all the way from the genome to function and to mind and brain.
SPEAKER_3: And once we have this full map of the brain and how it works, then we can help prevent things like Alzheimer's.
SPEAKER_3: So rather than looking at treatments, we're going to look at prevention.
SPEAKER_3: You know, if you can go in and tweak the genome a bit so that people don't get these kinds of mental disorders to begin with, then we don't even have to worry so much about the treatment side of things.
SPEAKER_3: So that would be wonderful.
SPEAKER_1: So can you treat the genome in an adult?
SPEAKER_1: And then that fixes their brain as an adult?
SPEAKER_3: That would be great if we can do that.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, if we can even do it in an adult.
SPEAKER_2: We gotta ask, though, from an evolutionary standpoint, why is it that mental illness persists?
SPEAKER_2: If it's really especially dangerous, wouldn't it have been eliminated from the gene pool?
SPEAKER_2: So I suspect it's not in the biggest picture that deadly to have a mental illness if it's manageable.
SPEAKER_2: That is to say, germs and parasites are much more likely to kill you than being mentally different.
SPEAKER_2: I just wonder about this whole thing when you go to predict the future without taking into account, let's say, the flu that killed more people in 1918 than World War I did.
SPEAKER_2: The other thing is these questions, I think, are really only useful to a society that can afford it.
SPEAKER_2: The people that are more successful at having an overall health in their tribe or their society might do better than...
SPEAKER_3: Well, there are two things there.
SPEAKER_3: One is that certain things do persist, like for example, being a sensation seeker, being really impulsive, that's a quality that got people out there and discovered America, right?
SPEAKER_3: These kinds of traits which we might call...
SPEAKER_1: And by the way, that probably killed more people than who actually survived and came back.
SPEAKER_5: Autistic ability and mental illness, right?
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, there are some positive things about being at the extreme ends of what we consider to be normal.
SPEAKER_3: There is no such thing as normal.
SPEAKER_3: But what studies do show is that the most amount of any disease, cancer, you know, all sorts of physiologic diseases, the thing that causes people the lowest quality of life in distress are mental illness because they don't die from it, but they have to suffer their lives.
SPEAKER_5: And often they have children and pass on genes that may be predisposing to future mental illnesses.
SPEAKER_5: It's a really sad discussion.
SPEAKER_1: We got to wrap this up.
SPEAKER_1: So, let me offer some concluding remarks here.
SPEAKER_1: You know, I studied the universe and the interesting thing is that there's this universe inside our heads that is perhaps less well known than the universe extends back to the Big Bang in time and space.
SPEAKER_1: And so, it's curious, maybe the big challenge here is you're using your own brain to study a brain.
SPEAKER_1: You're not some other entity studying the brain.
SPEAKER_1: And that prevents some questions perhaps from even being asked.
SPEAKER_1: You don't even know the right question because the brain is asking the question about the brain.
SPEAKER_1: Carl Sagan is famous for the saying that humans, conscious humans, are a way for the universe to know itself.
SPEAKER_1: No, not the universe, we're in the universe.
SPEAKER_1: And we use our brain power to decode the universe.
SPEAKER_1: I'm intrigued by the fact that the real future here might just be in our minds.
SPEAKER_1: And maybe we will learn what questions we're not asking yet.
SPEAKER_1: And those are the questions that keep me going every day because that's the future of discovery in any field.
SPEAKER_1: So join me giving a very warm thank you to this brilliant panel.
SPEAKER_1: It's Q&A time, we have some microphones on the aisles.
SPEAKER_1: What we prefer is just to find one person to direct the question to, because if all 12 of us answer, it takes all night.
SPEAKER_1: So if you can be specific about it.
SPEAKER_1: Sir, you're up front.
SPEAKER_8: Hey, how are you doing?
SPEAKER_1: Hello.
SPEAKER_8: So you talked a little bit about the idea of these people, super humans, right?
SPEAKER_8: And so there are people out there who have what I think is called Savant Syndrome, who have some kind of amazing mental abilities.
SPEAKER_8: They can learn new languages in a week or do really rapid calculations.
SPEAKER_8: So what's different about these people's brains?
SPEAKER_8: Is this something we all have inherently able in our brains?
SPEAKER_8: And could we have it to enable that ability?
SPEAKER_1: Okay, a great question.
SPEAKER_1: I think, you know, we all want some of that ability, right?
SPEAKER_1: So what's up with that?
SPEAKER_8: Yeah.
SPEAKER_4: How can we all become magic?
SPEAKER_3: With Savants, they seem to be wired slightly differently.
SPEAKER_3: And so they seem to have these usually these isolated areas of specialization, but sometimes at the cost of other parts of the brain, development of other parts of the brain.
SPEAKER_3: So it's not necessarily a good thing to be very, very good at just one thing and at the cost of other things.
SPEAKER_3: The only way I think we can enhance our cognitive abilities is with working at it.
SPEAKER_3: It's like anything, like with losing weight, you have to work at it.
SPEAKER_3: So I don't think there's a sort of magic pillar, but it has to do with the way that their brains are wired slightly differently.
SPEAKER_1: Okay, so using the word wiring, so in the future you can adjust the wiring.
SPEAKER_1: If you have a Savant, is there an ethical question about whether you would change that about that person?
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, I think there is.
SPEAKER_3: I think it's, I mean, it's with like anything, even with a psychopath, they don't come in for treatment.
SPEAKER_3: As gestures too.
SPEAKER_3: They might enjoy being that way, you know?
SPEAKER_3: So if they're not a threat to other people or if they're not in distress, I don't think that we should go around just changing people for the sake of it.
SPEAKER_1: Question here, yes.
SPEAKER_9: Yeah, so since we have the comedians here, I don't know if you guys have thought a lot about the intersection between comedy and neuroscience.
SPEAKER_3: I have, yes.
SPEAKER_11: Sure, sure.
SPEAKER_4: I wrote a paper on the physiology of laughter in college.
SPEAKER_1: Actually, he did.
SPEAKER_1: That was his.
SPEAKER_4: Yeah, it was all wrong, but.
SPEAKER_4: I wrote the shit out of it.
SPEAKER_9: So, you know, these guys are up here providing great comedic interjection and not everyone can do that.
SPEAKER_9: Like not every brain works that way.
SPEAKER_9: So maybe we could hear from like one comedian and one neuroscientist, like why.
SPEAKER_5: Or how about a neuroscientist who is a comedian?
SPEAKER_1: So Mayim, can I add that on the Big Bang Theory, her timing is impeccable.
SPEAKER_1: From 1991 to 1994, she was Blossom on the show.
SPEAKER_5: I mean, I.
SPEAKER_1: And you were the young Bette Midler in The Rose.
SPEAKER_13: Yeah.
SPEAKER_13: In Beaches, Beaches.
SPEAKER_5: No, I mean, I'm happy to let you guys also speak to it.
SPEAKER_5: I mean, in terms of what's funny and why are things funny, there is a really interesting field of sort of understanding the timing.
SPEAKER_5: It's complicated social interaction, but I think for me as an actor and as a scientist, what I'm aware of is we're constantly scanning and tracking.
SPEAKER_5: People can do it better than others.
SPEAKER_5: You know, standups can do something that I can't do, right?
SPEAKER_5: I can't do improv.
SPEAKER_5: There's a different set of skills that actors and performers have, but you know, the joke that we tend to be neurotic, that we tend to be constantly looking to make someone feel something, is a very complicated thing about being an actor.
SPEAKER_5: And I didn't think about it as much when I was younger, but when you meet other actors and when you talk about process, which a lot of people laugh, they figure like, oh, we're paid to be funny, or we're paid to make people believe something.
SPEAKER_5: It's a very complicated process by which I need to make you feel something.
SPEAKER_5: I need to make you believe something, and I need every single person to feel that.
SPEAKER_5: So if you're a standup, you're working with a room of people.
SPEAKER_5: When I work in front of a live audience, I need everyone to feel something, and it's a really complicated interaction, especially if you work with a live audience.
SPEAKER_5: It's very different than not, because it is a constant tracking.
SPEAKER_1: Heather, are convenience subjects of your...
SPEAKER_3: Well, yeah, actually, so this is really exciting stuff.
SPEAKER_3: This is a new area of research we're going to.
SPEAKER_3: It's actually the neural basis of creativity and improvisation.
SPEAKER_3: And so what we find is that, whether it's jazz improv or comedy improv, there's a certain neural signature involved when people are improvising.
SPEAKER_3: So you can put people in a scanner and even freestyle rappers, right?
SPEAKER_3: So you give them a memorized rap and then they can freestyle.
SPEAKER_3: Or you give a musician a memorized piece or improv.
SPEAKER_3: And when they're improvising, what they find is that a part of the prefrontal cortex, the medial prefrontal cortex becomes extra activated.
SPEAKER_3: And that has to do with internally generated ideas.
SPEAKER_3: And the dorsolateral part of the prefrontal cortex becomes deactivated.
SPEAKER_3: And that has to do with sort of self-awareness and monitoring your behavior.
SPEAKER_3: So you almost go into this free-flowing state.
SPEAKER_3: If you become too aware, you mess up.
SPEAKER_3: You're not good at improvising.
SPEAKER_3: You have to kind of lose yourself, so to speak.
SPEAKER_3: And that's what the neuroimaging shows.
SPEAKER_2: I have a follow-up.
SPEAKER_2: Is there any connection between improv and optimism?
SPEAKER_3: I don't know.
SPEAKER_3: Actually, wait, one of the studies showed, actually, one of the studies showed that when they were improvising, they had increased activation of the amygdala, which could be related to positive feelings.
SPEAKER_1: That's your brain part.
SPEAKER_1: That's interesting to know.
SPEAKER_1: Right here, sir.
SPEAKER_10: Hi.
SPEAKER_1: I actually had a couple of questions, but then when you guys mentioned eugenics.
SPEAKER_10: That's kind of your thing.
SPEAKER_4: What's your question, Himmler?
SPEAKER_13: That kind of shades my question, doesn't it?
SPEAKER_1: I was actually, all I could think about was the movie Idiocracy.
SPEAKER_1: Now, I don't know if any of you guys have seen that.
SPEAKER_1: It's kind of a scary look at what might happen if.
SPEAKER_6: If dumb people keep breeding.
SPEAKER_6: Thank you, yes.
SPEAKER_1: Okay, so my question is to the neuro folks over there.
SPEAKER_1: I don't know if you've seen anything going in that direction or not or.
SPEAKER_4: Have you seen a genetic predisposition in society to become idiots?
SPEAKER_5: I didn't see the movie, so I can't speak to that.
SPEAKER_3: Well, this is going to be, I'm trying to be like sort of PC.
SPEAKER_3: Well, one thing is that with evolution in the past, right, if it was survival of the fittest, then those who just couldn't make it, couldn't make it.
SPEAKER_3: And they would die out.
SPEAKER_3: And then there would be certain traits that would have evolved and survive.
SPEAKER_3: But now we have all sorts of ways to keep those people around.
SPEAKER_3: Exactly.
SPEAKER_3: So, it's kind of messing with evolution a bit.
SPEAKER_3: Thank you.
SPEAKER_12: Yeah.
SPEAKER_12: I've got a question right here.
SPEAKER_13: I've got an in-depth and specific question, I guess to the scientists, and I guess to the neuroscientists here.
SPEAKER_13: Based on quantum theories of the mind, what's your take on the idea that consciousness originates at the quantum level?
SPEAKER_13: And if you're familiar with Schrodinger's equation, the very fact that observing something changes the outcome, so the mind observing consciousness, what's your guys' take on that?
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, I can offer something on that as well.
SPEAKER_1: So quantum physics has sort of mysterious properties that are real, but they defy anything your five senses or more have ever experienced in your life.
SPEAKER_1: So you say, well, that's weird, but it's real.
SPEAKER_1: It happens.
SPEAKER_1: Particles pop in and out of existence.
SPEAKER_1: You look at it and then it changes into something else.
SPEAKER_1: This is the behavior of the universe on the smallest scale.
SPEAKER_1: Because it has all these mysterious properties, what I have found in my experience, watching people think about the world, is they have this urge to insert quantum physics where there's something where they don't otherwise understand what it is.
SPEAKER_1: So we don't really understand consciousness, quantum physics must be at work, right?
SPEAKER_1: So it's this.
SPEAKER_1: And in fact, the more they invoke quantum physics, that's the evidence that they know least about what it is they're talking about.
SPEAKER_13: Well, I admit that.
SPEAKER_10: I don't know what I'm talking about.
SPEAKER_5: No, but I think the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, I mean, I do appreciate this notion that any observation of something alters what it is, how we perceive it, how we describe it.
SPEAKER_5: I appreciate that.
SPEAKER_1: However, when I observe you, you don't pop into a different quantum state.
SPEAKER_1: You're a macroscopic entity.
SPEAKER_1: Large things average out these principles so that we have a macroscopic world that lends itself to macroscopic discussions.
SPEAKER_1: If we were the size of particles, yes.
SPEAKER_1: Me beaming eyes at you with the light would pop you into some other part of the universe.
SPEAKER_1: Yes, but you're big, so it doesn't happen, okay?
SPEAKER_1: Is that a fat joke?
SPEAKER_1: Okay, it would be cool if we were like particle size and you walked through a doorway, okay?
SPEAKER_1: You would diffract, okay?
SPEAKER_1: Because that's what light does.
SPEAKER_1: I mean, it'd be funny if Planck's constants were much larger than it is, weird stuff would happen all the time.
SPEAKER_1: Okay, so, yes.
SPEAKER_3: Can I just bring this to the brain for a second?
SPEAKER_3: I just wanna diffuse this theory because I always get this question about the quantum theory.
SPEAKER_3: Roger Penrose, who's a mathematician at Oxford and Stuart Hammerhoff, who's an anesthesiologist, they came up with the quantum theory of consciousness, basically saying that at some level, at the structural level of the neuron is where these quantum effects can sort of take place and that's where consciousness lies and the rest of it.
SPEAKER_3: But there's no evidence for that and also the temperatures at which these effects would have to occur, they'd have to be cooler than the temperature that the brain is currently at.
SPEAKER_3: So there's a lot of things that go against this idea, but again, people tend to want to put together something mysterious with something else mysterious, but as far as we know from the field of neuroscience, there's no evidence.
SPEAKER_6: Can I ask a follow up question about this?
SPEAKER_1: Okay, always just quick, but go.
SPEAKER_6: Doesn't this imply, this idea, does that imply then that consciousness has mass?
SPEAKER_2: I gotta say, you guys, as an engineer, at some level, you can measure the voltage, like with a logic analyzer or whatever, you can measure the voltage without screwing up the circuit.
SPEAKER_2: At some level.
SPEAKER_6: I don't understand what you're saying.
SPEAKER_1: If one day we establish consciousness as the sum of some energies within the brain, then by equals MC squared, consciousness has a mass equivalent.
SPEAKER_6: That's what I'm saying.
SPEAKER_10: Okay, so tonight's discussion was mostly centered upon human neuroscience for obvious reasons.
SPEAKER_10: But there was a few mentions about neuroscience and consciousness and whatnot of other species.
SPEAKER_10: And we do know that some species are quite smart.
SPEAKER_10: And not just like our close relatives, like great apes, but also toothed whales, some birds like parrots and crows.
SPEAKER_10: And even I recently saw the video that looked like it was unedited of an elephant painting an elephant.
SPEAKER_1: Was that on YouTube?
SPEAKER_10: No, it was not.
SPEAKER_4: I saw a dolphin playing chess.
SPEAKER_4: Is that real?
SPEAKER_10: My real question is, what might consciousness be if it has arisen in different lineages of living things?
SPEAKER_10: What might consciousness be for them?
SPEAKER_10: And also what might it be for say a possible alien life.
SPEAKER_4: Form?
SPEAKER_1: Heather, Heather, so conscious big brained mammals out there, can we learn about our consciousness by studying them?
SPEAKER_1: You work on lab rats to learn about other things.
SPEAKER_3: I don't work on rats, I work on human, but yeah.
SPEAKER_1: Oh, you work on, excuse me, did you hear what she said there?
SPEAKER_1: I don't work on rats, I work on humans.
SPEAKER_3: Well, they're different, they're different.
SPEAKER_5: Different IRB protocol.
SPEAKER_3: Exactly, a totally different protocol.
SPEAKER_3: So there are two different things, there's intelligence, there's consciousness.
SPEAKER_3: A bee can have consciousness, it could feel a sensation, it can sense something, it can do something very simplistic.
SPEAKER_3: So you don't need to be able to play chess to be conscious.
SPEAKER_3: We know that in certain creatures like in dolphins, in whales, in humans, there are certain types of cells called spindle cells, especially in animals that are social, and that might have some link up to awareness, or at least some self-awareness.
SPEAKER_3: But until we have a fundamental theory of what consciousness is, we won't be able to know for sure what something has.
SPEAKER_3: We only can look at behavior.
SPEAKER_3: Even with humans, in the lab, you have to just ask them, did you see that or not?
SPEAKER_3: Were you aware of that or not?
SPEAKER_3: That's the only measure we have.
SPEAKER_1: I saw a comic of two dolphins, one swimming next to another, and they're referring to the humans up on the shore, and one dolphin says to the other, they face each other and make noises, but there's no evidence they're actually communicating.
SPEAKER_1: Yes, right here.
SPEAKER_11: Yes.
SPEAKER_11: First, I have to say, what an awesome panel.
SPEAKER_11: And Bill, you were great in the debate.
SPEAKER_1: Thank you.
SPEAKER_11: I'm really starstruck just being here.
SPEAKER_11: So, but anyways, I want to ask to the neuroscientists and to Neil, because I think you've been on stage, I think a lot of you guys have been on stage with them.
SPEAKER_11: It's a rather controversial position held by Sam Harris.
SPEAKER_5: Who was one of my colleagues at UCLA.
SPEAKER_11: And by the way, let me preface this by saying, I think he's a brilliant orator.
SPEAKER_11: I think he communicates very well.
SPEAKER_11: I just know he's got some, he's a great thinker too, but it's trying to parse out whether we agree or not or whether there's consensus.
SPEAKER_11: And the question is about whether or not we have free will.
SPEAKER_3: Oh yeah, I can answer that.
SPEAKER_1: Free will.
SPEAKER_3: So, as far as we know from neuroscience.
SPEAKER_1: Sam Harris recently published a track on the assertion that we do not have free will.
SPEAKER_1: And the evidence cited for it comes from neuroscience.
SPEAKER_4: I must answer this, I have no choice.
SPEAKER_6: There you guys go.
SPEAKER_1: Free will, what's up?
SPEAKER_3: So as far as we know, it started with Benjamin Libet studies in the 1980s and all the way until modern studies now.
SPEAKER_3: The sense of free will is kind of an illusion.
SPEAKER_3: Free will is an illusion in the sense that your brain decides first and you become aware of it after the fact.
SPEAKER_3: And we know this from a whole series of studies for measuring neural activation.
SPEAKER_3: There's even studies now where you can put somebody in a scanner and you could predict, for example, up to 10 seconds now before they're gonna decide whether to go left or right or press the left button or right button by just reading their brain activation.
SPEAKER_3: The brain pre-decides.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, the brain, it's called the readiness potential.
SPEAKER_3: So it kind of is gearing up and you can start to read how the neurons are firing and that it's gonna go sort of toward one way or another.
SPEAKER_3: At a certain point, you can make that prediction well before the person becomes consciously aware that they've decided to go left or right.
SPEAKER_5: Big N too, talking big N.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, yeah, that's a big N there.
SPEAKER_3: Right, it's pretty well established that yes.
SPEAKER_1: Okay, so, but does that alone negate free will?
SPEAKER_3: Well.
SPEAKER_1: Your brain has free will, presumably to do it.
SPEAKER_3: The brain decides.
SPEAKER_3: Your perception of I made the decision only comes after the brain has already kind of decided.
SPEAKER_1: So we are slaves to it.
SPEAKER_2: What I made the decision is my brain that's I'm making the decision.
SPEAKER_2: So let me ask you, what is this phenomenon?
SPEAKER_2: I sure hope I don't see my keys in the trunk of my car and close the lid on it.
SPEAKER_4: What is that?
SPEAKER_4: Why does the brain keep putting keys in the trunk?
SPEAKER_2: You feel that you're going to make a mistake, but you go ahead and make the mistake anyway.
SPEAKER_3: So this is the thing, everybody's talking about consciousness, but much of our behavior, much of what we're doing is happening outside of awareness.
SPEAKER_3: So you're already halfway there before you're realizing, oh, where am I going, what am I doing?
SPEAKER_3: And so if we had to be consciously aware of every single move we made, the brain doesn't have the capacity to do that.
SPEAKER_3: Consciousness has a limited capacity, but the unconscious processes seems to be unlimited.
SPEAKER_5: Which is not to say we also couldn't call that free will, right, in an unconscious way.
SPEAKER_3: You're unconsciously, yes, you're unconsciously making decisions freely all the time.
SPEAKER_1: Sir, go.
SPEAKER_12: Okay, the question is kind of following up on the issue of awareness and Hayden awareness and the use of psychotropic drugs and hallucinogenics in treatment of brain disorders.
SPEAKER_1: Oh, okay, yeah, so.
SPEAKER_12: And I have one other question, how many people on the panel are left-handed?
SPEAKER_5: Amidextrous, yeah.
SPEAKER_3: We'll get rid of them quickly.
SPEAKER_2: No, no, once again, the left-handed people have certain advantages to certain things.
SPEAKER_3: Yes.
SPEAKER_2: It's a hilarious old joke.
SPEAKER_2: You want your kid to go up to be a left-handed relief pitcher because he or she is going to, so far, make more money.
SPEAKER_3: Actually people who are left-handed have less lateralization, so language tends to be more lateral.
SPEAKER_3: It's not completely in the left brain, but there's more activation in one hemisphere of the brain than the other.
SPEAKER_3: So, like, language tends to be lateralized, or there's more activation in the left hemisphere, but people who are left-handed, there tends to be more activation in the right hemisphere above and beyond those who are right-handed.
SPEAKER_3: So there's less lateralization.
SPEAKER_3: There's more sort of distributed across the brain activation.
SPEAKER_1: I'm about 20% left-handed.
SPEAKER_3: But the point of the drugs, the treatment, there are actually now studies that where I'm at, they're using ketamines as a treatment for depression, which used to be a club drug called special K, and if you take too much of it, you can dissociate, it's not good.
SPEAKER_5: We're doing that later.
SPEAKER_5: In the name of science.
SPEAKER_3: I got some special K.
SPEAKER_5: I think also treatment for depression, it's sort of one set, but there is a field that's looking at sort of understanding altered states of consciousness and our perception of altered states of consciousness, probably beyond the scope of it.
SPEAKER_3: And even using drugs like Ecstasy for therapy and treatment.
SPEAKER_5: And therapeutically with well-trained and very elaborate supervision, it can be very helpful.
SPEAKER_1: Is there any mental state beyond the one that is alert and bright that can be chemically induced that is a greater mental state of awareness than the one you started with?
SPEAKER_1: Because it appears that every time you do anything chemical to the brain, it disrupts your ability to know what reality is.
SPEAKER_3: First of all, even just in our non-drug-induced state, our perception is different than what's necessarily out there in reality.
SPEAKER_3: So there's all sorts of illusions.
SPEAKER_3: You don't see what's right in front of your face.
SPEAKER_3: So there's that.
SPEAKER_3: So anytime you add a certain kind of chemical, you change the neurochemistry of the brain, it's not gonna say that you're gonna be more aware.
SPEAKER_3: You're just gonna have a different type of awareness and perception.
SPEAKER_5: But when you have things like synesthesia, when you have senses crossing from LSD, those kinds of experiences, these are kind of qualitative or quantitative questions, right?
SPEAKER_5: Yes, you're having more experiences that are much more complicated and much more trippy than what we're experiencing in our normal state.
SPEAKER_5: But I think that's subjective.
SPEAKER_1: And you've read about these conditions.
SPEAKER_5: I have.
SPEAKER_5: In Life Mac.
SPEAKER_6: So my follow-up question is, what if the way you see blue is different than the way I see blue?
SPEAKER_2: It's like really red, or red, it's like the same.
SPEAKER_1: On this side of the aisle.
SPEAKER_6: Something I've always been fascinated with, you guys talked about telekinesis, mind reading and all that.
SPEAKER_6: Where does deja vu fall into the spectrum?
SPEAKER_9: We've all experienced it.
SPEAKER_5: We've all had that moment, or many moments that we know it's coming, but we don't know why.
SPEAKER_2: Have you asked this before?
SPEAKER_2: I'm waiting for one of you, I'm sorry.
SPEAKER_4: It's only because I had already heard you ask that question.
SPEAKER_1: Have you heard George Carlin comment on deja vu?
SPEAKER_1: He says, have you ever walked into a room and you were sure it has never happened to you before?
SPEAKER_1: What do you guys say about that?
SPEAKER_3: I'm not an expert in this area, but I think that something is triggered in the brain where you get a sense of familiarity and then you attribute that to what's happening around you.
SPEAKER_3: There's also studies that show when you lose that sense of familiarity, some people think that a person they know very well is an imposter.
SPEAKER_3: So they think like their husband or wife is an alien.
SPEAKER_3: And sometimes that same neurocircuit is activated in any situation and they feel like they've been there before.
SPEAKER_5: I think that's sort of speaking to the sort of redundancy that occurs in the brain, that the notion is that there are many ways to get to one destination.
SPEAKER_5: And sometimes pathways get triggered that have this sense of familiarity because you've literally activated a pathway that is redundant.
SPEAKER_5: I mean, everything's got to fit in there.
SPEAKER_5: Sure, there's miles and miles and miles, but there are certain things that are going to trigger redundant kind of pathways that also again, have that sense of I've done this before and your brain thinks it has.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, and also the other thing with that, memories are malleable.
SPEAKER_3: Each time you re-remember something, you can reconstruct it.
SPEAKER_3: It's different than the memory of your iPhone.
SPEAKER_3: The picture that you look at will stay the same, you know, 10,000 years from now.
SPEAKER_3: But every time you remember something, it slightly changes.
SPEAKER_3: So we can re-write history in a way.
SPEAKER_1: The last question of the evening.
SPEAKER_1: Yes.
SPEAKER_7: If someone was born in space, how would that affect the way their brain develops?
SPEAKER_1: You're nine.
SPEAKER_1: It's past my bedtime.
SPEAKER_1: Is it past your bedtime?
SPEAKER_4: When you see your parents, let them know they're irresponsible.
SPEAKER_4: Unless you drove here.
SPEAKER_4: Child genius.
SPEAKER_1: So, that's a brilliant question, first of all.
SPEAKER_1: Second, I can take it only so far, maybe Heather and Mayim have some other comments on that.
SPEAKER_1: But we evolved to be on Earth with our force of gravity and the kind of light that's here.
SPEAKER_1: So, there are all these things that shape what eventually we call common sense.
SPEAKER_1: Things fall down when you let go of them.
SPEAKER_1: In fact, the act of saying let go means to drop it.
SPEAKER_1: Whereas in space, letting go doesn't drop it.
SPEAKER_1: It just sort of stays there.
SPEAKER_1: So, your awareness of what is normal is really different.
SPEAKER_1: And we don't really know.
SPEAKER_1: It's kind of unethical at this point to just do that experiment.
SPEAKER_1: Let's see what happens to my kid after she's born in zero G.
SPEAKER_1: So, we don't really know.
SPEAKER_1: But from the experiments done, there are things about your ears.
SPEAKER_1: Inside your ear, you get a sense of balance.
SPEAKER_1: At the fitness center, I do that little balance thing.
SPEAKER_1: So, you can do this, right?
SPEAKER_1: So, your sense of balance comes about because you're in a gravity field.
SPEAKER_1: If you're born in space and that's all you know, and then we put you here on earth, did you see the end of the movie Gravity?
SPEAKER_1: No.
SPEAKER_1: Sandra Bullock, who's been a long time in space.
SPEAKER_4: The only accurate part of it.
SPEAKER_1: She crawls up on the beach and she realizes she hasn't had to walk in a long time.
SPEAKER_1: Her sense of balance had grown accustomed to being in zero G and had forgotten what it was like to walk on earth.
SPEAKER_2: Dr.
SPEAKER_2: T, I got to interject this.
SPEAKER_4: Do it.
SPEAKER_2: You don't know that.
SPEAKER_1: Don't know what?
SPEAKER_2: You don't know that if a kid were born in space, that he or she came back to earth, couldn't figure it out.
SPEAKER_2: You don't know like he or she may have actually a whole different, deeper understanding of inertia and physics and friction.
SPEAKER_2: I admit we don't want to run that test.
SPEAKER_1: Uncle Bill is right, we don't know, okay?
SPEAKER_4: Our closest guess is Sandra Bullock.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, best evidence is what happened at the end of the movie Gravity.
SPEAKER_1: Thank you all for coming to StarTalk Live.