Live at the Bell House: “The Space Between Your Ears” (Part 1)

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.

StarTalk begins right now.

Welcome everybody to another StarTalk Live at Bell House.

We have a wonderful show for you about neurology, psychology.

You’re going to leave here learning, and I’m sorry for that.

It is now my great pleasure to bring on the host of StarTalk, ladies and gentlemen, Neil Tyson!

On tonight’s show, we’re calling the Space Between Your Ears.

And let me bring out my two special guests, two experts on what’s going on inside your head.

First up, Kara Santamaria, a journalist on neuroscience and all science topics for the Huffington Post.

Kara, come on out!

She has a video blog called Talk Nerdy to Me, and her particular expertise is the neurophysiology of love, and also depression.

Okay, so we got to work that one out.

And my second special guest, Professor Heather Berlin, neuroscientist.

She’s a professor of psychiatry at Mount Sinai Medical Center.

She actually probes the human brain to find out what’s going on when things are happening to you.

And her particular expertise includes helping Jews.

I’m Jewish, it’s fine.

But compulsive disorders and impulsive disorders.

I should have waited with my joke, I remain accurate.

We have one more guest from The Daily Show, Wyatt Senak.

Here we go.

First, I want to find out a couple of things.

You know, what is normal?

Because every time I turn around, somebody’s identified with a mental disorder, but if most people I know have exactly that disorder, why would that be abnormal?

So what is normal for humans?

I’ve seen animals do weird things, and we say, well, isn’t that cute?

And if a human did it, they’d be committed.

So how do you decide?

It would be ostracized, just to be clear.

How do your people decide what is normal, what isn’t?

I have no idea.

You know, historically, I think that that was just decided by social invention.

You know, I’ve talked to some neuropsychologists who study religion, for example, and a lot of them claim that religion is mass delusion.

But because enough people are deluded by it, it doesn’t qualify as a mental disorder.

Was mass delusion technically legal?

But there are enough individual people who share the same kind of hallucination.

And you know, what’s funny is that really there are certain things in certain cultures that are considered normal, and in other cultures, they’re considered abnormal.

Actually, there’s no such thing as being a normal.

There’s no normal person.

Everybody is abnormal, really.

I’m normal.

We’ll be the judge of that one, you think?

Normal-esque.

How we decide if somebody has an actual psychiatric illness is how much distress it causes the person.

So there is the social norms of exactly if somebody is outside of the social norm.

However, it’s also how much distress is it to that person.

But nobody is normal.

I’m sure I could diagnose you with one or two psychiatric illnesses.

So here’s what interests me.

Humans are capable of extraordinary extreme emotions of hate, of love, of rage.

That’s a little like hate, but go on.

So Bieber fever.

I’d also throw Bieber fever in there.

That’s an extreme emotion.

When those emotions are expressed in their extreme, havoc is wrought upon society.

What possible evolutionary good is that?

The evolutionary basis of Bieber fever.

Yeah, thank you.

That’s a very important point.

Heather, you’ve got some insight into this?

Yeah.

So I think the reason our emotions evolved, our emotions evolved initially, if you think about these sort of little creatures crawling around the earth before humans evolved, it was about seeking out pleasure, which meant food, water, sex, that helped you survive.

So we needed these things, emotions, likes, dislikes, stay away from poisonous things.

Are you describing gentrification?

As we evolved, we developed these more cerebral cortexes that interpreted these emotions and put labels on them like love and passion and anger and hate.

But really they evolved from human need to have sex, to eat.

Life needs.

Life needs.

Animal needs.

The brain evolved inside out.

And so generally speaking, we see functions in the brain that are happening in very deep brain structures.

Some people call that the lizard brain or the phylogenetically older part of the brain.

And kind of the more outside we get in the brain towards the cerebral cortex, the more that we see these kind of higher mammalian functions.

Wait, wait, so the two of you are saying is that we have these basal sort of caveman lizard needs, okay?

And now that we’re…

Write a play.

But now that we’re smart, we actually try to interpret these basal needs and that can mess us up.

And we give them labels and that can really mess things up because we mislabel things.

We feel something and we have to put a label on it.

It might not be the right label.

You know, people fall in love with their professors, for example.

Well, really they might feel emotion.

They’re excited about the information.

The way you said that…

People keep trying to hook up with me.

But you know, I think we say that these are kind of hiccups and these are mess ups of evolution, but the truth is we wouldn’t be human without these things either.

I mean, what makes us human is language and poetry and putting meaning into some things that we generally think of as just being these kind of hindbrain or midbrain activities.

But the scary bit is really most of what’s mooting our behavior is happening outside of awareness and we’re only aware of it after the fact and then we start to make up to rationalize it.

Yes, exactly.

So what’s a good example of that?

For example, they’re free association tasks.

They’ll learn word association pairs like mood and tide, for example.

Don’t say moon and tide.

That has way baggage with Bill O’Reilly saying, you can’t explain the tides.

That’s right.

Yes, I can.

So I don’t want to go there right now, okay?

That’s the moon god.

If you miss, just Google moon O’Reilly.

It’s all there.

Moon and ocean.

Let’s say moon and ocean.

Moon and ocean.

I say to you, you’ve learned these things previously.

Now just name any detergent you want.

Free association.

Whatever you want.

Name a detergent.

Name a detergent.

Most people…

Degree…

.

are likely to say tide.

They’ve been primed.

And they’ll say, well, why did you choose tide?

They’ll say, oh, my mom used it as a kid, or I loved it.

But really, it was because they were primed by learning this word pair, ocean and moon.

So people explain their behaviors and the decisions they make after the fact.

In the lab, we can show that we can manipulate the way people decide things, and they’ll come up with all sorts of reasons why…

So you manipulate people in the lab?

Why do we even have war then?

Because we just put Al Qaeda in a lab.

This comes down to a question which I probably don’t want to take the conversation here, but they always go to this place when I try to write about these kinds of things, is does that mean that we have no free will?

Actually, free will is an illusion.

I can assure you.

I’m the only human with free will.

Psychiatry, they lay out on the couch and just have a conversation.

But you’re saying now you’re beyond this.

What are you doing to people’s heads?

So for people who are really suffering and they’ve tried all sorts of pharmacological treatments and psychosomatics.

I’m the only human with free will.

I’m the only human with free will.

I’m the only human with free will.

I’m the only human with free will.

I’m the only human with free will.

I’m the only human with free will.

I’m the only human with free will.

I’m the only human with free will.

I’m the only human with free will.

I’m the only human with free will.

I’m the only human with free will.

I’m the only human with free will.

I’m the only human with free will.

I’m the only human with free will.

And they’ve already tried having a glass of wine, I imagine.

You’re taking therapy to another technological level.

We actually call it deep brain stimulation.

Deep brain stimulation.

It sounds so sexy.

But it’s really these evolutionarily older parts of the brain that we were talking about that evolved for these emotions that we have.

Those are the parts that we’re actually going in and manipulating.

The lizard brain.

The lizard brain, yes.

And the alternative was actually people used to go in and lesion those parts of the brain.

Lesion cut.

Yes.

I saw that movie too.

Yeah, they don’t destroy it anymore.

There’s no destruction.

It’s not like that.

How did that work?

What was the effectiveness of it?

Of the lesioning the brain.

It actually worked for some…

It wasn’t like one flu over the cuckoo’s nest.

It was actually they would lesion these subcortical structures and they would work for obsessive compulsive disorder.

But now…

You would just cut out the idea of counting to a hundred.

This is one part here.

But now this deep brain stimulation doesn’t cause any damage.

It’s reversible.

It’s adjustable.

We can change the amount of stimulation.

It’s really quite amazing.

So if you have OCD and then you get it and then you’re like, you know what?

I want a little bit of OCD.

You’re like, I miss counting to four before I go in a room.

So actually, there’s an interesting ethical question here.

If you can go in and mess with someone’s brain, altering their state of mind, can you go in and make them smarter?

Can you go in and change their political affiliations?

Can I make them fall in love with me?

First we have to understand…

Can you electrocute someone until they date you?

You don’t need to be a sign.

The only human with free will.

This is how we define intelligence today.

Name 90.

Well, and what’s interesting, and this is a quick aside, is that when we do a statistical measure called factor analysis, and we look at all different intelligence tests, we find this factor called G, the G factor, Spearman’s G, which…

Does that relate to the G spot?

For the brain.

For the brain.

The G spot for the brain.

What’s with the letter G?

It’s this thing that we see, yeah, general intelligence, and it’s this thing that we see across all intelligence tests, and they all rank high on it.

And so, there is.

Is this kind of fundamental intelligence, intangible measure that we don’t even really know what it is, but some people have it, and some people don’t?

Have you asked those people what it is?

Those who have it, right?

They might have an insight.

Can you figure out whether you have it on a test that might be in the sidebar of a Facebook page?

Possibly.

All right.

But the wave, I think, of the future with these neural prosthetics, as they’re called, implants into the brain where we can stimulate certain parts, is we can actually increase things over time, like memory, like attention.

So while it’s not intelligence, per se…

And both of those are components of most intelligence.

Exactly.

But there’s a lot of ethical issues there because who can afford to get the implants?

Rich people.

It’s rich people who can afford…

cerebral cortex.

You don’t want to let a lot of potentially reasonable hippies into your mind.

Let me ask, given that you can probe the brain, given that there are these disorders that can be adjusted, given that there might be a future in where you go in the brain…

Why are women so crazy?

We’re continuing the broadcast of our show, The Space Between Your Ears, recorded live at the Bell House in Brooklyn, New York, along with my co-host, Eugene Mermin.

Joining us on stage that night were Professor of Psychology, Heather Bodolin, science blogger, Kara Santa Maria, and the comedian, Wyatt Sinak.

One of the other things I study is the neural basis of consciousness, and I’m interested in the-

What other basis could it possibly have if not neural?

A lot of people would think that it doesn’t.

People thought it was way back in the Greek, you know.

You know, in the science, it could be just in the-

There are people today, there are duelists who truly believe that mental states come from some sort of soul-like substance that they’re not found in.

And one of those people is Yoda.

Did you say duelas?

Duelist.

Oh, okay.

The monist kind of looks at the brain and mind as the same thing.

The duelist looks at the brain and mind as two separate kinds of things.

Should I now make my Yoda joke again?

But I do think that we’re getting closer to understanding it, whereas before we can only sort of peer into the brain using things like neuroimaging and say, oh, this lights up when a person thinks about that or feels this.

And that was just looking at correlations.

But now we’re getting into causation because we can actually go in and change a person’s emotion or percept.

We can induce a memory or an image.

So we can actually go in, stimulate the brain and cause a person to have a percept.

And by going from correlation to causation, we’re learning a lot more about the relationship.

So why are you you and why am I me?

What are you, high and funny?

Heather, I was driving home and I said, every day I wake up and I am me.

I’m not someone else.

The persistence itself.

The persistence of me.

And if I had a twin, I would never become my twin even though we’re genetically identical.

But there are certain types of brain damage where you might lose that sense of self.

There are also ways that we can induce that pharmacologically.

Oh.

Where you are not yourself.

Where you might lose a sense of self and maybe gain a sense of connection with a greater…

I mean, there are a lot of ways that we can kind of affect our brain so that that sense of self becomes a little less tangible to us.

Well, okay.

So when we think of drugs on the brain, we think that somehow they’re stimulating phenomena.

Is that really what’s going on?

Yeah.

So a new paper actually just came out recently.

A research paper.

Yes, a research paper.

Not the Denver Gazette to clarify.

When an academic says a new paper came out, it means something different.

Where traditionally people thought when you go on things like LSD or mushrooms, the brain becomes activated and you have all these hallucinations and weird, strange experiences, but they actually put these people in a scanner to look at what’s happening in their brain while they’re on it.

In a neuroscanner.

Look at brain activation.

Yes.

Or they don’t just hold up Shazam to the head and go like, man, I don’t know what this song is.

So they put the people in a scanner while they were on mushrooms, the drug that’s in mushrooms, and they found actually that they had decreased activation in certain part of the brain, in the prefrontal, in the frontal area of the brain that has to do with executive function, and that that part of the brain actually decreased, which allowed these, again, the evolutionarily older bit of the brain, the subcortical regions, to have full range to just act out.

What I’m saying is that our normal state suppresses hallucinations.

Yes, yes.

So that dreams, for example, when you’re dreaming, there’s decreased activation in the prefrontal cortex.

When you’re under hypnosis, there’s decreased activation.

So normally, we’re suppressing all these weird, freaky, strange things.

Are you also saying that lizards are naturally high?

Well, you know, a lot of animals don’t recognize themselves in the mirror, and they may not be able to…

Well, how do you know that?

E-mail!

When you put them in front of a mirror, they don’t notice their reflection.

Some dogs will bark as if it’s another dog, and some will be like, meh, I don’t care, and they’ll walk off.

And so there are kind of some tests…

Wolf wolf back to you.

But many apes, chimpanzees and bonobos can look in a mirror, and if you mark their forehead with yellow paint, for example, they’ll go to wipe it off.

They know that it’s on their own forehead.

And then they’ll go to destroy you for putting it on their forehead.

I trusted you.

And did you know that the laws of optics dictate that in a mirror, you can only kiss yourself on the lips?

Unless you’re a vampire.

Well, vampires have no reflection.

Exactly, that’s why.

Vampires never know self-love.

Okay, so Heather, I interrupted, yes.

We’re talking about our sense of self.

There’s actually a theory that there’s certain cells in the brain called spindle cells that are only found in creatures that have social interactions.

So they’re found in humans, they’re found in dolphins, they’re found in great apes.

And these are the animals that can recognize themselves.

The three species that have sex for pleasure.

Bonobos, dolphins, and humans.

Excuse me, dogs look like they’re having fun when they’re doing it.

So what do you say?

I think all animals get something out of sex, but these are the three species that have sex outside of estrus.

What’s the reason dogs have sex with human legs then?

They’re very frustrated.

Very frustrated.

Okay, so three species that have sex without regard to…

Procreation.

Procreation, exactly.

And which are…

They’re bonobo.

Bonobos.

Yeah.

Everyone’s favorite, eh?

Dolphins.

Dolphins.

And humans.

Known for the PJs.

Awesome orgy.

Bonobo dolphin.

Happening at Burning Man.

They’ll give a dolphin too much tequila.

We’re never gonna let Heather get to her point.

I think I made it really.

Really, the essence is that our prefrontal cortex acts to rationalize our brain, and we have all these thoughts that are constantly bubbling up, and the prefrontal cortex makes sense of them, explains why we make the decisions we do, why we behave the way we do, and organizes our thoughts.

If you depress that part of the brain with a certain drug or with certain types of therapy, will allow these strange thoughts to bubble up and have no rational meaning.

Now, is the prefrontal part of your brain, is that still the lizard brain part?

No, that’s actually the part of the brain that we consider makes us the most human.

Humans have the largest prefrontal cortex of all animals.

Well, but what’s proportional to the rest of their brain?

Ratio to the body weight.

Ratio, yes.

We call it the executor of the brain, so I always got really angry when I watched the movie Saw, because the…

I would get angry if I watched the movie Saw.

I say it like I watch it multiple times, the giveaway, for those of you who get spoiler alert, is that this guy who plans these extravagant ways to kill people had frontal lobe damage, which is not possible, because when you have frontal lobe damage, the first thing that goes out the window is your ability to plan things.

So you get pissed off watching…

Yes.

You’re like a fireman watching Backdraft being like, I don’t think so.

That’s not accurate.

That also seems like the best way to get out of any Valentine’s Day or anniversary thing was like, oh, I didn’t plan anything because I hurt my frontal lobe cortex.

Oh, it’s bruised.

Oh, I’m sorry.

We’re just going to have to sit on the couch and rent Saw.

So I didn’t know there are movies to which you would not take a neuroscientist because they would just be annoying during the week.

I can say something.

Hannibal, I think that was the film, was very accurate.

So this is one scene where the man is awake and Hannibal has opened up his skull and is taking pieces out of his brain and feeding it to the man.

He’s eating his own brain.

But the thing is actually there are no nerve endings in the brain.

So a person could be wide awake and you could be cutting in their brain actually as we do when we implant these electrodes.

Most brain surgeries don’t in awake individuals.

Absolutely.

So you only have to anesthetize the scalp.

And then once you’re in the brain, they don’t feel anything.

The brain has no nerve.

It’s a quite phenomenal thing because the thing that controls your entire nervous system doesn’t feel itself.

So you were cool with that scene.

That’s what you’re telling me.

That was an okay scene.

That was good for me.

Hannibal is very true to neuroscientific evidence.

Now what about on the show Heroes when the guy who played Dr.

Spock, he would like cut things out and then eat them and get their powers.

That’s also real.

Actually, if you eat Cuban brains, you may get prions, which is a disorder that will make you have delusions and insanity.

That sounds like that’s the new drug.

Safer than bath salt.

So let me bring this segment to a close by asking, do you think as neuro folk, neuro babes, right?

Right on.

Do you think computers will achieve consciousness one day?

I think we are the bottleneck to that.

I disagree with the Kurzweilian future of the singularity.

And I think that as humans programming these things, until we really fully understand computational neuroscience, we’re going to have a hard time programming computers to learn beyond our limitation.

Well, there is a lot of work going on now actually in Switzerland, and they are trying to create…

It’s like the figures, right?

They are building a computer modeled after the human brain.

It’s a huge project.

Millions of dollars are going into it, and they are trying to simulate what it would be if they can make a computer like the human brain.

My own personal feeling, and there is a lot of debate in this area, is that there is something about the biological material that is something different.

So even if you can map out every connection we have in the brain in a computer, it wouldn’t have what we experience as consciousness, because there is something special that it evolved within a biological being, this property of having sensations and perceptions that a computer can never have.

According to the movie Short Circuit, it’s just lightning.

That’s all it is.

Then Johnny 5 is alive.

I’m your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist with the American Museum of Natural History.

This show is about the space between our ears.

And we’ve got two experts on this, one, Kara Santamaria.

Kara, welcome to StarTalk Radio.

She’s the science correspondent for the Huffington Post and has a video blog where she talks about all manner of science, including brain issues, especially brain issues.

And it’s called Talk Nerdy to Me, we like that.

And Heather, a professor of psychiatry at Mount Sinai Medical Center, specializing in compulsive disorders.

Excellent, I mean, good.

I mean, what do you say to that, I don’t know.

Hey, Eugene Mermin, this is your house?

Yes, hello everyone.

And you’ve got a guest?

Wyatt Sinai from The Daily Show.

All right, so in this next segment, I just want to break stride here just a little bit.

Every now and then, I tweet something and people write back and say, mind blown.

I know the feeling.

My most retweeted tweet of them all was a simple observation that the numerals, 11 plus two, equal 12 plus one.

We agree with that.

For now.

If you take.

I mean, we’re talking about base 10.

Not only does 11 plus 2 equal 12 plus 1, so too do the letters that spell 11 plus 2 equal the letters that spell 12 plus 1.

Whoa, mind-fulated.

So things can blow people’s minds apparently, and the universe is like really good at that, all right?

So for example, let me just take you to a few places, and then we…

Butterflies, wow.

Okay, so here you go.

Numbers that get large quickly.

So we have million, billion, trillion, quadrillion, quintillion, sextillion, septillion, octillion, nantillion, dectillion.

You lost me a billion.

All right, so we have words for these.

That’s not the metric prefixes.

You can go metric on it and you get ado and femto in both directions.

Oh, yeah.

But none of these are my favorite number.

So glad I got homeschooled.

The favorite number going on here is Google.

The number Google, G-O-O-G-O-L, not Google the company that changed the spelling and incorporated themself.

Google is a one with a hundred zeros.

Now, here’s the catch.

That number is bigger than the total number of atoms in the universe.

And so you might ask, when would you ever need such a number?

If there’s nothing that big to count.

This is a good example.

Right now.

Without that number, I’d be like, what is happening?

But what’s the other instance?

So now here you go.

Here’s what you do next.

You take the number 10 and raise it to the Google power.

We found the nerd!

The Googleplex!

Wait, which is actually what Google called their headquarters.

It’s all derivative of what we had first.

Now, Google doesn’t invent everything.

Let me just let you know that.

So here’s the point.

If a Google is a one with 100 zeros, that’s 10 to the 100th power.

When you go to the power, that’s how many zeros follow the one.

10 to the 100th power is a Google.

A Googleplex is 10 to the Google power, which means it’s a one followed by a Google zero.

What about a Google to the Google power?

No, no, so here’s the thing.

If you want to write that number, you’d have to write a Google zeros.

But there aren’t even a Google atoms in the universe, so the Googleplex cannot be written out in the available space and matter of the cosmos.

And your pen would run out of ink.

But the universe is expanding.

So are you saying, should we wait like what, two years?

Okay, three years.

But the amount of stuff in the universe, is that expanding?

No, thank you, thank you, Kara.

So the ink, the amount of ink is not expanding.

Thank you, there you go.

The empty space is expanding, but if you’re going to put a zero somewhere, you need something to write it on, and aren’t enough atoms.

I will use the blood of the poor!

Plus the regular ink available already.

So we deal with these numbers all the time.

We don’t deal with these numbers.

The astrophysicists.

And just a couple other quick things.

For example, the galaxy has about 100 billion stars in it.

I love that number!

It’s a good number because you feel very Carl Sagan-y.

One, two, three.

See, I like to say 100 Warren Buffets.

Yeah, let it sink in.

So we have about 50 to 100 billion galaxies in the universe.

And if each galaxy has 100 billion stars, you multiply these two numbers, you get 10 to the 22nd power.

That number is bigger than the total number of grains of sand in the Sahara.

Can I bring in neuroscience here for a minute?

So what really blows my mind, and this is sort of what motivated me to get into the field of neuroscience, is that given all these extraordinary numbers that you just talked about and our little speck, this little earth, right, in the universe, which is huge and expansive and Googles and all that stuff, the fact that our little tiny brains, this little piece, this little piece, three-pound piece of matter, can comprehend that is extraordinary.

How does it do that?

How can we understand?

If you look at it, compare it to the rest of the universe, it’s a speck of dust, yet that speck of dust can understand itself and understand its place in the universe and the enormity of it.

Carl Sagan famously said…

Kara, read this to everyone.

We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.

That’s a freshly acquired tattoo.

It is.

That’s my newest tattoo.

Right after…

Yours says, I have cash or grass, nobody rides for free.

Another famous Carl Sagan quote.

So really, this quote speaks to me, which is why I got it tattooed on my body.

In a sense, I think that what he was really saying, and I think Neil kind of disagrees with this, with this idea…

She asked how he knows that I had this.

I imagine you told him.

I told him in an interview.

We were all in our bikinis backstage in preparation for this talk.

That’s what was going on.

Neil has cameras all over the world watching us.

So I am not a religious person.

I’m an atheist.

I’m pretty open about that.

And in a sense, I think that what Carl…

You are damned to hell for all eternity.

According to my parents.

So I think what Carl was really saying here is that because…

You and Carl were like that.

You and Carl.

Wait, okay.

So you believe in Carl but not Jesus.

Alright.

I get it.

So because in the minds of people like myself, there is no greater consciousness, and because the universe can’t contemplate itself but we are made from the stuff of the stars, we in essence are a way for the cosmos to know itself.

We can contemplate our own existence in the eternal landscape to the extent that we are able.

Well, so my rebuttal to that, it’s a mild rebuttal, but I just want to keep our hubris honest.

It assumes that our understanding of the universe is a meaningful understanding of the universe.

It assumes that.

What about gray matter, right?

Is that a thing?

Dark matter?

What are we talking about?

Okay, here we go.

That’s a thing.

Dark matter is a thing.

Dark matter, we don’t know what that is.

One of it’s super smart.

And gray matter is a thing in the brain.

And gray matter is in the brain.

What color matter isn’t there?

Heather, what?

Yes, the question is how, right?

And I think you’re right.

We might be having a really distorted vision of what it is that we think our place in the universe is.

It can be completely incorrect.

And another sort of mind-blowing thing is that perhaps the aliens, right, these space creatures with big heads and big eyes who come down to see us, are really us evolved many, many years from now.

This is a theory, actually.

Coming back to visit us with a greater understanding of who we are.

And we’re these primitive ape-like creatures.

Which is why they haven’t conquered us and why they look in our bottoms.

So why are they so curious about our reproductive organs?

They’re harvesting them for research, of course.

Well, so here’s the thing.

They’re horny ourselves in the future.

So Heather, here’s my concern about that concept.

Because you look at the DNA between we and the bonobo, or the chimps, and the strifling difference between the two.

Less than 1%.

There’s less than 1%.

Wait, but that 1% can code for…

And they have their own version of law and order!

Welcome back to StarTalk Radio.

I’m your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson.

We’re continuing the broadcast of our show, The Space Between Your Ears, recorded live at the Bell House in Brooklyn, New York, along with my co-host, Eugene Mermin.

Joining us on stage that night were Professor of Psychology, Heather Bodelin, science blogger, Kara Santamaria, and the comedian, Wyatt Sinak.

Maybe the difference between us and chimps is as small as that 1%.

Consider another species, 1% beyond us, and they studied us and say, oh, look at Stephen Hawking.

He’s slightly smarter than the rest.

He can do astrophysics calculations in his head, like little Timmy over here, okay?

So if they look at us and say our smartest are like their toddlers the way we look at chimps and say they’re smarter than like our toddlers, it makes me lose sleep at night, wondering if, in fact, we truly understand the universe.

And whether, if we are visited by aliens, they just pass us by because their observation of Earth draws them the conclusion that there’s no sign of intelligent life.

Maybe our brain is not as great as you say.

Of course, but this is a function of human evolution.

The truth is…

I’m just gonna say, I am very close to just becoming pure energy.

I don’t wanna brag, I’m probably about three weeks away from floating around being like, you do not get it.

So I just wanna say something about this 1%.

The 1% can code for things that will, let’s say, create a whole new region of the brain.

1% sounds like it’s a little bit, but if it’s coding for a protein that creates, let’s say, the size of the prefrontal cortex, that’s a huge thing.

So now you go 1% beyond us, and we’re blithering, drooling fools in the present.

So 1 in 100, that’s a pretty big percentage, actually.

You’re saying the 1% are the brain creators who create other things for the…

Uh-oh.

So we shouldn’t tax the capital gains of the brain that comes up with new ideas.

It’s a trickle-down brain economics.

We are actually limited in our capacity by the very thing we’re trying to understand, let’s say, our brains.

But I think that the collective consciousness which some people talk about, let’s say the answer to everything is the table, for example.

And I have my little microscope, I’m looking at 1 little piece, and you’re looking at another little piece, and somebody else, but together we can shine our light and see the entire table, but only collectively.

So I think the accumulation of knowledge of everything people discovered before us and they’ll discover after us, the accumulation of all this knowledge will have a greater understanding than one any individual brain can have.

So knowledge…

I love you, this!

All right, so the future of this would be going into the brain, finding all the lizard parts and just severing the lizard connection from what we need to function in an organized society.

Wait, wait, wait, but hold on.

So what you’re saying is we create these sort of Spock-like creatures which are very rational but non-emotional that they would somehow be more evolved.

But there’s a caveat there because research has shown that actually people make better decisions when they’re informed by their emotions.

This is like Captain Kirk on Star Trek.

Yes, yes.

He beats Spock in chess because Spock is exactly logical and Kirk just is feeling it.

And this is also why.

He just grunts his way to a victory.

Now I gotta go find a nurse and have sex with her.

Or blue.

This is also why I have a problem with this Kurzweilian singularity.

There are some very human components to neural processing that I don’t think in the near future, at least not in the next 50 years, we’re going to be able to infuse into machines so that AI can really rival the human brain.

I think it’s important to distinguish between artificial intelligence and artificial consciousness.

Computers, they’re already more intelligent than we are.

I mean, they can do mathematical calculations way faster than we can.

They can analyze information way faster than we can.

If that’s how we define it.

Exactly.

But if you’re looking at consciousness, perception, so actually just our simple experience of seeing the color red or smelling a rose is much more complex than anything a computer can do.

But we can actually implant things.

Let’s say, for example, the iPhone.

We all have it.

It has a lot of memory.

It has a lot of things.

It’s become an extension of ourselves in a certain way.

We don’t remember numbers anymore because they’re in our iPhone.

So now let’s say the iPhone gets smaller and smaller and smaller.

I otherwise remember numbers.

Exactly.

Very good, very good.

Oh, really?

What about 18?

The point I was making.

You had a real point.

Is that if you can imagine all this information in the iPhone, it will become smaller and smaller and smaller, growing exponentially as Ray Kurzweil would say, that eventually we can implant an electrode in your brain that has all the information that’s stored in the iPhone.

So it’s not just using what your brain is capable of doing, but it’s expanding it using a neural prosthetic, and you’ll have access just by thinking about it.

Imagine you don’t even have to speak in your phone anymore and say, call mom.

You can just think, call mom, and it will happen.

And you can just talk to yourself without even having a headset.

Well, we’ll be walking around looking like we’re insane.

What happens when you’re on a plane and the flight attendant is like, hey, you need to stop playing Words with Friends in your head.

I can think of even more weird things that would happen if your head was a phone by accident.

Say you are doing it.

Calling everybody in your phone because you’re distracted.

I just got pocket dialed by Eugene.

Oh, what am I listening to?

Mind dialed.

Do you foresee like a USB connection to download brain information and upload?

Eventually, and eventually what some philosophers are saying is that we can avoid death, we can achieve immortality by downloading our brain onto a computer.

And so in a sense, all of our memories, our perceptions, everything, could be downloaded.

If that’s how you define who you are.

You have to bring the consciousness with it.

Exactly.

Otherwise, it’s just information.

We still don’t know what that is.

Thank you.

Exactly.

But as you say, if you’re an atheist and there’s no such thing as a soul, then what are we really but the computations that are happening inside of our brain?

We are that gestalt though.

We are that sum that’s greater than the whole of its parts.

It’s the mind that arises from brain or the mind that exists concurrently with brain.

And we still don’t really know how to define that.

But if we thought even more outside of the box, a lot of futurist biological thinkers are thinking about going beyond these neuroprosthetics and actually going into the genome.

Because of course, all the brain is, is a manifestation of these blueprints in the nuclei of our cells.

So rather than poke the brain, poke the genes to make the brain.

Tell the genes to create a being which has perfect memory.

I mean, we can go even farther.

Who will control the super baby?

Or will the super baby control you?

And the bottleneck here is our research.

It’s our ability to find intelligence in the brain.

It’s our ability to find consciousness in the brain.

And where’s the seed of that?

We used to think it was in, what, the pineal gland.

And before that, we thought it was in the heart.

We know it’s in the four humerts!

The only problem with all this is, if you think of the roundworm, right, only has very few cells and connections in terms of its nervous system.

And we can barely understand that, barely.

And to think about the complexity of the human brain, it’s like thinking about the complexity of understanding the universe.

We’re so far off.

This is where we get to those large numbers.

Yes.

So understanding now, not only how the brain works, but then how to code it from the genome, I mean, it’s not going to happen in our lifetimes.

You’ve been listening to StarTalk Radio, a broadcast partially funded by the National Science Foundation.

Join us next week for the second half of our show, The Space Between Your Ears.

Until then, for StarTalk, I’m Neil deGrasse Tyson, urging all of you to keep looking up.

Thank you.