podcasts
Collection
Collection for podcasts • 511 items • Updated • 2
speaker stringclasses 3
values | text stringlengths 3 4.55k |
|---|---|
A | Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science based tools for everyday life. |
B | I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today, my guest is Doctor Matthew McDougall. Doctor Matthew McDougall is the head neurosurgeon at Neuralink. Neuralink is a company whose goal is to develop technologies to overcome specific clinical challenges of... |
A | Our first sponsor is element. Element is an electrolyte drink with everything you need and nothing you don't. That means plenty of salt, magnesium and potassium. The so called electrolytes, and no sugar, salt, magnesium and potassium are critical to the function of all the cells in your body, in particular to the funct... |
B | In fact, in order for your neurons. |
A | To function properly, all three electrolytes need to be present in the proper ratios. And we now know that even slight reductions in electrolyte concentrations or dehydration of the body can lead to deficits in cognitive and physical performance. Element contains a science back to electrolyte ratio of 1000 milligrams. ... |
B | And now for my discussion with doctor Matthew McDougall. |
A | Doctor MacDougall, welcome. |
C | Good to be here. Nice to see you. |
A | Andrew, great to see you again. We'll get into our history a little bit later, but just to kick things off, as a neurosurgeon and as a neuroscientist could you share with us your vision of the brain as an organ as it relates to what's possible there? I mean, I think most everyone understands that the brain is, along wi... |
C | Yeah, that's a great question. Thinking about the brain as this three pound lump of meat trapped in a prison of the skull, it seems almost magical that it could create a human set of behaviors and a life merely from electrical impulses. When you start to see patients and see, say, a small tumor eating away at a little ... |
A | Could you share with us one of the more satisfying experiences? |
C | Sure. |
A | Or perhaps the top contour of what qualifies as satisfying in neurosurgery. |
C | Yeah. One of the relatively newer techniques that we do is if someone comes in with a reasonably small tumor somewhere deep in the brain, that's hard to get to. The traditional approach to taking that out would involve cutting through a lot of good, normal brain and disrupting a lot of neurons, a lot of white matter, t... |
A | So that procedure that you just described translates into better clinical outcomes, meaning fewer, let's call them, side effects or collateral damage. |
C | Exactly right. Yeah. Even in cases that previously would have considered totally inoperable, say, a tumor in the brain stem or a tumor in primary motor cortex or primary verbal areas, Broca's area, where we would have expected to either not operate or do catastrophic damage, those people sometimes now are coming out un... |
A | I'm very curious about the sorts of basic information about brain function that can be gleaned from these clinical approaches of lesions and strokes and maybe even stimulation. So, for instance, in your example of this patient that had bilateral frontal damage, what do you think his lack of regulation reveals about the... |
C | Yeah, it varies, I think, from tissue to tissue. But with respect to the frontal lobes, I think they act as a filter. They selectively are saying, sh backward to the rest of the brain behind them. When part of your brain says, that looks very attractive, I want to go grab it and take it out of the jewelry display case ... |
A | When I was a graduate student, I was running what are called, you know, what these are. But just to inform you what are called acutes, which are neurophysiological experiments that last several days, because at the end, you terminate the animal. This isn't. My apologies to those that are made uncomfortable by animal re... |
C | I don't know specifically if that effect is more pronounced in the forebrain as opposed to other brain regions, but it's clear that sleep deprivation has broad effects all over the brain. People start to see visual hallucinations. So the opposite end of the brain, as you know, the visual cortex in the far back of the b... |
A | So we've been talking about damage to the brain and inferring function from damage. We could talk a little bit about what I consider really the holy grail of the nervous system, which is neuroplasticity, this incredible capacity of the nervous system to change its wiring, strengthen connections, weaken connections, may... |
C | So, as you mentioned or alluded to, that plasticity definitely goes down in older brains. It is harder for older people to learn new things, to make radical changes in their behavior, to kick habits that they've had for years. Machines aren't the obvious answer. So implanted electrodes and computers aren't the obvious ... |
A | I wasn't expecting that answer, given that you're at Neuralink. And then again, I think that all of us, me included, need to take a step back and realize that while we may think we know what is going on at Neuralink, in terms of the specific goals and the general goals, and I certainly have in mind, I think most people... |
C | Yeah, it's funny what you mentioned neuralink, and I think Tesla and SpaceX, before it, end up being these blank canvases that people project their hopes and fears onto. And so we experience a lot of upside in this. People assume that we have superpowers in our ability to alter the way brains work, and people have terr... |
A | Because of some high level spinal cord damage. |
C | Exactly right. And so this pristine motor cortex up in their brain is completely capable of operating a human body. It's just not wired properly any longer to a human's arms or legs. And so our goal is to place this implant into a motor cortex and have that person be able to then control a computer. So a mouse and a ke... |
A | Why use robotics to insert these chips? And the reason I ask that is that, sure, I can imagine that a robot could be more precise or less precise, but in theory, more precise than the human hand. No tremor, for instance, more precision in terms of maybe even a little micro detection device on the tip of the blade or so... |
C | In this limited case, yes. These electrodes are so tiny and the blood vessels on the surface of the brain so numerous and so densely packed, that a human physically can't do this. A human hand is not steady enough to grab this couple micron width loop at the end of our electrode thread and place it accurately, blindly,... |
A | So in some ways, neuralink is pioneering the development of robotic surgeons as much as it's pioneering the exploration and augmentation and treatment of human brain conditions. |
C | Right. And as the device exists currently, as we're submitting it to the FDA, it is only for the placement of the electrodes. The robot, as part of the surgery, I, or another neurosurgeon, still needs to do the more crude part of opening the skin and skull and presenting the robot a pristine brain surface to sew electr... |
A | Well, surely getting quadriplegics to be able to move again, or maybe even to walk again, is a heroic goal, and one that I think everyone would agree would be wonderful to accomplish. Is that the first goal because it's hard but doable, or is that the first goal because you and Elon and other folks at Neuralink have a ... |
C | Yeah. Broadly speaking, the mission of neuralink is to reduce human suffering, at least in the near term. There's hope that eventually there's a use here that makes sense for a brain interface to bring AI as a tool embedded in the brain that a human can use to augment their capabilities. I think that's pretty far down ... |
A | I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, athletic greens. Athletic greens, now called ag one, is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that covers all of your foundational nutritional needs. I've been taking athletic greens since 2012, so I'm delighted that they're sponsoring the podcast. The rea... |
C | Yeah, in some way, yes. I mean, the deeper parts of the brain tend to be more stereotyped, as in more similar between species than the outer surface of the brain. They're kind of the firmware or the housekeeping functions to some degree. Body temperature, blood pressure, sex, motivation, hunger, things that you don't r... |
A | I think I heard Elon describe it as the human brain is essentially a monkey brain with a supercomputer placed on the outside, which sparks some interesting ideas about what neocortex is doing. We have all this brain real estate on top of all that more stereotyped function type stuff in the deeper brain, and it's still ... |
C | Yeah. Yeah. The one that comes immediately to mind is, unfortunately, in a terrible case in kids that have a tumor in the hypothalamus that lead to what we call gelastic seizures, which is sort of an uncontrollable fit of laughter. There's been cases in the literature where this laughter is so uncontrollable and so per... |
A | So I'm starting to sense that there are two broad bins of approaches to augmenting the brain, either to treat disease or, for sake of increasing memory, creating superbrains, et cetera. One category you alluded to earlier, which is pharmacology, and you specifically mentioned the tremendous power that pharmacology hold... |
C | So not immediately. Right now, we're solely focused on the extremely hard, some might say the hardest problem facing humans right now of decoding the brain through electrical stimulation and recording. That's enough for us for now. |
A | So, to just give us a bit fuller picture of this, you were talking about a patient who can't move their limbs because they have spinal cord damage. The motor cortex that controls movement is, in theory, fine. You make a small hole in the skull, and through that hole, a robot is going to place electrodes, obviously moto... |
C | So just to clarify there, I should emphasize we're not in the immediate future talking about reconnecting the brain to the patient's own limbs. That's on the roadmap, but it's way down the roadmap a few years. What we're talking about in the immediate future is having the person be able to control electronic devices ar... |
A | Right, prosthetic hand and arm, or just mouse and keys on a mouse and. |
C | Keys on a keyboard, for starters. So you wouldn't see anything in the world move as they have an intention. The patient might imagine, say, flexing their fist or moving their wrist. And what would happen on the screen is the mouse would move down and left and click on an icon and bring up their word processor. And then... |
A | Easy in quotes, I would say, because the transformation of electrical signals from motor cortex through the brainstem into the spinal cord and out to the muscles is somewhat known through 100 years or more of incredible laboratory research. But the transformation, meaning how to take the electrical signals out of motor... |
C | In fact, we're unloading some of that difficulty from the brain itself, from the brain of the patient, and putting some of that into software. So we're using smarter algorithms to decode the motor intentions out of the brain. We have been able to do this in monkeys really well. So we have a small army of monkeys playin... |
A | You can ask him, but you won't get a very interesting answer. |
C | You can't tell him to try something different. You can't tell him to, hey, try the shoulder on this. Try the other hand and see if there's some cross body neuron firing, that gives you a useful signal. Once we get the people, we expect to see what they've seen when they've done similar work in academic labs, which is t... |
A | Okay, so here's the confidence test. There's a long history, dating back, really, prior to the 1950s, of scientists doing experiments on themselves, not because they are reckless, but because they want the exact sorts of information that you're talking about, the ability to really understand how intention and awareness... |
C | Yeah, absolutely. I would be excited to do that. I think for the first iteration of the device, it probably wouldn't be very meaningful. It wouldn't be very useful because I can still move my limbs and our first outputs from this are things that I can do just as easily with my hands. Right. Moving a mouse, typing in a ... |
A | Lines of augmenting one's biological function or functions in the world. I think now's the appropriate time to talk about the small lump present in the top of your hand. For those listening, not watching, it looks like a small lump between Doctor McDougall's forefinger and thumb, or index finger and thumb placed on ski... |
C | Yeah, so it's a small writable RFID tag. |
A | What's an Rfid? What does RFID stand for? |
C | Yeah, radio frequency identification. And so it's just a very small implantable chip that wireless devices can temporarily power. If you approach an antennae, they can power and send a small amount of data back and forth. So most phones have the capability of reading and writing to this chip. For years, it let me into ... |
A | And then when you say you read it, you're essentially taking a phone or other device and scanning it over the lump in your hand, so to speak, and then it can read the data from there, essentially. What other sorts of things could one put into these rfids, in theory? And how long can they stay in there before you need t... |
C | Well, these are passive. They're coated in biocompatible glass, and as an extra, I'm a rock climber, and so I was worried about that glass shattering during rock climbing. I additionally coated them in another ring of silicone before implanting that. So it's pretty safe. They're passive, there's no battery active elect... |
A | What's involved in getting that RFID chip into the hand, is it. I'm assuming it's an outpatient procedure. Presumably you did it on yourself. |
C | Yeah, yeah. This was a kitchen table kind of procedure. |
A | Any anesthetic or is or. No. |
C | You know, I've seen people do this with lidocaine injection. For my money, I think a lidocaine injection is probably as painful as just doing the procedures. |
A | A little cut in that thin skin on the top of the hand. |
C | Right. |
A | Some people are cringing right now. Other people are saying, I want. Because you'll never worry about losing your keys or passwords. I actually would like it for passwords because I'm dreadfully bad at remembering passwords. I have to put them in places all over the place, and then it's like, I'm like that kid in remem... |
C | All the materials are completely biocompatible that are on the surface exposed to the body. So no bad reaction. It healed up in days, and it was fine. |
A | Very cool. Since we're on video here, can you just maybe raise it and show us? So, were you not to point out that little lump, I wouldn't have known to ask about it. And any other members of your family have these? |
C | A few years after having this, seeing the convenience of me being able to open the door without keys, my wife insisted that I put one in her as well. So she's walking around with one. |
A | Fantastic. |
C | We consider them our version of wedding rings. |
A | Love it. Well, it's certainly more permanent than wedding rings in some sense. I can't help but ask this question, even though it might seem a little bit off topic. As long as we're talking about implantable devices and Bluetooth and RFID chips in the body, I get asked a lot about the safety, or lack thereof, of Blueto... |
C | Sure. |
A | And EMFs are a real thing. That's not a valuable statement. Everything's a real thing at some level, even an idea. But there does seem to be some evidence that electromagnetic fields of sufficient strength can alter the function of, maybe the health of, but the function of neural tissue, given that neural tissue is ele... |
C | Yeah, Bluetooth. |
A | And you're not worried about any kind of EMF fields across the skull? |
C | No. I mean, I think the energy levels involved are so tiny that, ionizing radiation aside, we're way out of the realm of ionizing radiation that people would worry about tumor causing EMF fields, even just the electromagnetic field itself, as is very well described in a Bluetooth frequency range. The power levels are t... |
A | What about heat? I don't use the earbuds any longer for a couple of reasons. Once, as you know, I take a lot of supplements, and I reached into my left pocket once and swallowed a handful of supplements that included bluetooth. An airpod pro. I knew it. I swallowed it the moment after I gulped it down. By the way, folk... |
C | Well, think about it this way. I use cars as an analogy a lot, and mostly internal combustion engine cars. So these analogies are going to start to be foreign and useless for another generation of people that grow up in the era of electric cars. But using cars as a platform to talk about fluid cooling systems, your bod... |
A | Now you're talking to the guy that tells everybody you get sunlight in their eyes every morning. But I don't want people to get burned or give themselves skin cancer. I encourage people to protect their skin accordingly. And different individuals require different levels of protection from the sun. Sure, some people do... |
C | Thinking about the sun just as a heater for a moment, to compare it with bluetooth headphones. Your body is very capable of carrying that heat away and dissipating it via sweat evaporation or temperature equalization. Any heat that's locally generated in the ear. One, there's a pretty large bony barrier there, but two,... |
A | I'd like to go back to brain augmentation. You've made very clear that one of the first goals for neuralink is to get quadriplegics walking again and again. What a marvelous goal that is. And I certainly hope you guys succeed. |
C | Well, again, just to be very clear, the first step is we aren't reconnecting the patient's own muscle system to their. |
A | Motor cortex, allowing them, excuse me, agency over the movement of things in the world. Yes, and eventually their body. |
C | And you're exactly right. Yeah, eventually their body. We would love to do that. And we've done a lot of work on developing a system for stimulating the spinal cord itself. And so that gets to the question that you asked a few minutes ago of how do you reconnect the motor cortex to the rest of the body? Well, if you ca... |
A | And here I just want to flag the hundred years or more of incredible work by basic scientists. The names that I learned about in my textbooks as a graduate student were like georgiopolis, and that won't mean anything to anyone unless you're a neuroscientist. But Georgiopoulos performed some of the first sophisticated r... |
C | Yeah, it can't be said enough that we, broadly speaking, in industry, sometimes are and sometimes stand on the shoulders of academic giants. They were the real pioneers that they were involved in the grind for years in an unglorious, unglamorous way. |
A | No stock options. |
C | No stock options. And, you know, the reward for all the hard work is a paper at the end of the day that is read by dozens of people. And so they were selfless academic researchers that made all this possible. And we all, humanity and neuralink, owe them a massive debt of gratitude for all the hard work that they've don... |
A | I agree along the lines of augmentation. Early on, in some of the public discussions about neuralink that I overheard between Elon and various podcast hosts, et cetera, there were some lofty ideas set out that I think are still very much in play in people's minds. Things like, for instance, electrical stimulation of th... |
C | Yeah, well, so, absolutely. I mean, think about the fact that we could do this right now. If you pulled out your phone and started texting me on my phone and I looked down and started texting you, we would be communicating without looking at each other or talking. Shifting that function from a phone to an implanted dev... |
A | Or against I'm deliberately interrupting. Or I can text an entire team of people simultaneously, and they can text me, and in theory, I could have a bunch of thoughts, and 510 50 people could hear, or probably more to their preference, they could talk to me. |
C | Yeah. And so texting each other with our brains is maybe an uninspiring rendition of this, but it. It's not very difficult to imagine the implementation of the same device in a more verbally focused area of the brain that allows you to more naturally speak the thoughts that you're thinking and have them rendered into s... |
A | So silently hear or not silently. Let's say I was getting off the plane, and I wanted to let somebody at home know that I had arrived. I might be able to think in my mind, think their first name, which might queue up a device that would then play my voice to them and say, just got off the plane, I'm going to grab my ba... |
C | I'll give you a call on their home, Alexa. |
A | So that's all possible. Meaning, we know the origin of the neural signals that gives rise to speech. We know the different mechanical and neural apparati, like the cochlea eardrums, et cetera, that transduce sound waves into electrical signals. Essentially, all the pieces are known. We're just really talking about refi... |
C | For that use case, nonverbal communication, you might say that's a solved problem in a very crude, disjointed way. Some labs have solved part one of it. Some labs have solved part two of it. There are products out there that solve, say, the implanted bone conduction part of it for the deaf community. There are no imple... |
A | Some hints of how easily or poorly people will adapt to these. Let's call them novel transformations. A few years ago, I was on Instagram, and I saw a post from a woman. Her name is Kasar Jacobson, and she is deaf since birth and can sign and to some extent, can read lips. But she was discussing neosensory. So this is ... |
C | Yeah, certainly. The barrier to entry is lower, the barrier to adoption is low. If you're making a tactile glove hard to say no to when you can slip it on and slip it off and not have to get your skin cut at all. Again, there's no perfect measure of the efficacy of a device, of one device compared to another, especiall... |
A | Could you perhaps say what you just said, but in a way that maybe people who aren't as familiar with thinking about bitrates might be able to digest? There I'm referring to myself. I mean, I understand bitrate. I understand that adding a new channel of information is just that, adding information. Are you saying it's i... |
C | Well, I'm saying more. It's hard to measure utility in this space. It's hard to put a single metric, single number on how useful a technology is. One crude way to try to get at that is bitrate. Think of it as back in the days of dial up modems. The bitrate of your modem was 56k or ninety six k. I can still. |
A | Hear the sound of the dial up in the background. |
C | That was a bitrate that thankfully kept steadily going up and up and up. Internet service provider gives you a number that is the maximum usable data that you can transmit back and forth from the Internet. That's a useful way to think about these assistive devices. How much information are you able to get in, into the ... |
A | Let'S take this a step further, because as you're saying this, I'm realizing that people have been doing exactly what Neuralink is trying to do now for a very long time. Let me give you an example. People who are blind, who have no pattern vision, have used canes for a very long time. Now, the cane is not a chip. It's ... |
C | Right? |
End of preview. Expand in Data Studio
README.md exists but content is empty.
- Downloads last month
- 3