Speaker 1: Welcome to stuff to blow your mind from housetop works
Speaker 1: dot com. I would like to scan all of them
Speaker 1: in this room, one at a time. I must remind
Speaker 1: you that the scanning experience is usually a painful one,
Speaker 1: sometimes resulting in nosebleeds, ear aches, stomach cramps. Wait, wait, Joe,
Speaker 1: you can't just scan everybody in the room. Well why not?
Speaker 1: Well did you get everyone to sign those consent forms.
Speaker 1: I figured they show up for a press conference, they
Speaker 1: must be game for a little till epithy. But they
Speaker 1: might have pre existing health conditions. I mean, you just
Speaker 1: warned them that they might get cramps and nosebleeds, mild nosebleeds.
Speaker 1: I mean, we're not gonna catch anybody on fire or anything.
Speaker 1: What about their mental health? What about their privacy, the right,
Speaker 1: the right of freedom of thought and the deliberate communication. Well,
Speaker 1: that's not what this experiment is about. And that isn't
Speaker 1: even touched on the fact that you can scan their
Speaker 1: smartphones and laptops with your mind. I mean, that's not
Speaker 1: quite as bad as peering into their private thoughts, dreams,
Speaker 1: and fears. But nobody wants that either. Geez Robert, I
Speaker 1: was really looking forward to this, and I have to
Speaker 1: report that you are now being a major buzz kill. Hey,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, I knew you are. I know you are
Speaker 1: a bit of a migraine forming here. Okay, I'm good.
Speaker 1: That's a close one. Hey, you welcome to stuff to
Speaker 1: blow your mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm
Speaker 1: Joe McCormick. And if you haven't guessed already, today we're
Speaker 1: going to be talking about telepathy scanning, as it's often
Speaker 1: called in the literature. Yes, yes, I imagine a number
Speaker 1: of you identified our homage there to uh to David
Speaker 1: Cronenberg's sci fi classics Scanners. You know, what I found
Speaker 1: out just this week is that Scanners has a huge
Speaker 1: catalog of sequels that was unaware of. I knew there
Speaker 1: was a Scanners too that's got some corrupt police commissioner
Speaker 1: with an army of Scanners. But there's a Scanners three
Speaker 1: that has a scene where a woman makes a pigeon
Speaker 1: blow up with her mind. And then I had no
Speaker 1: idea about this until you told me. But there's a
Speaker 1: spinoff series called Scanner Cop Scanner Cop one and then
Speaker 1: Scanner Cop two, which is also sometimes essentially Scanners forward,
Speaker 1: depending on which a version of the release you're looking at.
Speaker 1: You know, one of the funny things about the development
Speaker 1: of the Scanners series, at least as far as I
Speaker 1: can tell, I haven't watched all of the movies, that
Speaker 1: most of the sequels look quite bad. But there is
Speaker 1: a sort of slow development or escalation of the powers
Speaker 1: that are attributed to Scanners. I can remember in the
Speaker 1: first movie, you can read somebody's thoughts, and you can
Speaker 1: also sort of I think, plant implant thoughts to a
Speaker 1: certain extent um, and then of course you can cause
Speaker 1: the resident for frequency cascade that makes their head blow up, right,
Speaker 1: and I think you can make fire, and you can
Speaker 1: you can. Oh well, then also there's at least a
Speaker 1: um I don't want to give too many spoilers, but
Speaker 1: it's at least mentioned that you might be able to
Speaker 1: absorb another individual's mind state into your own. Okay, so
Speaker 1: that's pretty godline. It's getting pretty weird even in the
Speaker 1: first movie. But later on you add what would conventionally
Speaker 1: be called telekinesis where you're throwing things around, you throw
Speaker 1: people across the room, So you're just generally developing psychic powers. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it goes into that realm of essentially magic. Yeah, pan
Speaker 1: psychic sorcery. But telepathy is something that I can understand
Speaker 1: why that happens, because it's a concept that I thought.
Speaker 1: I think it's been interpreted in various ways that are
Speaker 1: often quite vague. So as much as I hate to
Speaker 1: go to the dictionary at the beginning of a discussion,
Speaker 1: I do think it's helpful to get a specified common
Speaker 1: definition on the table for telepathy, and I want to
Speaker 1: go with one included a mere Iriam Webster, which it
Speaker 1: just says communication from one mind to another by extra
Speaker 1: sensory means. So I think that's what we're gonna be
Speaker 1: talking about today. It's sharing ideas. It's communication without using
Speaker 1: any of the senses, because we're using our our senses
Speaker 1: and our our language abilities or vocal abilities. Right now,
Speaker 1: we're engaging in a in a communication, in a communal
Speaker 1: thought process. Yeah, Like right now, a man walks into
Speaker 1: a bar and there's a duck on the bar. I
Speaker 1: just put that image into your head. I just put
Speaker 1: that image into everyone's head. I essentially use my scanner
Speaker 1: powers on everyone listening to this podcast. But there was
Speaker 1: a fidelity copying problem there because when I pictured in
Speaker 1: my brain, what I pictured was a swan there, and
Speaker 1: that sort of gets to the basic problem of communication.
Speaker 1: One of the reasons we often imagine the idea of
Speaker 1: telepathy as we defined it for the purpose of this
Speaker 1: episode communication without words or any of the normal sensory means,
Speaker 1: is that those normal canonical means of communication are highly flawed,
Speaker 1: like our ability to use them is far from perfect.
Speaker 1: Just think how often there's a conflict in your life
Speaker 1: because somebody took something that you said or wrote the
Speaker 1: wrong way, or because or because you don't know how
Speaker 1: to interpret what somebody has said or wrote. If only
Speaker 1: you could truly understand what their intentions and feelings about
Speaker 1: the subject really were without everything being garbled through this
Speaker 1: language transmission mediator, then then things would seem to be
Speaker 1: a lot easier, right, Yeah, I mean, there's a study
Speaker 1: that came out earlier this year talking about how there
Speaker 1: I think they were mainly looking at, you know, situations
Speaker 1: between spouses where individuals have known each other for an
Speaker 1: extended period of time, they've they have this this this
Speaker 1: long relationship and this collaboration going on, and you would think, oh, well,
Speaker 1: they're they've been they've been together so long, they totally
Speaker 1: understand each other. They can totally read each other's intents,
Speaker 1: and they know what the other person wants and values.
Speaker 1: But this particular study found there was kind of the
Speaker 1: the opposite into many cases, because you end up having
Speaker 1: an idea in your head of what that other individual
Speaker 1: wants and needs, and it need not actually be accurate,
Speaker 1: but you're no longer feeling it out as much anymore,
Speaker 1: because it's if you feel like it's written in stone. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like everything you say, because I know you, I'm interpreting
Speaker 1: through the lens of what I think about Robert. So
Speaker 1: even though all you said was, hey can you can
Speaker 1: you grab a cup of coffee from the kitchen, I'm thinking,
Speaker 1: why is he asking for a Satanic ritual? Yeah? Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's just so much that can that can become lost
Speaker 1: and ambiguous and just misinterpreted entirely. Of course, most of
Speaker 1: us are familiar with telepathy from fiction. That's how we
Speaker 1: started off with an example from a a fictional sci
Speaker 1: fi horror movie. Uh uh, And and certainly fiction gives
Speaker 1: us plenty of wonderful, rich examples uh and some more
Speaker 1: thoughtful than others. Yeah. Yeah, of course, there's like the
Speaker 1: shining in the Shining, you know, the title of the
Speaker 1: Shining refers to this this sort of telepathic ability, though
Speaker 1: it seems to extend beyond just communication telepathy. It is
Speaker 1: more just like we've mentioned earlier, the general psychic awareness,
Speaker 1: being able to sense things that are beyond what we
Speaker 1: can normally see with our see or here since is, Yes,
Speaker 1: they have a censury. It's like they have a sensory
Speaker 1: ability that everyone has, but there's this amped up to
Speaker 1: an incredible level, so they're constantly bombarded with the signals.
Speaker 1: You can finally hear the red rum resolve from the
Speaker 1: background noise. Yeah. Another one that comes to my mind
Speaker 1: is I assume you've seen The Dark Crystal, right, and
Speaker 1: do you remember the Guelfling dream fast in that vaguely?
Speaker 1: That's uh, that's when Jin and Kira, I believe you
Speaker 1: have the two Gelflings meet and I sort of they
Speaker 1: kind of have this mind meld moment where they share
Speaker 1: visions of their childhood, right, they share their memories. It's
Speaker 1: seems like it's been a while since I've seen the movie,
Speaker 1: but it is a great movie. And what I remember
Speaker 1: is that they just sort of download their memories directly
Speaker 1: from one another, so you can suddenly remember the other
Speaker 1: one's life. Another one, of course, is box vol can
Speaker 1: mind meld and start trek And that seems also kind
Speaker 1: of like the dream fast from what I recalled that
Speaker 1: it's not just like a single coded message being traded
Speaker 1: between minds, but it's like I've got your consciousness in
Speaker 1: me now? Yeah? Is that? Is that pretty much right? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I believe so, it's it's it's been houstine. I've seen
Speaker 1: any track with actual mind melding moments. But yeah, alright,
Speaker 1: well a few that came to my mind. Well, first
Speaker 1: of all, I was wondering, do you think that the
Speaker 1: spice orgies and doone count There's it's not directly mentioned
Speaker 1: as I recall that, and I could be wrong on this,
Speaker 1: that there's a telepathic link. And certainly I think the
Speaker 1: spice is going to affect individuals and you know, varying levels. Well,
Speaker 1: this is a problem I've read about in some of
Speaker 1: the skeptical rich you're on telepathy is that it's difficult
Speaker 1: to tell the difference between different types of extrasensory perception
Speaker 1: that people have claimed. So how can you tell the
Speaker 1: functional difference between telepathy and precognition or telepathy and clairvoyance. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean so I think that comes through in Dune.
Speaker 1: Our trouble here may just be that there's general psychic
Speaker 1: hyper awareness. Can you tell the difference between am I
Speaker 1: reading your mind or am I standing atop the dune
Speaker 1: viewing the great order of the universe? And one of
Speaker 1: the things I gain awareness of is what you would
Speaker 1: be thinking or saying. Yes, Yeah, that's a good point.
Speaker 1: Another one that comes to mind, This one's hot on
Speaker 1: uh in my memory since I just watched the whole thing.
Speaker 1: But then the Marvel Netflix series Jessica Jones has the
Speaker 1: villain Purple Man Zebediah Killgrave and fabulous, fabulous villain that
Speaker 1: used his mind control what he but what he commands
Speaker 1: you to do, you want to do. You don't just
Speaker 1: turn into a zombie. They just just a nice exploration
Speaker 1: of this to where if he puts an impulse in
Speaker 1: your mind, like that's the thing you want. So that's
Speaker 1: not just communication, that's full online control. Yeah, but it's
Speaker 1: it kind of leaks into some of the stuff we're
Speaker 1: gonna talk later, and that he kind of it's kind
Speaker 1: of I get the impression that kill Grave is kind
Speaker 1: of temporarily thinking with your brain. And so he's thinking
Speaker 1: with your brain and giving you, you know, something to
Speaker 1: to want, something to believe in that you know or
Speaker 1: or desire that you normally would not. Well, that blurs
Speaker 1: a line that will become important later in this episode
Speaker 1: when we talked about scientific studies. Yea indeed and uh.
Speaker 1: And another thing about kill Grave is that, you know,
Speaker 1: it raises the question that if there's an outside force
Speaker 1: making you want or believe something temporarily, and then that
Speaker 1: a force eventually you know, it's it's influence is gone,
Speaker 1: how does that affect what you're going to believe or
Speaker 1: want in the long term? You know, like, how does
Speaker 1: that memory and form? Can you remember that you wanted
Speaker 1: something but recognize that it was not original to your mind? Yeah? Indeed,
Speaker 1: so I thought that was a There were some some
Speaker 1: excellent explorations of that in in that particular show um
Speaker 1: in the Vampire in the Vampire novel by John Steckley
Speaker 1: Vampires where the s is a dollar sign, which was
Speaker 1: adapted into John Carpenter's movie, But believe me the book,
Speaker 1: So yeah, that the book is really really frightening and
Speaker 1: terrifying and the just hideous. Yeah. But the vampires in
Speaker 1: the book they engage in in mind control that's very
Speaker 1: similar to to kill Gray and from the world of
Speaker 1: Dungeons and Dragons, I feel like I need to mention
Speaker 1: just a couple of species real quick. There's of course
Speaker 1: the mild communal meditation of the fungal my conid species. Okay,
Speaker 1: you know, shambling fungus people benevolent that live in the
Speaker 1: under dark. But yeah, they engage in a kind of
Speaker 1: communal meditation. And then also they're the hive mind colligue
Speaker 1: colonies of the alipid mind flares, and there of course
Speaker 1: just catastrophically evil uh beings spent and they're using all
Speaker 1: of just about every shade of of psychic power and
Speaker 1: telepathic power to to work their evil schemes in the
Speaker 1: under dark. They strike terror just by directly transmitting the
Speaker 1: pages of the monster manual that feature them into your brain. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and and they also it's like a whole host of
Speaker 1: under dark creatures in Dungeon and Dragons there are weird
Speaker 1: and twisted and horrible because the mind players use their
Speaker 1: abilities to enslave their species in a in an earlier times.
Speaker 1: So yeah, it seems to me that in all these
Speaker 1: different conceptions of telepathy from fiction, you can basically break
Speaker 1: them down into two different categories of communication, linguistic and
Speaker 1: non linguistic. So even the linguistic version, of course, is
Speaker 1: not involving written or spoken words, but it's silent internal
Speaker 1: brain to brain communication without the senses that still somehow
Speaker 1: seems to be mediated through language, Like you hear a
Speaker 1: voice inside your head communicating with you through words, there's
Speaker 1: some other type of structured, coded message. Then there's non
Speaker 1: linguistic telepathy, and that's communication that's not mediated by language.
Speaker 1: And I think this is more difficult to represent in fiction,
Speaker 1: but it's the kind we see more often because it's
Speaker 1: the kind that's even stranger to to to reality. You know,
Speaker 1: it's one thing to send a message into somebody's brain.
Speaker 1: You could accomplish almost the same thing by them just
Speaker 1: having a tiny earpiece, you know, and talking into a microphone.
Speaker 1: But it's a different thing to download somebody's memories or
Speaker 1: to uh or to experience uncoded conceptual thought like the
Speaker 1: guelf link dream fast I was talking about. And that
Speaker 1: second kind, I think is it may end up introducing
Speaker 1: some conceptual problems with the concept of telepathy that we
Speaker 1: can talk about more once we look at the science.
Speaker 1: But so today we're gonna be talking primarily about technologically
Speaker 1: enabled brain to brain communication or technologically enabled to empathy,
Speaker 1: because we we should at least give a brief nod
Speaker 1: to the concept of paranormal telepathy. I don't think we
Speaker 1: need to spend a lot of time on this because
Speaker 1: I think by and large our listeners are are scientific
Speaker 1: skeptics of one kind or another. Yeah. I mean, there
Speaker 1: have been studies into paranormal telepathy, of course, and we
Speaker 1: could go through all of all those here today, but
Speaker 1: I think we pretty much decided that this would this
Speaker 1: would take time away from the more pressing studies we're
Speaker 1: gonna discuss regarding technological telepathy. Yes, so we'll just say
Speaker 1: very briefly that the scientific community has not been convinced
Speaker 1: that there's ever been any good evidence of telepathy from
Speaker 1: properly controlled studies. Lots of people have claimed to find
Speaker 1: evidence of telepathy, but usually when you look at these studies,
Speaker 1: they're not double blinded, they're not being carried out with
Speaker 1: the kind of strict rigor you expect if you want
Speaker 1: to get a scientific result that that you can feel
Speaker 1: confidence in. Yeah. So, so by and large, we have
Speaker 1: not seen any convincing evidence that paranormal telepathy exists. There
Speaker 1: doesn't seem to be any known mechanism of action for that,
Speaker 1: so we will leave that to the side for today. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because when it comes to brain to brain communication, we
Speaker 1: have all of these other wonderful systems and equally, i mean,
Speaker 1: even more mind blowing than than than brain sending little
Speaker 1: waves because we're communicating with language. We're communicating with all
Speaker 1: the various expressions and micro expressions that are that are
Speaker 1: rippling across this facial communication ray that we all have. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's one of those things that's, Uh, it can seem
Speaker 1: kind of silly to say it now, but really just
Speaker 1: take a second and try to step back from human
Speaker 1: experience and feel the weirdness of language. It's language is
Speaker 1: totally normal to us because we use it all the time.
Speaker 1: But just try to pretend you're not a creature that
Speaker 1: uses language, and look at this from the universe's perspective.
Speaker 1: What a bizarre thing we're doing. We're taking electrical patterns
Speaker 1: in our brain and then infecting other people with copies
Speaker 1: of those patterns by making waves in the air. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's freaky. So, setting aside any kind of naturally occurring
Speaker 1: you know, brain wave telepathy situation going on, we're talking
Speaker 1: about using technology, using the technology that we've created and
Speaker 1: have access to, to serve as a bridge between one
Speaker 1: mind and the next. Yeah. So you might be thinking like, well,
Speaker 1: wait a minute, how could you do this? Let us
Speaker 1: tell you a story. So for years now, scientists have
Speaker 1: been developing lots of different technologies for brain to computer
Speaker 1: interfaces or they're often known as b c I S
Speaker 1: brain computer interfaces. And in physical terms, it makes sense
Speaker 1: that you can do this because the brain is an
Speaker 1: electrochemical machine. Things are happening inside the brain when you're
Speaker 1: thinking thoughts, when you're performing behaviors. Whenever your brain is
Speaker 1: doing something, there's electrical activity going on inside it that
Speaker 1: is allowing that activity, that external activity, or that conscious
Speaker 1: thought to happen, and it's at ativities are expressed in
Speaker 1: ways for this reason, that are detectable by machines that
Speaker 1: are sensitive to electromagnetism. You have to get outside of
Speaker 1: this idea that your your mind is this magical soul
Speaker 1: or that lives in a little meat house in your
Speaker 1: skull um and just start thinking about the meat house
Speaker 1: itself as as being the thing. You're taking a very uh,
Speaker 1: you know, direct approach to what what what is going
Speaker 1: on with our mind? Yeah, not to not to downgrade
Speaker 1: the beauty and mysteriousness of consciousness, which is a wonderfully
Speaker 1: powerfully strange thing. But when there's something happening in your brain,
Speaker 1: there is electricity concurrent with that, and so if you
Speaker 1: can figure out how to measure that electricity, you can
Speaker 1: somehow represent it as data that's usable by technology. So
Speaker 1: what I've just been talking about is neuroimaging, various forms
Speaker 1: of neuroimaging to take what's going on in the brain
Speaker 1: and understand that with a computer, say okay, there's some
Speaker 1: electrical spiking in this part of the brain, here's here's
Speaker 1: what's going on with action potentials in in this cortical region,
Speaker 1: and then stimulate that same region in another individual's brain bingo.
Speaker 1: So in a sense, it's kind of like peeking behind
Speaker 1: one puppet theater, you know, out on the street, like
Speaker 1: a punch and judy thing, right, seeing what what manner
Speaker 1: of physical manipulations that puppet mat puppet master is making
Speaker 1: and then transmitting or relating those exact manipulations to a
Speaker 1: puppet here within a second puppet theater. So that's a
Speaker 1: great analogy because it encapsulates both what you're trying to
Speaker 1: do and the limitations we have when we try to
Speaker 1: do this. And we'll talk more about the limitations at
Speaker 1: the end. But notice that that what you just said
Speaker 1: would only really make sense if both puppet theaters were
Speaker 1: exactly the same size and had exactly the same puppets
Speaker 1: and the same type of puppets, and then the exact
Speaker 1: same method of manipulation, which is not necessarily the case
Speaker 1: for the brain, but maybe you can get some kind
Speaker 1: of a approximation. You know, your brain isn't the exact
Speaker 1: same as somebody else's brain. Your puppet theater is different,
Speaker 1: but there are some general rules that operate in both
Speaker 1: puppet theaters that you can exploit. So let's look at
Speaker 1: some of the technologies here. What what actual technology would
Speaker 1: you use if you want to scan somebody else's brain
Speaker 1: and see what's happening inside there. Well, one of the
Speaker 1: most powerful methods we would have would be implanted electrodes.
Speaker 1: You can implant directly into somebody's brain, cortical microelectrode arrays
Speaker 1: which are capable of of recording what's going on in
Speaker 1: the brain, and also what's known as intracortical micro stimulation
Speaker 1: or i c MS, and this means you can get
Speaker 1: both input and output with the brain, so you can
Speaker 1: read the electrical activity to find out what's going on,
Speaker 1: and if you want to stimulate parts of the brain,
Speaker 1: you can provide little bits of electric current through these
Speaker 1: two light up that part of the brain. You can
Speaker 1: also use electro cortico bography, which is electrodes on the
Speaker 1: exposed surface of the brain. If you want to be
Speaker 1: really weird at out google pictures of this. But if
Speaker 1: you don't want to cut your skull open, and I
Speaker 1: think most of us would prefer that method, there are
Speaker 1: there are still other ways you can scan what's going
Speaker 1: on in the brain. I think typically they're not going
Speaker 1: to be as sensitive, so there's a drawback. The advantages
Speaker 1: you don't have to go through brain surgery. The advantage
Speaker 1: or the disadvantages you're not going to get quite as
Speaker 1: much precision with the signals you're receiving. But you can
Speaker 1: use f m R I, so that's functional magnetic resonance imaging,
Speaker 1: So it's like an m r I, except you detect
Speaker 1: real time activity in the brain by mapping blood flow
Speaker 1: to different parts of the brain. There's magneto encephalography, which
Speaker 1: is great. Google pictures of this also. I love telling
Speaker 1: people to Google pictures of things. I think I do
Speaker 1: that pretty often, but this one, this one is worth
Speaker 1: it because it's a it's a system that detects magnetic
Speaker 1: field fluctuations caused by electrical activity in the brain. And
Speaker 1: it looks like you're wearing a hat the size of
Speaker 1: a car. You're kind of like you get in like
Speaker 1: the space jockey scene from Alien and then you put
Speaker 1: on a hat that's as big as a van with
Speaker 1: tons of wires and stuff. Yeah, it's gigantic and it
Speaker 1: just goes over your head. And I guess it's got
Speaker 1: to be very sensitive to to detect what's going on
Speaker 1: with these tiny little electrical currents in your brain, but
Speaker 1: it does it. Yeah, And all of these are methods
Speaker 1: that I'm sure that you've heard mentioned on this podcast
Speaker 1: before or in other science podcasts and science literature. These
Speaker 1: are standard means of looking at the brain and figuring
Speaker 1: out what's going on. Yeah, and then this very last
Speaker 1: one is gonna be crucial in some of the studies
Speaker 1: we're talking about. It's electro and cephalography or e e g.
Speaker 1: You've probably heard of this one before, but this one
Speaker 1: is very appealing because you don't have to get into
Speaker 1: a chair with a hat the size of the car.
Speaker 1: You just put some electrodes on your scalp, and the
Speaker 1: electrodes they go on the skin on your head. They're
Speaker 1: really really sensitive to electricity enough that they can read
Speaker 1: some of the electrical activity in your brain through your scalp,
Speaker 1: though obviously, like we said, it's not nearly as sensitive
Speaker 1: as implanted electrodes um And then, of course, if you
Speaker 1: want to go so that's all the ways we can
Speaker 1: read what's happening inside your brain. Imagine we want to
Speaker 1: switch to input on the brain. How can we put
Speaker 1: things directly into your brain without the use of your senses. Well,
Speaker 1: of course, like we said, you can implant electrodes, So
Speaker 1: just put some get some brain surgery, put those stimulators
Speaker 1: in your brain and give you little shocks. When we
Speaker 1: want you to experience something, you can use focused ultrasound,
Speaker 1: and that's high frequency sound waves targeted at specific parts
Speaker 1: of the brain. That's experimental. It's been used in animals,
Speaker 1: but I think it's it's not super cool to use
Speaker 1: this in humans yet. And I should throw into like
Speaker 1: most people are familiar with with ultrasound, probably from you know,
Speaker 1: hearing about it, you know, us sort of witnessing participating
Speaker 1: in its use to look inside an individual and see
Speaker 1: what's going on in their inside, particularly to look at
Speaker 1: a at at a grilling fetus. Right, and that just
Speaker 1: the lines that that ultrasience sound, depending on the frequency,
Speaker 1: can be used for something as as painless and mundane
Speaker 1: is that, or it can be used at higher frequencies,
Speaker 1: much higher frequencies to actually destroy tissue in the body,
Speaker 1: like being cancer. So this is a more middle ground
Speaker 1: where we can use it to stimulate but not harm.
Speaker 1: Little middle ground that's comfortable middle ground when you're talking
Speaker 1: about your brain. Yeah, yeah, we're gonna stimulate the tissue,
Speaker 1: We're not just gonna look at it, but we're also
Speaker 1: not going through just not enough to melt it, we promise.
Speaker 1: And then of course the last one we're going to
Speaker 1: mention is another one that's going to be important in
Speaker 1: the studies we talk about, which is transcranial magnetic stimulation
Speaker 1: or TMS. And this is where you put a nice
Speaker 1: friendly electro magnet against your skull, carefully aligned over the
Speaker 1: scalp to target a particular part of the brain, and
Speaker 1: it pulses with electromagnetism to stimulate electrical activity in the
Speaker 1: targeted region in your brain. And this is of course
Speaker 1: the domain of the god helmet. And uh, you know,
Speaker 1: countless studies out there. Anytime we're looking at at you know,
Speaker 1: at what's physically going on in the brain versus what
Speaker 1: the experience of reality is, you often see this technology employed. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and so for more than a decade now we've seen
Speaker 1: experiments using methods like this to send messages to and
Speaker 1: from to and from brains between brains and computers. These
Speaker 1: are brain computer interfaces or b C guys. So you
Speaker 1: can get people to say, control a robot arm with
Speaker 1: their minds or control a computer cursor with their minds.
Speaker 1: This is now pretty much conquered ground and science. We're
Speaker 1: still getting better at doing it and better at doing
Speaker 1: it with less invasive procedures, but it's a thing we
Speaker 1: can comfortably do in science and technology. Monkey moves a
Speaker 1: robot with its brain. Yeah, but what if instead of
Speaker 1: communicating with a robot arm or with a computer, you
Speaker 1: just substituted another brain m And that's where it gets
Speaker 1: kind of difficult to comprehend. Yeah, so stuff is going
Speaker 1: from inside your brain through a computer to another brain
Speaker 1: and then back the other way. That sounds like you
Speaker 1: have suddenly discovered a technological basis for telepathy, sharing the
Speaker 1: contents of our brains, or at least some form of
Speaker 1: brain activity, without talking, without text, without any external communication
Speaker 1: of any kind. It's brain to brain communication. All right, Well,
Speaker 1: let's let's launch into the studies. We'll get more into
Speaker 1: discussion of what this would be like, what the experience
Speaker 1: of melving your mind via technology would consist of. First
Speaker 1: Let's yeah, let's just launch into some of the studies,
Speaker 1: most of them pretty recent studies dealing with technological teleopathy.
Speaker 1: How about some rat to rat brain communication. That's what
Speaker 1: I'm talking about, rat telepathy. It's my favorite. How many
Speaker 1: are there any good novels about rat telepathy? They've got
Speaker 1: to be is that in secretive nim You know, there
Speaker 1: there are some rats in dungeons and dragons where and
Speaker 1: I love these guys because they're called off hand. But
Speaker 1: each individual rat has a rat intelligence, right, but they
Speaker 1: have a certain amount of psychic ability. So you get
Speaker 1: two rats together close together, and their minds melt and
Speaker 1: they have the intellect of like a double deck or
Speaker 1: rat brain. But you know, rats, eventually they form large groups.
Speaker 1: Two's company three is Willard, right, So you end up
Speaker 1: with a huge swarm of rats. But they their brain
Speaker 1: powers all pooled together into a powerful intellect that's capable
Speaker 1: of launching uh, you know, psychic attacks attack patterns. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: and also just like the mental energy, like they have
Speaker 1: so much mental power, they actually have paranormal abilities. Well
Speaker 1: maybe the people who created those for the Dungeons and
Speaker 1: Dragons manual went ahead and the time machine to read
Speaker 1: about this study that was published in Nature called a
Speaker 1: brain to brain interface for real time sharing of sensory
Speaker 1: motor information. So I'm not going to get too much
Speaker 1: into the details in the study because it was very
Speaker 1: long and there were multiple experiments described in the study
Speaker 1: with lots of different aspects to them that we're all
Speaker 1: individually interesting but kind of technical. So I'll give you
Speaker 1: the broad overview. There's several different experiments and the basic
Speaker 1: idea is that you've got two rats, an encoder rat
Speaker 1: and a decoder rat. So you take both your rats
Speaker 1: and you train them on a task. For example, an
Speaker 1: LED light comes on over one of two levers, either
Speaker 1: a left lever or right lever, and then you pick
Speaker 1: that lever. You pick the correct lever, and you get
Speaker 1: a reward. Now, once the rats have been trained on
Speaker 1: the basic task enough to be good at it, you
Speaker 1: split them up into encoders and decoders. These rats get
Speaker 1: electrodes implanted in their brains with wires running out of
Speaker 1: their heads. So this probably is not an experiment you
Speaker 1: want to try on your friends at home. But the
Speaker 1: encode rat has a micro electrode array that can read
Speaker 1: its neuronal activity, so essentially it's measuring the electrical pattern
Speaker 1: between cells in the brain like we're talking about earlier.
Speaker 1: And the decode rat also has electrodes implanted its brain
Speaker 1: for intracortical micro stimulation or i c MS like we
Speaker 1: mentioned earlier. So the encoder rat gets the same familiar stimulus.
Speaker 1: For example, the the l e ed over the left
Speaker 1: lever lights up, and then it goes to press the
Speaker 1: correct lever to get its reward. It presses the left lever,
Speaker 1: But then the decoder rat gets its turn and it
Speaker 1: doesn't get a clear visual signal. Instead of the LED
Speaker 1: just popping up over the left lever, the l E
Speaker 1: ED lights come on over both levers instead. What happens
Speaker 1: is that the micro electrode array measures the first rats
Speaker 1: brain activity. Then it runs that data through some analysis
Speaker 1: and amplification and sends the output straight down the wire
Speaker 1: into the I I C M S equipment in the
Speaker 1: decoder rats brain. Then the decoder rats brain lights up
Speaker 1: in patterns correl A did with the behavior of the
Speaker 1: encoder rats, so that the decoder rat goes to choose
Speaker 1: a lever and the translation was on perfect. It didn't
Speaker 1: get it right every time, but it did a good
Speaker 1: bit better than chance. So, through implanning electrodes in the brain,
Speaker 1: one rat teaches another rat which button to push from
Speaker 1: a separate room. This is rat to rat education with
Speaker 1: no external communication required. It's rat brain to rat brain
Speaker 1: teaching you how to get a reward, all right, and
Speaker 1: you only have to throw out the stimulus once. You
Speaker 1: only have to flip the switch once. It's like it's
Speaker 1: like each rat is a string of Christmas lights and
Speaker 1: you've just connected them together. Yeah, and so note that
Speaker 1: this study was complex. It involved a bunch of other
Speaker 1: interesting stuff as well, like uh, commentary on the rats
Speaker 1: as a cooperative die AD computing team, and then uh
Speaker 1: stuff about feedback from one rat to the other, like
Speaker 1: the encoder rat also getting positive feedback a reward for
Speaker 1: when the decoder rat did things right. But any so,
Speaker 1: this is the creation of a rat to rat brain
Speaker 1: to brain interface, which they called a bt b I.
Speaker 1: And this is a pretty cool study. One of the
Speaker 1: things I found very interesting is they said, quote, it
Speaker 1: remains to be explained how the brain simultaneously integrates information
Speaker 1: generated by direct I c MS and by natural stimuli,
Speaker 1: for example, real whisker stimulation. And that's referring to a
Speaker 1: second test they did where the rats were supposed to
Speaker 1: judge real versus virtual width of an opening by by
Speaker 1: touch on the whiskers. Okay, because they're essentially incorporating both
Speaker 1: natural stimuli and this new you know, unnatural stimuli you
Speaker 1: will into into their single experience. Right, So, how does
Speaker 1: the rat, like, what's imagine you are the rat, and
Speaker 1: how does the rat differentiate between between stimulation coming in
Speaker 1: through the brain. That's just like the brain being electrically
Speaker 1: stimulated and the real sensory information it's getting from its
Speaker 1: eyes and its whiskers. Can it tell the difference? How
Speaker 1: how does that information get put together? We don't really
Speaker 1: know because we have not done such experiments on humans
Speaker 1: for obvious reasons, So we don't know what the experience
Speaker 1: is like for the rat. But it's at least powerful
Speaker 1: enough that the rat can perform tasks based on this
Speaker 1: incoming brain information. But you know, rat to rat is
Speaker 1: one thing. Yeah, I think we need to do some
Speaker 1: cross species telepathy. Yeah, we want to get a little
Speaker 1: Willard e here and talk about human to rat mind control.
Speaker 1: And this study saddled non invasive brain to brain interface
Speaker 1: establishing functional links between two brains is from April and UH.
Speaker 1: In this particular study, a US South Koreanan team investigated, UH,
Speaker 1: that classic question how might a human wag a rat's
Speaker 1: tail using only their brain and brain to brain interface
Speaker 1: system that shockingly requires no surgical implantation. So in this
Speaker 1: particular experience of SID went down. First, the human controller
Speaker 1: is hooked up to to that e G based brain
Speaker 1: computer interface. Again, we're talking electro in cephalography. UM, it's
Speaker 1: in this some monitoring system generally it's based on scout
Speaker 1: based electrodes to record electrical activity of the brain. Then
Speaker 1: they hooked the rat up to a focused ultrasound based
Speaker 1: computer to brain interface and uh, these again have high
Speaker 1: frequency sound waves. Uh that are that are going into
Speaker 1: the tissue. Uh, not enough to do any damage. Next,
Speaker 1: they hit the human with some visual stimulation to invoke
Speaker 1: a little uh steady state visually evoked potential, so we're
Speaker 1: talking strobe light flashes here. The researchers were then able
Speaker 1: to identify the same burst frequency in the humans brain. Okay,
Speaker 1: Then the humans b c I detects this and then
Speaker 1: transfers that that same pattern to the focused ultrasound based
Speaker 1: c b I on the rat, targeting the region of
Speaker 1: the rat's brain that controls its tail, and this causes
Speaker 1: the tail to move with the same frequency, this flashing
Speaker 1: through the humans mind the same frequency this flashing on
Speaker 1: the strobe lights. Creepy. Yeah. And they used rat. Yeah.
Speaker 1: They use six different humans and six different rats in
Speaker 1: this experiment with success rate. So, I mean, there's a
Speaker 1: lot of these experiences. They may not seem all that
Speaker 1: amazing when you break it down into these simple parts
Speaker 1: but you really have to look at what's being done,
Speaker 1: and most importantly, what's being done completely non evasively. If
Speaker 1: it seems simple, that's because the experiment breaks down thought
Speaker 1: and action into simple components, which is always kind of
Speaker 1: both overwhelming and underwhelming at the same time. When you
Speaker 1: when you see something that we think of as magical,
Speaker 1: like thought, broken down into the physical actions that constitute it,
Speaker 1: it just kind of seems like, really, that's all there is,
Speaker 1: all right, So what's next on the plate? Then we've
Speaker 1: gone we've gone rat to rat, we've gone human to rat.
Speaker 1: What's next? Oh, we gotta go human to human? Okay, okay?
Speaker 1: So here was another study came out in ten called
Speaker 1: conscious Brain to brain Communication and Humans using Noninvasive Technologies
Speaker 1: published in Plos one. And here are the basics. You've
Speaker 1: got a cinder in India and recipients in France. So
Speaker 1: here we're we're the cinder wears an e G cap
Speaker 1: like we're saying stuff on the scalp to text electrical
Speaker 1: activity in the brain, and the recipients sit under a
Speaker 1: different thing than we've seen before, one of those transcranial
Speaker 1: magnetic stimulation coils or tms coils and uh and like
Speaker 1: I said earlier, what this does is it generates an
Speaker 1: electromagnetic field, so it stimulates the brain with electrical activity
Speaker 1: at the sender's end. There are some code words, so
Speaker 1: the sender with the e G cap gets code words
Speaker 1: chow and oh lah, a couple of different kind of
Speaker 1: European hellos, and had to translate them into binary code,
Speaker 1: so that's ones and zeros are on and off switches.
Speaker 1: And then the sender had to think about different actions
Speaker 1: to represent each one and zero in the string to
Speaker 1: spell the word. So for example, thinking about moving your
Speaker 1: hands could be a one and thinking about moving your
Speaker 1: feet could be a zero, and then they thought out
Speaker 1: the binary string. So if to spell o lah, it
Speaker 1: would be like, you know, zero one zero, you have
Speaker 1: to think about feet and then think about moving your hands,
Speaker 1: and then think about moving your feet, but on and
Speaker 1: on as you would have to do to spell the
Speaker 1: whole word. So the e G measured those different electrical patterns,
Speaker 1: sent them to the computer, and then that was sent
Speaker 1: five thousand miles over the internet to the recipients t
Speaker 1: MS coils. The t M S coils caused the recipients
Speaker 1: to experience this is great fast fiends or visions of lights.
Speaker 1: So you're sitting under this coil, you're sitting in the chair,
Speaker 1: and suddenly you might see dots or lines sort of
Speaker 1: visual light hallucination patterns pop up in your vision. And
Speaker 1: it's caused by when the pulses of electromagnetism come through
Speaker 1: the t M S coil, and so different kinds of
Speaker 1: visions translated into ones and zeros of code. And once
Speaker 1: you've got your string of ones and zeros from the
Speaker 1: TMS code, you could translate that back into text from
Speaker 1: the binary code. And thus brain to brain communication of
Speaker 1: coded messages in language was achieved over five thousand miles.
Speaker 1: You see some of the media reports, it sounds like
Speaker 1: they're kind of gushing over the fact that it was
Speaker 1: five thousand miles, Like the distance matters a lot when
Speaker 1: it just comes down to the use of the internet,
Speaker 1: you know, yeah, exactly. To me, maybe there's something I
Speaker 1: didn't understand, but to me that the distance didn't really
Speaker 1: seem to matter. I mean, once you've got a decoded
Speaker 1: brain signal on the Internet, sent to somebody else and
Speaker 1: then recoded back into the message it was supposed to be,
Speaker 1: it's the Internet. Why does it matter if it's one
Speaker 1: mile or a hundred miles or a thousand miles. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: But anyway that that that's some human to human text communication.
Speaker 1: But then there's another one, and this one got some
Speaker 1: interesting media attention. I actually wrote about this last year
Speaker 1: for a forward thinking video, but it was also published
Speaker 1: in Plos one and it was called a direct brain
Speaker 1: to brain interface and humans. And this involves a video game.
Speaker 1: So it's it's cooperative gaming. No, it didn't sound like
Speaker 1: a very good video. I'm looking at the image right now.
Speaker 1: It's one of these video games. Yeah, it sounded like
Speaker 1: I think it was one of those free video games. No,
Speaker 1: it may have been designed purposefully for this study. I
Speaker 1: don't know. It looks it looks kind of boring. Yes,
Speaker 1: So researchers at the University of Washington published this study
Speaker 1: showing they were they were able to establish a non
Speaker 1: invasive brain to brain an interface between people which allowed
Speaker 1: them to cause movements in a different person's body without
Speaker 1: speech across the internet to play the game. So it
Speaker 1: works this way. One person sits in a room with
Speaker 1: the ability to look at a screen. The screen has
Speaker 1: the game on it and what you see on the
Speaker 1: game is that there's a pirate ship launching rockets at
Speaker 1: a city, and you've got control of a cannon that
Speaker 1: can shoot down the rockets if you time the cannon
Speaker 1: shot right. So you gotta wait until the pirate ship
Speaker 1: shoots a rocket, and then when it does, you shoot
Speaker 1: your cannon to shoot the rocket and knock it out
Speaker 1: of the sky. Pretty simple, right, But the problem is
Speaker 1: you can't press a button. The only person who has
Speaker 1: a controller to control the game is in a different
Speaker 1: room across the campus, different buildings, like exactly right. So
Speaker 1: you are sitting there watching the screen of the game
Speaker 1: with an e G cap on your head, and when
Speaker 1: you see that it's time to press that button to
Speaker 1: shoot down the rocket, you think, move my hand. You
Speaker 1: don't move your hand, You just think move my hand.
Speaker 1: The e G cap records that and says, oh, okay,
Speaker 1: it's time. Since that information across the internet to the
Speaker 1: room which has the other person sitting in it. Now,
Speaker 1: this person cannot see the screen that the game is
Speaker 1: being played on, but this person is the ability to
Speaker 1: press the button to fire the rocket, and when the
Speaker 1: when the timing is right, when the signal arrives, it
Speaker 1: activates a t MS coil that causes their hand to jerk.
Speaker 1: And when that causes their hand to jerk, they press
Speaker 1: a button that says fire the rocket. That signal goes
Speaker 1: back to the game and fires the rocket. So you
Speaker 1: have to so neither one can play the game alone.
Speaker 1: They have to coh operate to play the game, and
Speaker 1: they can't talk about it. It's just thought to thought
Speaker 1: to action, all right. I think that makes that makes sense.
Speaker 1: I think everybody's falling along with that. So so what
Speaker 1: was the success rate? Like? How did how did these
Speaker 1: weirdly conjoined individuals um perform in this simple game? So
Speaker 1: there were three pairs of subjects and they correctly identified
Speaker 1: and destroyed eighty three point three percent percent and thirty
Speaker 1: seven point five percent of the rockets, respectively during the
Speaker 1: the experimental games, and then they had a zero percent
Speaker 1: success rate during control games. Uh so they did better
Speaker 1: in the experimental games where real information was being transmitted
Speaker 1: than in the control games when it wasn't. So there
Speaker 1: are several takeaways from this. One of the things that
Speaker 1: I think is interesting about this is that the receiver's
Speaker 1: action is not conscious. They're not thinking they're not getting
Speaker 1: a message that they're decoding. They're just being caused to jerk,
Speaker 1: all right, So they're not hearing a voice in their
Speaker 1: head that's saying saying, shoot it, now, push the button, now,
Speaker 1: push the button now. It's just happening. No, they're they're
Speaker 1: getting some magnetism that says, uh, Suddenly their hand moves
Speaker 1: and they press a button. Uh. There are three takeaways
Speaker 1: that the authors of the study came up with. So
Speaker 1: they said, one of the takeaways from the study is
Speaker 1: that we've got the technology now that's sufficient to develop
Speaker 1: devices for rudimentary brain to brain communication. So that's one
Speaker 1: of the things they say. They've demonstrated it's already here.
Speaker 1: We can do it now, though it is rudimentary. The
Speaker 1: second thing they point out is that working brain to
Speaker 1: brain interfaces can be built out of non invasive technologies.
Speaker 1: Neither person here required a brain implant. Uh. They it
Speaker 1: was e g. To the transcranial magnetic stimulation. And then
Speaker 1: the third thing they point out is that this is
Speaker 1: very rudimentary, but the fact that it can be done
Speaker 1: at all means we need to start having a conversation
Speaker 1: between ethicis neuroscientists and regulatory agencies on the ethical, moral,
Speaker 1: and societal implications of b b I. S Uh, they're
Speaker 1: they're talking. They're about the ones that could grow in
Speaker 1: the future out of the rudimentary technologies that are being
Speaker 1: developed now. Yeah, yeah, setting the stage for the whole
Speaker 1: world of neural security, right, neuro security protecting our our
Speaker 1: our thoughts and emotions and true feelings from all those
Speaker 1: technologically enhanced scanners out there. Yeah. Now, there's an even
Speaker 1: more recent study on this, right. There was one that
Speaker 1: came out just in September of this year in September,
Speaker 1: where it was not exactly the same group but most
Speaker 1: of the same scientists, uh, some of the same authors
Speaker 1: from that that previous one published again in p OS
Speaker 1: one a study called Playing twenty Questions with the Mind
Speaker 1: collaborative problem solving by humans using a brain to brain interface,
Speaker 1: and it was a set up a lot like the
Speaker 1: last one. It was pretty much just the same with
Speaker 1: cinder with e G and a receiver using a transcranial
Speaker 1: magnetic stimulation coil. But instead what they did here, instead
Speaker 1: of playing a video game together, they got them to
Speaker 1: trade coded messages in order to play a game of
Speaker 1: twenty questions without talking. Okay, so this is communication that
Speaker 1: goes beyond merely just push that button, push that button right,
Speaker 1: and but it's still one of the things worth pointing
Speaker 1: out is that it is still coded communication. Now that
Speaker 1: they had a pretty high success rate, the setup is
Speaker 1: a is a whole lot like the last experiment you've
Speaker 1: got to You've got a sender wearing an e G
Speaker 1: cap to read their brain, and you've got a receiver
Speaker 1: under a t MS coil to uh to give them information.
Speaker 1: Except what's different here is that instead of the t
Speaker 1: MS coil giving somebody a jerk hand movement in the hand,
Speaker 1: it gives them what we were talking about earlier, a
Speaker 1: phosphene a vision, and they can use that to decode
Speaker 1: information sent by the person in the e G cap
Speaker 1: and by trading information back and forth this way, by
Speaker 1: being able to answer yes or no questions by sending
Speaker 1: them a phosphene or not, these people can ask an
Speaker 1: answer questions, to play a game of twenty questions to
Speaker 1: guess an object without any words or language. So the
Speaker 1: basic ideas, say you have a parakeet in mind, the
Speaker 1: person asks a question that they select from a square
Speaker 1: from a screen like can this thing fly? And then
Speaker 1: the person in the e G cap gives a stimulus
Speaker 1: by looking at two different lights to answer yes or no,
Speaker 1: and then that goes back to the person who answered
Speaker 1: the question and they get they get a sense of
Speaker 1: whether the answer is yes or no by whether or
Speaker 1: not they get this vision of light from the from
Speaker 1: the coil, and by going back and forth this way
Speaker 1: they can solve the puzzle and eventually figure out what
Speaker 1: the object is. And this set up allowed the people
Speaker 1: in the experimental group to win seventy two percent of
Speaker 1: the games. And so there's a control group where no
Speaker 1: genuine information was being traded back and forth, and only
Speaker 1: eight percent of those participants were able to correctly identify
Speaker 1: the object. So pretty cool this twenty questions without words. Well,
Speaker 1: actually know, there were words because you had to select
Speaker 1: the questions to go back and forth, but the answers
Speaker 1: didn't require words. It was just coded brain signals, the
Speaker 1: flashes of light in the mind. Yeah, okay, So the
Speaker 1: authors themselves point out a couple of limitations at the end.
Speaker 1: One of them is that the kind of obvious thing
Speaker 1: is that this doesn't necessarily provide any better communication than talking, right,
Speaker 1: it's it feels very hamstrong that you're having to to
Speaker 1: to rely on this convoluted method of flashes, where when
Speaker 1: really we have far better means of communication at artists,
Speaker 1: it would be much easier to play the game by
Speaker 1: by text messages or just by talking. But they point
Speaker 1: out how well, even something like this could probably help
Speaker 1: in somebody who has uh, for example, the inability to
Speaker 1: move or speak if it broke as aphasia or something
Speaker 1: like that, um or if it's being played between people
Speaker 1: who don't speak the same language. So so that that's
Speaker 1: a possibly a good point. But then they also point
Speaker 1: out that this is just sort of a proof of
Speaker 1: concept for technologies that could become much more power and
Speaker 1: powerful and sensitive in the future, and that's the real question. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And then the other thing they point out is a
Speaker 1: limitation of their own study, is that it doesn't allow
Speaker 1: bi directional transfer of information. The information is going from
Speaker 1: one person to the other, but it would be very
Speaker 1: interesting to hook up both the sender and the recipient,
Speaker 1: or both people at least with both capabilities. So you've
Speaker 1: got an e G and a t MS coil and
Speaker 1: you can send information back and forth both ways, which
Speaker 1: is when things would really start getting creepy, all right.
Speaker 1: So there's a taste of where we are with the
Speaker 1: with the with the research and the technology, where and
Speaker 1: and and an idea of where we may be going.
Speaker 1: So how do we prepare for and what's it going
Speaker 1: to be like as these more advanced telepathic technologies become
Speaker 1: available and even become a part of our life. Well.
Speaker 1: I think it's interesting because it's a question whether these
Speaker 1: have really changed that concern we brought up at the
Speaker 1: beginning of the episode about linguistic versus non linguistic telepathy. Um,
Speaker 1: if it's just saying that you will be able to
Speaker 1: send coded messages like like this kind of binary morse
Speaker 1: code type thing we were talking about earlier between brains,
Speaker 1: that's one thing. If it were to somehow become the
Speaker 1: case that you could send something more complex and difficult
Speaker 1: to quantify, like a non encoded thought or memory or
Speaker 1: something like that, that would be very interesting. But I
Speaker 1: don't know if that's even possible, because, like we talked
Speaker 1: about with our puppet theater analogy, your puppet theater is
Speaker 1: not exactly the same as somebody else's puppet theater. They
Speaker 1: can't just put electrodes in your brain and say, well,
Speaker 1: I'm going to share this, uh, this image by lighting
Speaker 1: up exactly the same neurons in your brain that are
Speaker 1: lit up in somebody else's brain. You don't have the
Speaker 1: same neurons as them. Everybody's brain is going to be
Speaker 1: a little bit different. So I'm not sure how that
Speaker 1: would even work without some kind of encoding back and forth.
Speaker 1: And this is something that's been pointed out in some
Speaker 1: of the criticism of these studies and the supposed implications
Speaker 1: of it. Again, they are just sending coded messages, right,
Speaker 1: It's still basically language. It's not emotions ideas thoughts though
Speaker 1: the one about making the hand jerk or making the
Speaker 1: tail wag is kind of interesting because that's motor control.
Speaker 1: But for the most part of these situations where you
Speaker 1: could still lie, it's not like it's so this direct,
Speaker 1: you know, unfiltered communication system. Yeah, but what would that
Speaker 1: be like that? That's the thing I keep coming back to,
Speaker 1: what would what would it be like to have this
Speaker 1: communal mind experience with someone else? And in researching this,
Speaker 1: I came across a really cool u A in magazine
Speaker 1: article by Peter Watt's titled hive consciousness and UH. In
Speaker 1: this he points out that the brain that makes us
Speaker 1: who we are, you know, essentially it quotes, spreads across
Speaker 1: two cerebral hemispheres connected by the corpus colossum, a fat,
Speaker 1: meaty pipe more than two hundred million accents thick. Yeah.
Speaker 1: This sort of the idea that you've already got two
Speaker 1: brands in a way. Yeah. And in fact, he points
Speaker 1: out that if you were to cleave these hemispheres in
Speaker 1: two and that's indeed a last ditch surgery that sometimes
Speaker 1: a uh see employee that deal with to deal with
Speaker 1: certain forms of epilepsy, each half would go its own way,
Speaker 1: developing its own taste and beliefs. And to support this,
Speaker 1: he points to uh a talk that was given by
Speaker 1: noted to neuroscientist Vilanio Ramachandren at the two thousand six
Speaker 1: Beyond Belief Conference, And you can find video of this
Speaker 1: on YouTube. I'll try and link to the clip on
Speaker 1: the landing page for this episode of Stuff to Build
Speaker 1: Your Mind dot Com. But Ramachandren points h he shares
Speaker 1: an account of a split brain patient with a Christian
Speaker 1: hemisphere and an atheist one. Uh, and they have to
Speaker 1: end up having to teach the hemispheres to commune kate
Speaker 1: with each other. So the the general idea here, I
Speaker 1: think was that he's saying that the corpus colossum helps,
Speaker 1: uh homogenize the two different brains. It creates the conscious
Speaker 1: illusion that your hemispheres are in accord with one another.
Speaker 1: But if you're able to sever them and you don't
Speaker 1: have this high bandwidth connection between them, they're very much
Speaker 1: two different minds. Yeah, and it's not a gradual separation either.
Speaker 1: It's not like a musical duo breaking up and then
Speaker 1: each struggles for years to find their own solo identity.
Speaker 1: You know, this side of the brain eventually becomes atheist
Speaker 1: and this side eventually becomes a believer. No, scientists can
Speaker 1: actually induce hemispheric isolation chemically in the brain, just shutting
Speaker 1: it down U uh and uh and then watching, just
Speaker 1: without any delay, the undrugged hemisphere sort of coming into
Speaker 1: its own, becoming the primary decider, developing a whole new
Speaker 1: personality right there in front of us. So like I
Speaker 1: I anesthetize your left brain and I suddenly see your
Speaker 1: brain evil twin emerges the dominant personality, which was really
Speaker 1: only half of you before. Yeah, it reminds me of
Speaker 1: a character in the Culture book by Enim Banks consider Flibus.
Speaker 1: There's a character name uh Craikland who has enhanced hemispheric
Speaker 1: task division in his brain, but basically he sleeps with
Speaker 1: one eye open. He can use a uni hemispheric sleep
Speaker 1: much like a you know, like many animals out there
Speaker 1: that never completely put their brain under. So one third
Speaker 1: of the time, one half of his brain sleeps and
Speaker 1: he's a bit dreamy and vague. Another third of the
Speaker 1: time he's all logic in numbers and doesn't communicate all
Speaker 1: that well. And only one third of the time is
Speaker 1: he fully awake with both sides of his brain making
Speaker 1: up who he is. That's pretty cool, yeah, and uh yeah,
Speaker 1: So it's it's interesting to think of it in terms
Speaker 1: of rama Chandren's example. He he jokingly pointed out, what
Speaker 1: happens to this individual dies? Does half his brain go
Speaker 1: to heaven and one half go to hell? And uh
Speaker 1: And it makes us ask some difficult questions about conscious
Speaker 1: this itself, because consciousness remains something of the mystery and
Speaker 1: when we have a hell of a time unraveling and
Speaker 1: as author our Scott Backer points that we're trying to
Speaker 1: explain the magic of a coin trick, right, But we're
Speaker 1: in a horrible position because we are the magic that
Speaker 1: we're trying to understand. We're trying to explain se consciousness.
Speaker 1: You mean, yeah, with consciousness and then but ultimately with
Speaker 1: any any time time we try and tackle our you know,
Speaker 1: our our cognition and our and our brain activity, and
Speaker 1: certainly we try to translate it into another being or
Speaker 1: try to bring two of them together. We have to
Speaker 1: we have to unravel the magic of the human experience. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: we mentioned this earlier. I mean, when you start under
Speaker 1: understanding consciousness for some reason, it's kind of a scary thing.
Speaker 1: Like we we like this magical illusion of the unified
Speaker 1: self to to persist. And when you start separating consciousness
Speaker 1: into constituent parts or understanding I mean we I'm not
Speaker 1: saying we fully understand justousness, but even understanding little bits
Speaker 1: that might inform how it comes together, it's a little alarming.
Speaker 1: You don't like the idea that your consciousness can be
Speaker 1: explained via, you know, a combination of different processes in
Speaker 1: the brain. But one of the scary things here is
Speaker 1: is the implication going back to brain to brain interfaces.
Speaker 1: That what if combining different brains with technology in different
Speaker 1: skulls will become just as seamless as combining the two
Speaker 1: hemispheres of your brain via the corpus colossum. Uh. And
Speaker 1: it's such that maybe our producer Null and our other
Speaker 1: co host Christian would link their brains up via computer
Speaker 1: and it wouldn't feel like they were two different brains connected.
Speaker 1: It would just feel like they were one brain. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Like essentially would be like you know, like a Vultron
Speaker 1: scenario or um or or like an assemblage of of keywords.
Speaker 1: So like, oh, we we need somebody who's really good
Speaker 1: at maritime law, but we also need somebody who really
Speaker 1: is really tuned into pop culture, and we need to
Speaker 1: go out and speak Well, what can we do? Well,
Speaker 1: let's just take these two individuals, hook them up together
Speaker 1: and make them manifest a new individual who is a
Speaker 1: perfect uh you know, convergence of those two uh skill sets. Now,
Speaker 1: now again, I want to say, who knows if such
Speaker 1: a thing as possible? We don't want to get to
Speaker 1: uh to hype heavy here and suggest that we we've
Speaker 1: now demonstrated that it's possible to link brains up in
Speaker 1: a way that they seamlessly combined. But just the mere
Speaker 1: possibility of that is a very like human experience changing proposition. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and when what are the legal ramifications? So if if me,
Speaker 1: if you and I, if we conjoined our brains with
Speaker 1: some fancy helmets and essentially became this different mind state,
Speaker 1: and then that mind state broke a law or invented something,
Speaker 1: you know, who owns that invention, who's responsible for that crime?
Speaker 1: And then it gets even weird. Or if you look
Speaker 1: at our own brains and think of it as to
Speaker 1: havels of brains that are connected together, it's like which
Speaker 1: individual has the right to exist and even his personhood
Speaker 1: the the Joe Robert being Joe Robert or the two
Speaker 1: halves of Joe in your head and the two halves
Speaker 1: of Robert in mind? Right, I mean, do you think
Speaker 1: it's possible for one hemisphere of your brain to conspire
Speaker 1: to kill the other one? Yeah, or sue it, or
Speaker 1: or get out of some sort of a neural divorce.
Speaker 1: We'll be all right, brain from now on. Uh Yeah. Well, anyway,
Speaker 1: if we've got you worried about this, based on this
Speaker 1: final discussion, it is a good thing to consider in
Speaker 1: the long run. But please do remember that these these
Speaker 1: experiments we've been talking about in this episode don't indicate
Speaker 1: anything like that yet. Like we we certainly don't want
Speaker 1: to get into the over hype machine that the types
Speaker 1: of communication, not the over hyph machine, but maybe the
Speaker 1: over dream machine. Like take these and run wild with
Speaker 1: the possibilities. But don't you know, this is still super
Speaker 1: super rudimentary communication. Like we said, it's it's very coded,
Speaker 1: it requires extremely bulky and difficult and expensive equipment, and
Speaker 1: it's it's it's impressive in one sense that it can
Speaker 1: be done at all, but what can be done with
Speaker 1: it is not that impressive yet. Indeed, who knows how
Speaker 1: impressive it will be or is impressive the right word?
Speaker 1: Who knows how daunting and and mind bending it will be? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Game changing? Alright, Well, there you have it, a little
Speaker 1: explanation into technological telepathy and some of the possible near
Speaker 1: future and far future ramifications. Oh, looks like we have
Speaker 1: an update coming in. We don't have a lot of
Speaker 1: these roll into the podcast, but here's the one right now.
Speaker 1: All right, this is this has to do with our
Speaker 1: recent episode December sevent i believe grand theft genome gene
Speaker 1: steelers in the wild and which Joe and I explored
Speaker 1: several examples of horizontal gene transfer. Yeah, that's the process
Speaker 1: where genes from one organism travel into another organism that
Speaker 1: is not its direct offspring, but some other contemporary creature
Speaker 1: living at the same time. Yeah. And uh, one of
Speaker 1: the creatures we discussed is the tarte grade, the water bear,
Speaker 1: the moss picklet pernial favorite here. Yeah, yeah, very cool animal. Uh.
Speaker 1: And we were drawing on a November twenty third, two fifteen,
Speaker 1: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill study. Uh, this
Speaker 1: is the one where they claimed that the Tartar grade
Speaker 1: possessed nearly one sixth or seventeen point five percent foreign DNA.
Speaker 1: That amounts to about six thousand, six hundred genes of
Speaker 1: pilfer genetic goodness. This is a remarkable claim that up
Speaker 1: to one sixth of of this organism's d NA came
Speaker 1: from foreign sources, so not from its parents or its
Speaker 1: parents parents, but other organisms that lived around it. And
Speaker 1: as we discussed in the episode, this hi it's a
Speaker 1: sort of using facts. So we pounced on it and
Speaker 1: it and it ties into this idea of the tartar
Speaker 1: grade is this ultrahardy organism that may have stolen some
Speaker 1: of its acquired some of its its hardiness from hardy
Speaker 1: bacteria or actually, to be clear on what I just said,
Speaker 1: that the idea was that it so it did get
Speaker 1: it from its parents and parents parents, but they got
Speaker 1: it from other organisms. It wasn't just a direct lineal
Speaker 1: passing along of genes in the same branch of the
Speaker 1: evolutionary tree. Yeah, so we weren't the only ones who
Speaker 1: were maained, but we weren't the only ones to to
Speaker 1: pounce on it because in the weeks that followed, a
Speaker 1: second team from the University of Edinburgh, who were also
Speaker 1: sequencing the tartar grade genome chimed In, reported that they've
Speaker 1: found very few horizontally transferred genes and the tartar grate
Speaker 1: between thirty six and five hundred and their charge is
Speaker 1: that thirty of the unc genome probably came from contaminating microbes.
Speaker 1: In other words, they think that the results were contaminated
Speaker 1: with random bacteria from the lab. Yeah, and this is
Speaker 1: a problem that course can happen when you're dealing with microbiology.
Speaker 1: Typically scientists do a lot to try to rule out
Speaker 1: these types of errors. And uh, and I think we
Speaker 1: can assume that the the U n C team was
Speaker 1: doing their best, like that they were doing good work,
Speaker 1: but at least this cross comparison of results shows that
Speaker 1: whatever measures they put in place, at some point they
Speaker 1: must have failed. Yeah, and you know, this is what
Speaker 1: we're observing here, ultimately is not This is not a
Speaker 1: soap opera. This is this is science working the way
Speaker 1: it's supposed to. If somebody makes mistake, if or may
Speaker 1: have made a mistake, then someone else can chime in
Speaker 1: and say, hey, our study says something a little differently.
Speaker 1: Let's let's see where the truth lies. Yeah, and hopefully
Speaker 1: by comparing and synthesizing the results of these two studies,
Speaker 1: we can figure out not just what the truth about
Speaker 1: the Tartegrade genome is and how much horizontal gene transfer
Speaker 1: has informed its lineage, but also help hone the types
Speaker 1: of procedures that these experimenters are using, because is you know,
Speaker 1: learning from our mistakes is one of the best ways
Speaker 1: to get better at doing science. Before we head out here,
Speaker 1: I just want to remind everyone head on over to
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow your mind dot Com if you want
Speaker 1: to check out all the podcast episodes, all the videos,
Speaker 1: blog post links out to our social media accounts. It's
Speaker 1: all there. And in the meantime, how can they get
Speaker 1: in touch with us? How can they? How can they
Speaker 1: communicate the contents of their brain to our brains the
Speaker 1: magic of the Internet. Well, you can use some good
Speaker 1: old Stone age linguistic technology and type out an email
Speaker 1: and send it to us. That blow the mind. At
Speaker 1: how the Works dot for more on this and thousands
Speaker 1: of other topics. Is it how Stuff Works dot Com
Speaker 1: joined four point of part propo