Michio Kaku, Antonio Damasio, JoAnn Deak and Robert Krulwich: The (Neuro) Science of Genius

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[Music] [Applause] okay so tonight we're gonna be talking about genius kind of interesting so in all its flavors and it's guys is this is a word we use a lot maybe too much so we're gonna try to define it explore it and to do that with me tonight let's see I'm going to get my seating right I don't know I'm just gonna grab this michio kaku is the Henry Sumati show on your come out I guess couldn't just pop you all know him because like it's hard not know him he's the Henry cemaat professor of theoretical physics at City College here in New York he's written two New York Times bestsellers physics of the impossible physics of the future and now he's got a new one called the future of the mind he's hosted the program explorations on WBAI forever and ever and ever and ever he's done TV specials for the BBC the Discovery Channel the History Channel the Science Channel he was on the comedy channel this week with Jon Stewart it's been on Colbert you name your channel who's been on it it's he's probably one of the best known physicists in our part of the world so welcome to you sir Tony it's time for Antonio Damasio Tony at the vows you who's coming next he spent more than 30 years trying to figure out how our brains work he is especially proud of his collar which he can fold and button at the top it is just killer fashionably forward he's all searching in the nature of consciousness and mind and the role that our body plays to produce various mental states but if you're in pleasure or in horror or in alarm it's not all a brain thing it is a it is a body thing as well and he's pretty much described that as beautifully as you can to as many people as is possible he is the David Dorn sighs professor of Neuroscience at the University of Southern California he heads the brain the brain and creativity Institute you kind of want to go to their parties I think he is the author of des cartes era the feeling of what happens and more recently self comes to minds that's Tony DiMaggio and Joe antique is the next I plan to start with Joanna she's an educator psychologist is the author of how girls thrive your fantastic elastic brain the driver's manual for your adolescent brain she's a consultant her main mission is actually to help kids develop into confident and competent adults so development is what she thinks about a lot deeply and all the time so there you go okay so first of all you're not gonna be held to this because this is just sort of a these are sort of obvious questions and they may have been covered in other sessions but they make me real curious to just hear what you guys think the word genius if you think about it you could what is there such a thing or is it just a sloppy word that we use for being very good at something so if I said you know here's a here's an athletic genius here's a scientific genius here's a literary genius he's a military genius is there anything that these that these geniuses have in common in your view well I think there are several types of genius one are the mathematical geniuses that are off scale in terms of mathematical abilities that are superhuman one boy for example had a bullet that went through his left temporal lobe another Adobe into a swimming pool hit is left side of her head again both gradually emerged with superhuman mathematical abilities now tonight after this talk do not pick up a hammer and do not try to bang yourself on the head trying to induce this form of genius but then also we have the genius of Albert Einstein a totally different kind of genius not based on photographic memory not based on enormous computational ability might one of my favorite Einsteins quote is he was talking to elementary school kids and he said no matter how much difficulty you have with mathematics mine were greater and that's Albert Einstein saying this now believe it or not we have his brain the doctor who did the autopsy kidnapped Einstein's brain and kept it in a jar in his living room for 30 years he drove across country in the Buick with Einstein's brain in a mayonnaise jar we have Einstein's brain and it's now back at Princeton hospital where it should have been put like 50 years ago but we've analyzed it and we find that the brain is a little bit different not significantly different but certain parts of the brain that deal with abstract thought that mathematicians have that writers have people that are intellectuals have a certain thickening of a part of the brain but then the question is is that a result of genius or a byproduct are you born that way or are you made that way and that's still not clear would you Paul like I wouldn't want to be a genius who cracked his head the left side of his head in a swimming pool I wouldn't be my I wouldn't be vying for that option I wouldn't mind being Einstein I don't think but if you know but you know let's see Michael Jordan is a genius maybe Glenn Gould is a genius Frank Lloyd Wright is a genius what does that mean but yeah well let's start with your original question which is is this a good word or a sloppy word yeah I would say by now it's a sloppy word so I think in general it describes high talent in a variety of values of creativity which can range from the arts to the sciences technology and a variety of areas of social activity everything that goes from the building of ethical worlds to systems of justice religions and political social organization in general so in all of those areas of activities depending on the time at which you are there people that are going to be extremely adjusted to the needs of the time and to the needs of a particular situation and are going to produce works that you could call of genius and then there are people who may be equally talented but we're just coming at time and and a very different demands for example if we will have a chance of having nine Stein right now with us or Mozart for that matter or Picasso maybe they would not be geniuses anymore because what has been done historically in the areas in which they have worked might or might not have permitted them to achieve the the level of prominence that they did achieve because what they were doing at that time was needed and came at the right Airport so I think that and in fact I think that the classifications of genius are going to change very rapidly that it would be very difficult right now to think of the equivalent of mine sucking you ever I mean before Cezanne decided to paint I don't think anybody saw landscapes the way he did so absolutely better but you could ask yourself about how many people right now in the world of the visual arts are achieving something that is truly comparable to for example of to what Cezanne did or Picasso and I think that's debatable but gonna have a very interesting discussion about that the other thing I might get in sideways is the issue of Einstein's brain we too have examine Einstein's brain and we - you have yeah we have examined the images of Einstein's brain haven't you no I wasn't invited to that party what if actually I just feel obliged as the token woman here to say that the first person who analyzed Einstein's brain was Marian diamond a female out of Berkeley and I was bummed that I didn't get any slide said to me can i before you switch gears can I jump into the fray well I think he was just about to thought no so I just wanted to say that it's you yourself pointed out as you were telling the story it is pretty dangerous to make claims about brain structure especially taking off out of context and related to a particular ability whatever it is the genius or not and it so happens that the critical issue in Einstein's brain turns out to be a particular shape in a particular dimension that can be found in other brains and we don't not have any word that they were geniuses of any kind it depends on how large is your sample and how large whether or not you have access to it nor do we know that they were not geniuses by the way we know that certainly that nothing was reported about their genius achievement but it could be that again this goes back to my original comment that the conditions were not right for those people to become geniuses so maybe they would have Joanne I could ask you something or you could just say something I better jump in quick I can see I'm I'm the front lines practitioner my job often parents and teachers especially come to me and say how do I make this human being of mine an Einstein or a Madame Curie or whatever and and so my job is can we neuro sculpt or do we want to and do we know enough to do that when you ask about geniuses I agree it's too big a sloppy umbrella term and and sometimes giftedness gets equated with genius and I one could argue that they're different but it's kind of like saying when somebody says to you am I in love we now know that the chemical changes in parts of the brain when you're in love are equal to that of heroin doses or high cocaine doses so you kind of know if you have to ask if you're in love you're not if you have to ask somebody do you think he's a genius and the other person has to ponder in general my answer it would be no I hate to be that simple but let me give you an example of a boy I worked with okay he was 14 months old his mother brought him in actually in a stroller and he started reading the posters on my wall to me she had never they didn't have books in their house how old was this kid 14 months 14 months and he was reading and speaking the words yes 14 months yes just checking I am just making this up because I have nothing to say that was a fact check that was that's all that was at two years he was decently fluent in English and polish there are many instances of people that most common sense or most people looking at them would be called genius where we see what's happening at a stage and age and without experience that can't be explained that I would definitively say as genius you whether Bill Gates's in fact I will say publicly I've talked and met with Bill Gates he didn't give me the grant but maybe that's why I'm saying this he's not a genius but you can get very close to what people view as genius by reaching a very high level of production Michael Jordan is not a genius he's very good at jumping and shooting baskets okay but how do you get a person to achieve and to stretch this malleable plastic thing three basic things one are you ready I wrote them down in case I forgot read Malcolm Gladwell's outliers 10,000 hours doing something propels you into a very high category if you have decent intelligence to use a brain during a window of opportunity sensitivity the boy you talked about it happened during a plastic window had he been ten and shot in the head he wouldn't that wouldn't have happened so it happened during a window of plasticity example go on ted.com patricia Kuehl you will see they do imaging of babies the sweet spot for hearing a language is eight to ten months of life if I'm a Native American and I hear Mandarin for a half an hour a day between the ages of eight and ten months it keeps the plasticity so that if I'm 30 and I take Mandarin the plasticity is still there so if you hit the sweet spot the time period when when the brain is into what I call uber plasticity or Windows that's the second one and then the third one please read the research on grit on grit yes gee are some human beings most labeled geniuses like Einstein have this incredible passionate Drive you can't stop them Mozart had music in his head every second every minute which is why he was such a social flop and a jerk because he didn't he couldn't do anything else so that kind of thing so those were the be the three things I would say that we have access to that we can change you but you'll get near what I think we call genius but the tough boy that I'm talking about I won't give his name nobody who met him would would disagree that he fell in the genius category no one would say he was no one would say he wasn't a genius Wow I might yes but because I don't think when you look at an 18 month old you know what you're going to get oh well he's grown up now and I have had brown hair when I met him he is he is okay but you I don't think well I will get to this because we're doing a lot of things but go ahead and well many of these people have passed away however there's one class of people that are quite interesting and this is Asperger's syndrome if you want to see what Asperger's syndrome looks like watch CBS TV's Big Bang Theory okay these people are clueless they have very few social skills and we think Isaac Newton perhaps the greatest scientist who ever lived had Al's had Asperger's you certainly wonder what wouldn't want to invite Isaac Newton to dinner you couldn't carry a conversation he had no close friends in his entire life but he was the greatest mathematical physical genius of all time many Nobel Prize winners like Paul Dirac the founder of quantum field theory he had Asperger's syndrome and these people can actually be studied I interviewed one of them Daniel Hammett and I asked him how did you set the world's record for memorizing pi/2 about ten thousand decimal places and he said I do it by associating a color with each digit and then I said oh that's nice how do you memorize 10,000 colors and you said well it just comes to him you know he doesn't know how these these colors just are associated with digits so what I'm more interested in is whether or not we can duplicate or enhance these things artificially and that's where I think there's a whole new panorama opening up for example memory some of these people have photographic memories we can now just last year implant and record the first memory this memory was in a mouse however it was recorded re-implanted in the mouse when the mouse forgot the memory and the mouse got it the first try next primates very soon we're going to have this tested on primates and then we're gonna create a brain pacemaker a brain pacemaker for Alzheimers patients to upload the memories that they've lost who are they who are their children where did they live where did they leave their keys and maybe just maybe in the future we'll be able to upload complex memories like a vacation you never had okay and if you saw the movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger Total Recall you'll be able to upload a whole memory of a marriage with Sharon Stone which never happened okay and so these are possibilities think of all the courses we flunked in college what do we want to pass them by pressing a button now that science fiction but it does raise the possibility that we could retrain workers if they get laid off from work by uploading memories of a new skill then you can take courses in college mentally without having to crack open a book I mean we can't do that yet but the first memories are now being implanted and a brain pacemaker is a short-term goal that people are looking at well let me let me try to I think I want to have rights yes I have I saw you sir looking uncomfortable I tell you what because feet we're bouncing into one thing after another so let me just try to order it a little bit I wanna just just to just sort of Center the question I want to propose something just here your reaction and then we'll get to the booting up brains and things if I'm the reason I'm skeptical of your boy being a genius and the reason I'm not so sure about your cracked left head guy being a genius in my view is a genius to me is actually a to I use the word very narrowly I would even think that Albert Einstein might not well he almost wouldn't qualify for my definition because then nobody would well yes yes no yeah nobody wears who would you set the bar so high well here's my I think that a William Shakespeare who creates a Lear out of his mind so there's this person who couldn't exist without William Shakespeare having invented him Albert Einstein in a way was simply the first to discover something that is always there I would like to suggest and just like to hear from you but is there something about artistic genius that puts it in one level above the others Michael Jordan can be fantastic Glenn Gould can be practiced Mozart can be well notes that would be in my definition these are people who can't who are the only one take them out of the system you don't get their product you take Einstein you'd still have the universe the way it is you'd have to wait for someone else to notice what he noticed but not Shakespeare but if you go off the planet Earth and you ask an alien from outer space is this artistic genius a genius he'll say what is art they're gonna have a totally different conception of art but if you ask an alien from outer space the work of Albert Einstein they'll say everybody in the universe knows the laws of Einstein that difference there that first of all you're a physicist or you have your obvious bias and second of all second of all why is this a democratic decision I'm not asking the aliens to votes I'm just telling you I do you guys have a feeling about just about literary or artistic genius being different from all the other kinds I think what I would just say is that I think it's it's very dangerous to put all these things in the same footing I don't think we can even put all the arts in the same footing because they have different genealogies but I think especially with science we have a big problem because the creativity of a scientist is the creativity that is related to discovery it can be about building a particular hypothesis you can be about building a particular set up that allows you to investigate an idea to investigate that hypothesis and come up with the findings but in essence you are uncovering something that has already is already in existence yeah whereas when you're talking about artistic creativity you're fundamentally talking about creating a new idea or a new set of ideas a new construction there's a new product and that product is not there in nature before that product is going to come whether it's your season painting or because so or bar or what have you or Shakespeare which I think is a very very good it's very good to bring that into into the comparison so inherently these things are different but especially the difference between science and the arts needs to be acknowledged in technology is still another DUI different do you like do you have super do you have the category of genius different from my no no no no III think I would go along with it I don't like the word to begin with but I don't like the concept the world is beautiful but I think they basically I I think I'm with let me just add that I was just thinking in terms of Sciences we have this big physicist bias to my left I was thinking of throwing in someone that I knew personally for many many years and who I think gets to the to the genius level and that's Francis Crick and I know other scientists that are actually quite close to and there are equally decorated with the Nobel Prize that I would not classify at all as geniuses because they they are of the kind of incredible minds incredible dedication coming in at the right time in identifying exactly what is needed at that point to make progress in the science brilliant but it is not quite the same way that I saw Francis Crick work in not quite the same way that I know he worked during the all the the efforts that led to the discovery of DNA but it is again a discovery it was there there to be found Joanne let me let me let me just throw this at you and just see what you think there's the idea of multiples like you get Charles Darwin thinking up this idea of evolution at the same time you get Alfred Russel Wallace thinking about it you get Leibnitz thinking up calculus at the very same moment that Newton is thinking up calculus you get the telephone from Alexander Graham Bell around the same time of Elisha gray or in a short period of time actually she was before him but okay 4:42 380 BC in one short season Plato Socrates Pericles lucidity z-- Herodotus Euripides Sophocles Aeschylus Aristophanes and Xenophon and in nothing for a while Florence Michelangelo Leonardo is your birthday Botticelli Donatello woo all at once there why is there this great bunching great point that that speaking oh go for it it's a great point go for it so I don't know I don't know maybe there was something in the water I however I have a big butt for this so hold on my butt to that is that however you want to measure intelligence which is another whole argument that we'll all argue about but thinking capacity in the general populace has changed every century thinking capacity a brain has gotten bigger the prefrontal cortex no I don't bigger got bigger the brain has been in 1580 is a bigger brain than in 2014 of a human parts of it yes oh really okay well you just don't believe anything I am I so can go then so to fit into the to be seen and and and come forward in the world was easier for brilliant people there were less of them comparatively speaking as a species in general many people argue me being one of them that the overall normal curve is shifting to the right in terms of intelligence therefore now to be in the top one or two percent which is a definition of genius in any particular sub field is harder to do that would be one answer the other answer is I think something else is going on but I haven't a clue what I did I think maybe it's there's something in the air thing that you know there's something in the water they not the air but but I think this is this goes back to the point that I was making that there's a certain set up socially and culturally there is necessary or at least contributes greatly to the appearance of the works that come from the people that we later call geniuses so there's something in the culture that promotes that and I think that that has to do with a certain thinking that goes on there there's a certain zeitgeist at that point and people identify certain needs people have certain techniques available certain approaches to a problem and they can engage in them and I think this is absolutely critical and your example about Greece and about Florence for example we can find several others where you have this flourishing of creativity for example even take take what happened during a very short period in a city like Los Angeles that has not been known for major creativity in the past that happened during the 30s and the 40s largely as a result of immigrants that came from Europe and came largely to Los Angeles and largely because of Hollywood and you have this incredible flourishing of writers of people that were doing cinematography people that were great film directors and and and that was all put together in fact you can identify the geography the part of Los Angeles where they actually met on Sundays and where there was this culture that did not exist do you think it's something like there's their people there's a density there's desert dances but you're in your book about Einstein you'd made a point that you think that one of the reasons that Einstein clicked is because the world was that it was timing timing but let's take a look at why we have this coincidences of genius emerging right I think a large part of it has to do with politics and economics the rise of great powers means also the rise of prosperity and a class a class of intellectuals that society can support the rise of England in the 1800s it was no coincidence that faraday maxwell the great pioneers of electricity and magnetism come out of that era then the rise of Germany with the formation of Germany when Bismarck then he had the great flourishing of the Germanic music as well as quantum mechanics quantum mechanics short enger' Heisenberg and Einstein all of them basically spoke German because of the rise of the economic power of Germany with the unification of Germany and so you in going back to the Greece the rise of Greece as a political military power could support a class of people look at then had the luxury to then create a news about philosophy and things like that so I think you have to look at the military political and economic basis which makes possible prosperity power the interaction of scientists who then start to create the flourishing of the Arts so with that I know geniuses in a job and or no DZ's that we know about in Chad well I guess it has a lot to do with economic and military and political power because then they create a class of people they can support so they can become independent and muse about the arts and the sciences if you're starving to death you don't have time to muse about the great arts in philosophy right great powers often support great art and great science so there's no snow accident that England dominated the sciences in the 1800s and Germany dominated the sciences in the early 1900's this time I agree with you entirely but it all talks to this due to the setting or your issue about Florence humanities and right and you have in for example in relation to the arts before there was the possibility of having Christie's and gagauzian gallery there were actually this is a joke by the way there was the possibility of having people that had a lot of money very often Royals who were capable of buying art by the end of commissioning artists to be in their courts and and paint for them or sculpt or have a great architecture this is absolutely critical and by the way science very often went along the same way and a lot of scholarship that was maintained around Joanne's question about sweat versus inspiration like is a genius somebody like this would be that the description that Wordsworth gives of Isaac Newton of Newton with his prism and silent face the marble index of a mind forever voyaging through strange seas of thought alone so this is the portrait of a lonely mind sort of out of time that seems to be able to see further than others Joanne's version is somebody who's got ability but who does the 10,000 hours sweats it and I didn't say they were a genius I said that is a way to get as close to approximating a genius you get to a very high level of production if to be simple I'll just put it right out there and understandable terms everything I know about the brain and human beings says the geniuses are born and then made in other words they have some brain parts when they're born that if used well early frequently flip them up to the genius category but you don't go to the genius category if you don't have the beginning wherewithal to do that example Einstein's brain had more astrocytes than any brain that we've seen and more myelin brand-new research just in the last six months astrocytes if you really want to have fun seemed to be where the mind is because astrocytes one astrocyte can fire up to 300,000 neurons when we thought neurons were linear electrical instruments and now we see we go back and look at Einsteins brain and see that he had more astrocytes and more myelin did he grow that everything I can find and every neuroscientist I've talked to has said you cannot grow astrocytes they come in with you as you come into the world another difference in Einstein's brain his brain was actually smaller than the average sized brain but his parietal area had no fissures in it we've never seen a brain that didn't have that so we don't know things but the few brains that were able to look at that most people in the world would have labelled a genius whatever that means there's no disagreement hardly any except you disagreement are showing differences the prefrontal cortex seems to be a bit bigger the corpus callosum seems to be a little more fibrous there see you can set the G that the it sounds like putting aside the exercise for a moment if you you're saying that if you could you could spot the genius anatomically I was that what you I didn't say that yeah what did you what should I take from your well first of all we haven't had the kind of brain imaging until very recently to even take a look at these and now Einstein's brain is cut up and dead so we can't watch the astrocytes work and that's where the newest information is coming from looking at live brains while they're working and comparing a Joe and eek brain to a Mozart brain if Mozart was alive okay I think I'm decently bright but I'm not a genius and now we're starting to get comparative studies with live brains and when we have enough of that that will begin to answer these questions with more definition right now we're just having fun with what we think oh but I guess what I'm wondering is do you think or do any of you think like here's a here's Berlioz is asleep one night this is from a thought of her sax book he's asleep and he's he he hears a symphony in his head boom boom boom boom melody everything and he says to the symphony hmm boy I could maybe use you but I have bills to pay I have another Symphony I have something due next month so he says to this Symphony which is sitting there humming itself to him go away the next night it comes back and he thinks maybe I should write this down I mean it's just a gimme and then he tells it to go away and it vanishes there's something about that story that amazes me like that's a kind of genius who just got handed in sprite he got handed a symphony now you were taking aside the question of Anatomy just leaving the brain for a moan and what I'm really asking is do you guys think that a genius is a lucky person who got whispered some kind of special intelligence from somewhere outside himself or is as German was suggesting before it's it's an advantage which you have to push and push and push and push in order to get the prize well I think as you mentioned it takes both you have to be born with certain kinds of talent and then you have to have the drive the the ambition to carry it through I'm not I'm a theoretical physicist okay in my field we have a lot of child prodigies okay a lot of them but most of them peter out they lacked certain social skills they're not mature so every once in a while the newspapers you read about some child whose pant has fantastic mathematical ability send them to school and get educated well we see these people okay and yeah do you want to work on on the most advanced form of physics which is which is string theory string theory attracts the greatest minds on the planet earth okay Ilana that never peter out because they don't have drive the determination but um do Peter ever do yeah don't do Peter out because of the fact that it's not enough just to be bright you have to have the ambition the drive Isaac Newton was once asked how he was able to come up with such great ideas like calculus and the universal law of gravitation and his answer was very simple he thought on it a lot that's what he said and it's absolutely he would literally starve himself not eat food for weeks practically only nibbling on things and scribbling equations on the wall it takes hard work Einstein went to the same process for about a month Einstein was consumed in 1950 right in the last sex set of equations for general relativity so you have to have both you just can't be born bright because like I said before in my field child prodigies are dime a dozen in my field the question is do they pan out do they have the drive the determination the imagination and that's where you see a weaning art process taking place I only both everything occurs to me is it's maybe not much fun to be a genius like some of them like like some of these great jazz musicians or they have they have drug problems they have you were mentioning the the famous physicist who was walking around and being kind of strange all the time is there an association do geniuses have a slightly higher level of you called it sort of on the spectrum but they also seem to get sick a lot to get crazy a lot is that is that something you can associate with genius or is it just an accident that happens with some and not with others well to be a genius on that scale you have to be a little bit crazy okay they don't talk about that and so we can sort of confuse it too but I think there really is a difference some people are just crazy okay they're just out of their mind okay but genius mathematics and physics at least the ones that I'm aware of okay their badness is confined with with very definite boundaries they have the equations they have the understanding of the quantum theory and relativity and then they play with it in mad ways that one day could change the world okay but that's different from the madness you see in comic books in the movies right I'm talking about madness that has is fluent in in equations is fluid in relativity and the quantum theory that's what I'm talking about so let's go to the manufacturing geniuses which because you mentioned that the prodigies you mentioned first of all there's a Lewis Terman study was called the termite study and he got a fourteen hundred and seventy kids who had really really high IQ and he followed them for their whole lives and as we show says they didn't they didn't I think the his finals and statement was we have seen that intellect and achievement are far from perfectly correlated but I'm wondering with you I like Picasso says like no every child is an artist and then the problem is how to remain an artist once you grow up is there do you have the sense because you work with kids and you watch them grow out do you have the sense that something available to all of us turns off in general and some lucky few keep the flame going yes I don't have a sense I have the numbers of kids that I look at documenting that and and in trying to figure out why I mean there are there are studies looking at this and one of the things in I don't know if you've are familiar with Carol Dweck's research around mindset but one of the things I tell parents and teachers which they find startling is never tell your child he or she is smart because if you do they get a fixed mindset that's called a fixed mindset and then very bright kids are so used to getting things correct every time with very little effort that as soon as they start to hit the walls which they hit as they get older when they're young they can do it easily and and leave everybody in the dust as they get older other kids start to put in effort and then their achievement goes up and kids there's an inverse correlation between somewhat between being told you're smart and how long you continue to do things when it isn't easy for you to do it because if I'm smart enough obviously I should be able to get this and they quit and they stopped putting in the traduction which is half of genius prodigy is early but to remain ahead of the pack it requires production and kids who are who things come easily to who are pretty bright who are not made to put their nose to the grindstone to persevere to think of something for three months they they wash out not that they're not bright but the production stops and therefore the girl here there's sometimes you see though if you watch sid caesar on television or louis c.k you watch people who get really loose and it's almost as if that's something that inhibits most of us they have sort of done a workaround so they can get into say in this in their in their case comedians they can get into a zone where they are so i'm these is a brain question is there as as we grow is there up in the front is there a inhibitor that is and i've read on and off about a variety of the things but i i wonder is there something that you can dis inhibit that would allow you to just get wildly creative it's called LS teams you certainly can you certainly you have your friends your fan club wants you the there are certain ways of inhibit inhibiting creativity and inhibiting that flexibility of thinking and a lot of rules a lot of rigid implementation of rules can shut down the the looseness that is necessary in many fields of creativity for anything new to emerge so but don't just put that in the front of love that's all phrenology let's see now you don't want that you know they said this is all about a system working with many parts in a very interactive way you know all the the creativity that we're talking about a genius level or not has to do with a great capacity of imagination which has to be very free and flowing and in a variety of sensory bases you know you have great imagination for example in the music realm which relies on auditory and motor patterns or in the visual but do you know what it is that gives those people that flow like when a composer is when Bob Dylan is just writing you guarantee you I'll miss you can describe the systems that are necessary and you can describe some of the conditions that are necessary and some of the conditions have to do with this great balance between these different things we've been talking about a good gift that may be given to begin with in the brain and that may be developed by a certain kind of education and growing up and then the ability to connect that with a variety of personal for example personal discipline discipline that may be instituted by yourself or by others around you because you in most of these great cases of creativity there is both the some of this genius ability this enormous free-flowing imagination but you also need other things you need prior knowledge you you need you need craft you cannot be you cannot be a so-called gene yes in any art of science if you just have nice ideas and if you're sort of winging well I'm sure in his new book he has a very intriguing notion which is not so much on the comedy flow but on the mathematical side that there might be a way to in this case it's a sort of grand gesture slobo could you describe in your book you describe the difference between the left side and the right side and maybe inhibiting one side in order to free the other could you describe well the question is why do we see these savants suddenly emerge these autistic savants as well as acquired savant syndrome with a blow on the head one theory and it's just a theory one theory is that the two the two hemispheres of the mind have to balance each other and they check each other the left being more analytical a verbal the right being more artistic and holistic and why is it that damage to the left temporal lobe on some rare occasions unleashes artistic Musical and mathematical ability one theory is that if the left left hemispheres damage the right hemisphere has to compensate and the balance between these two starts to be disrupted and in certain cases you can actually see a time lapse a time lapse of a degrading left lobe I'm elect hemisphere creating much more artistic free-floating ideas coming from the right now again it's just a theory but the theory says that the right half compensates for damage on the left the right being very artistic and artistic tense aspect starts to take off for example when you go to Kennedy Airport go to terminal 1 the American Airlines terminal and look up and you'll see this mural of the entire New York City Harbor including all of Manhattan drawn by a savant after one helicopter ride over New York City he sued the entire skyline down to the windows from memory he's done this for Hong Kong done this for a London and now Manhattan and you can see it at JFK I don't I don't have to be autistic or Bergy and to do that I was thinking in your book you suggest that there might be a benign way using some kind of electrical current or something to to shut down one side in order to liberate the other side I imagine you were going to vomit at any moment but I pretty near yeah but yes using magnetism it used to be that if you are neurologists you had to wait for someone to have a stroke in a certain part of the brain to see what kind of damage will be done to the body that's a very inefficient way to understand the body now we can do with magnetism with very precise flows of magnetism you can deaden dead in certain parts of the brain without temporarily temporarily and it's painless and it's temporary without having to have a stroke in that part of the brain and then we can see what part of the brain has what kind of effect for example hyper religiosity is a byproduct of one kind of epileptic lesions there's something called the god helmet the god helmet where you shoot electromagnetic radiation at the brain and you feel that you're in the presence of a great spirit like God and some people think that perhaps even religion is a byproduct of this so they put Richard Dawkins in the god helmet he's an avowed that's a hard case and was he on his knees in moments no after coming out of the god helmet he says now he's still an atheist and he put an onion they put a nun in the god helmet to see what the electromagnetic radiation can change the the religious beliefs of nuns and the nun said no God made us with a telephone system to communicate to heaven you can't win but if I could bring it down to the simple level I'm struggling here with these great minds let me ask you a question okay because you're talking about creativity and does it does the world dumb it down so to speak or constrain us or does a prefrontal cortex or something constrain us as we get older and we lose before okay so here's my question for you okay what happens when you split 13 in half what happens you get half of 13 on one side and the other half of 13 on the other what is that what is that what is the half six and a half yeah he's been too narrowed in his thought process he went for the right standard answer the middle if you asked young kids this they may say something like I'll put a 1 over here and a 3 over here or I'll put an X eye over here and an eye eye over here what I'm saying their ability to look at a seemingly there's only one answer called convergent thinking question and give a an answer that's what happens as you move into a little bit older and school has given you letter grades and taught you to think in a right way and one of the things we talk about is one of the characteristics of geniuses is that they think in ways that aren't linear and standard they look at something and they see a blitz of ways of looking at it in possibilities and when I talk with parents and teachers I say to them do not put your children in schools that make them memorize too much have letter grades and have them spit back and answer to something we should be asking questions like tell me all the ways you can split thirteen and six and a half I hope is one of them do you I guess for the go ahead if you went on this discussion actually has international educational political significance I do a lot of traveling and I get to meet educators in other countries and they're struggling to create the next Silicon Valley they see the enormous profit and vitality and energy coming out of Silicon Valley and they deliberately have a government policy to create their own Silicon Valley and then the question is how do you do it the Chinese have a problem and that is they have well they have what is called a cusp you program they take the cream of the cream of the cream of physicists the top physicists out of a billion people send them to the United States where I see them okay I'm part of this custody a committee and I see these Chinese physicists the top that a billion people can produce and well there's an expression in Asia the nail that sticks out gets hammered down and they got him okay that's what she's saying well in the West we had the expression the nail the in the West we have the opposite and that is the squeaky wheel gets the grease okay and you see the byproduct this a national policy that creates physicists were very competent very competent but no creativity no spark of genius that you wanted to create a Silicon Valley and then I went to Moscow I actually I had an audience with Medvedev about 50 of us met with Medvedev and he was very frank he said Russia has a systematic policy to create a Silicon Valley on the outskirts of Moscow Moscow has a ring is on the outskirts of Moscow and he said we have no problems creating geniuses we have no problems creating physicists and mathematicians the problem is that is they want to leave that's interesting so there you have the opposite problem they do have creative genius as a first rank coming out of Russia and they all want to get up so you guys are both saying that there is a culture there is a way to shape a world yes that will produce a higher incidence of these magnificent like if you if you're in Dominican Republic something there produces more baseball players in in Toronto they produce more hockey player yes and what it seems to be is that anybody in Toronto can play hockey anywhere because the skates are free and they're part their rinks all over town they all hit the ten thousand hours in New York it's basketball in summary but I've been asked to work in China the last five years because the Chinese government has decided they want to change that mindset they want to change it to the Western one and they're now starting with their preschools and changing the growing of brains to divergent thinking and not production when I first went to China I have to tell you this I went to a preschool there were these three and four-year-olds with pencils drawing an incredibly intricate agrarian scene three and four-year-olds I'm thinking I don't know of a kid in the United States that can do that and they shouldn't be able to do it then I looked up on the blackboard and there was the scene that had been up there for three months and they weren't leaving till they got every single thing right production repetition getting it done getting it done in the way that is prescribed and now they've looked at the brain research of divergent thinking and 21st century skills and they're bringing in people like me to change their educational system because they know what is happening not for you or you and one of them is there's what I was going to ask next anyway will gene-editing lead to the creation of super intelligent humans yes you talk about a study where they tried to figure out what jeans got us apes separate from previous Apes and gave us a slightly different brains that the bigger brain which fader became the brain that had culture and they found some genes that split us off from the other apes and then the thought was maybe we could feed that to some other animals and make new intelligent I'm one this is a whole weird area called a genetic engineering of smarts all right do you any of you find this this is what this guy's asking is like is that a plausible way towards a smarter well this or even to genius if you wasn't straight out of Planet of the Apes yes it is but it is possible first of all we are roughly 98.5 genetically percent genetically equivalent to chimpanzees a handful of genes separate us from our closest evolutionary neighbor we are now sequencing all those genes among those genes are the genes that doubled our lifespan we live left roughly twice as long as a chimpanzee and also we're beginning to find a gene the a s ASP gene which basically exploded the size of the cranium we found that gene we know the number of times it's mutated over the last several million years and it has increased the the brain size also we're finding the genes that control the the vocal cords which are necessary for articulation of language language is a very inherent part of intelligence so if you gave that gene to a chimp then the port that chimps take 12 months to be born and if they have if their heads get as big as our heads their mothers will die in childhood you just can't change genes without changing the bodies those genes are in has he knows very well so you can't like you're gonna be able to pull this other words if you take a chimpanzee and you have to strengthen the spinal cord to support the head have a mother that has a large birth canal to support the large head have better manual dexterity we found all those genes when you get yeah I already have humans so why do we have to take a tape and create it to a human what you already have humans well Toni I'm just I'm just wondering if you're the brain guy do you think a genetic fix would I think it's ridiculous to try to genetically create a Shakespeare I feel that's he's just mysterious to me but could you genetically improve the average performance of a species if you if you gave the stud Lea strand the most beautiful women something extra and they proceeded to have more babies than everybody else would you a thousand years later have a brighter species from a genetic engineering of some kind I have serious doubts about that but I can't possibly rule it out but let's not just think in terms of genetics alone let's think that you are born with a certain set of genes in a certain condition but then you develop and you develop outside of the utero in real life and not only that Gene's keep interacting with the environment so that they modify what you're going to become so this very sort of simple idea that you plug in a few different genes and you get this or that I think is just a little bit too simple it's good for for him a movie script but a television series but I don't think it's it really connects with reality question is there anything like an evil genius so good at it as to be spectacular well one of the problems we're having is the definition of genius and in general from what you've heard everybody say is that somebody who tends to get that label isn't genius and everything there are spikes of genius maybe it's mathematical genius maybe it's a musical genius maybe it's artistic genius but we don't see someone who is genius in everything we don't it just hasn't been anybody there are people who are very intelligent in most things but we don't see those spikes of genius in every part and so what's his name the good good-looking serial killer that was just was Dexter no the real one Ted Bundy okay yeah Ted Bundy one could argue that his social savviness in reading others was almost at the genius level he could pretty much talk any victim into anything and know how to approach them so one could argue that he had some genius in that area okay I think the danger is not so much the sadistic genius who happen to be very clever the danger is to have ordinary geniuses that work for the Nazis that are called good Germans the greatest quantum physicist who ever lived was Verner Heisenberg and he was head of the Nazi atomic bomb project and that scared the hell out of American scientists realizing that the founder one of the founders of the quantum theory which makes possible electronics and all the wonders of the modern age was head of the Nazi program to build the atomic bomb okay that frightened Einstein so it's not that the genius was living in an abstract world of absolutes he was more nathie political he was very patriotic he wasn't a Nazi himself but he was head of the my bomb project and thank goodness he made a mistake because otherwise we'd all be speaking German here today what about the idea that every single person has their own inner genius and it's just a matter of ultimate self-actualization and the question that immediately follows is could you plug in or buy bits of genius at a store one day so that would mean you're not so good at math like Albert Einstein wasn't but you solve that problem by going downtown to brains or us and you buy the mathematical ability and you plug it in shorted like you would cook your plan for your hearing glasses for your eyes could we boot ourselves up from the outside it's more possible than the story on jeans or will be there will be a lot of devices that can be external to us so that we can be connected to that potentially can have a good effect I hope that we begin the right way and that we use those external devices to produce things that are badly needed like for example movement that was lost in an arm or a hand or speech and there is certainly that that's not science fiction then that is beginning to happen and will be happening in the next few years and there are also a variety of devices that can be used to treat diseases for example epilepsy in a variety of deficiencies that were induced by a neurological disease so those are realities and interacting but does that mean that the deficiency is corrected will inevitably be buying extra at the store help this is an extra question an experimental extra math extra extra memorization extra vocabulary extra facility and language just by French plug it in you speak French if you look at the research on DBS deep brain stimulation you can see that those are those electrodes can be put into areas of the brain and stimulate them and make them very active that's maybe a beginning stuff but the exoskeleton approach as as michio said we already can attach an external memory drive to brains that is already available at the experimental level you might want to talk to the military and we can now attach a prosthetic device directly to the neurons that go to the head so my thinking can now move an artificial limb and so the the external application into the brain is here and now the refinement is coming that I will be able I will bet everything I've got in ten years if you want to do better in math we will have a way of helping you do that externally you know in the same way that the Human Genome Project helped to bust open genetics and modern medicine President Barack Obama last year stunned the scientific community by initiating what it's called the brain initiative whereby the Europeans and the US will dump over a billion dollars that's billion with a B not an M to give a complete map of the human brain all the way down to the neuron level we can see neurons work at the individual level we can see clusters of neurons work at the million neuron level but in between at the thousand neuron level it gets very very fuzzy and now a billion dollars is going to be put into the brain initiative to just what's the whole thing wide open now the short term goal and you say bust the whole thing wide open with the human genome project but we got genetics you can see here's the difference I here's what I wonder about that I can say to this beautiful map of a brain ooh let's turn you on and it'll do stuff but will I be able to see when I look at the traffic through this brain will I be able to see and identify a thought if someone is trying to decide between Cheerios and cornflakes will I be able to read that and this map or will it just be a set of highways that will be that people will stare at for 150 years and basically use as a as a long term guy to investigating the brain but it won't answer anything it'll just be like any map it's the latter it's exactly what you just said so there's no question that for example the human connectome in knowing more about it and by the way talking about initiatives the the the big initiative is actually the european community initiative and that's where the billion dollars was placed not the american initiative which is paltry by comparison and in fact came as a sort of letter day correction not to make us look idiotic and so there's a very big difference in they cannot be confused and they have very different strategies they have the the european community initiative in fact by and large is run out of the north european community but in fact of switzerland and it has a very very specific approach to the problem that is completely different from the approach that we have here but is it a good thing to have a very expensive brain to look at no it's going to be in very expensive rates a very good thing that that a lot of funding was placed in this initiative because inevitably something very good is going to come out of it whether it comes economically or not it's a different story but good things will come out of it without a doubt and they will help us understand brain function better and they may even have some payoff in terms of in terms of brain diseases and what do you think of Joann stole your window that in ten years it will be possible to enhance basic things that everybody like you could get i don't know what you you were thinking but i'm imagining that you could memorise better you could get you could learn the multiplication tables quicker you could read things fast you know that the arc of learning will be artificially boosted in a lot of ways and not just by coffee I have no I have no way no way of predicting that I think without a doubt these applications will exist and some of them may be very beneficial whether they will all be with whether I'm looking forward to being implanted with any of this to Millie rate my abilities I'm not so sure that I do actually want that and by the way in terms of memory something that is happening already is that people are relying on external memories more and more already think of what you have you know I have my iPhone here it's full of memories of things that I actually no longer need to memorize in order to go through my day and in fact what happens is that people are having much less memory available internally and have less need to make those memories because they rely on these external devices I think it's still too early to say whether we can upload memories into the mind however we have to look at the progress today what's happening in the labs today last year as I mentioned the first thought was uploaded into a mouse that's historic mean like did you say to the mouse I love M&Ms and then the mouse goes me too what does that mean I thought was loaded into a mouse well take a look at memory the mouse was trained to sip water from a bottle okay so that memory was recorded in the hippocampus then later after the mouse forgot that skill that memory was reinserted back in the upper campus and the mouse learned it immediately that was done at Wake Forest University and now at MIT they even inserted a fake memory a false memory into a mouse this is moving very fast next will be women does that mean that that the memory was some kind of pattern and they effete a small feat of learning something like sipping water from a bottle and that memory could be reinserted back into the hippocampus and the mouse learned it on the first try has as elected by electricity or bright you you've measured the electrodes electricity circulating in the hippocampus and then record that and then reinsert it back into hippocampus later and the mouse remembers in next will be primates okay they're already beginning to lay the groundwork for research on primates and after that perhaps Alzheimer's patients well then this next question is exactly this I'm in high school I'm failing Spanish can genius be worked for or given over time and this guy is name is Chavez I guess I said he I suppose if he could if he could get Spanish if he could get Spanish the way the mouse got the memory then sharpest would be a happy boy assuming you're a boy well as you can see there are enormous hurdles involved the typical language involves about 5,000 words each word internets we take it in context and so you begin to seek thousands of thousands of little bits of information but in the future we may be good at it we may be good at recording the memories at hippocampus but how far and how fast that moves is hard to predict all I'm saying is it's moving very fast it's already now moving to primate trials and after that perhaps a brain pacemaker a brain see you say und sentences with cliffhangers a brain pacemaker that's the short term goal but we already have prototypes I have pictures of a chips that function like the hippocampus an artificial hippocampus which is the gateway to memory of the brain if you have damaged the upper campus you cannot create long-term memories you basically relive the same day over and over and over again like Groundhog Day and Bill Murray okay you need the hippocampus to store long term memories the goal is to create an artificial hippocampus this is the goal now several laboratories around the world this is not science fiction this is now based in real research none of the laboratories but it's at a very low level well here's the here's the follow-up to that do you think the technology could come to a point where our thoughts are already thought out so there's nothing left to be solved and if there if that's wrong then what is there left to be solved if we have solved everything I don't think we're there yet however is for at the University of california-berkeley where I got my PhD a group there is photographing thoughts in fact there are basically photographing dreams and so things that were once considered preposterous physically impossible they do at Berkeley okay photograph a dream one day perhaps you may be able to wake up push a button and see fragments of the dream you had the previous night I don't know whether that's good or we think that's better I dunno I think your question should be I don't know whether it's possible or not because the more pertinent queer already done it no I'm sorry you would what you have done what you may have done is not photograph a dream or not photograph the four dream but you know little snafu lorem party this make any difference you do not photograph the mind with by manipulating the brain you can perfectly well photograph or manipulate circuitry in the brain but that is not the mind and you're making a confusion between mind and brain that I think is extremely what is your definition of the separation of mind and brain I have what is yours oh joy that's a huge question I tell you what it's nine-thirty I'll let them have this argument and then you can all go sign their books or they'll they'll sign books if you buy them I miss it go ahead but you're not gonna be able to you're not allowed to do this for half-hour so you have to do like in like three minutes or something now what I but I just want to make certain that we understand is this of course our mind is the product of the activity in our brain but it is one thing to talk about the mind that you have subjectively the mind that we all can have right now I'm looking at you I'm looking at him looking at the audience and I'm creating a picture of the sound in a room a picture of them and you in this room visually that is in terms of phenomenon a different level and a different kind of phenomenon from the phenomenon that is going on in the brain in terms of the firing of the neurons and in terms of all the molecular and chemical activity that is necessary for the mind to occur and this by the way is something that is not dualistic as you probably know or may not know just make any difference I am NOT a duelist and I do not think that the mind is a free-floating thing that is unconnected to the brain but there is something that one needs to be which is what classical philosophy calls aspect dualism is that the two things are different in that the mind is something that is accessible only to the person who owns it my mind is my mind right now and nobody has access to it your thoughts no you cannot read my thoughts you can read the activity you can read the activity of my brain what's in there I doubt very much you can really know you can read the activity by brain and I'm having my thoughts to me the brain is wetware the mind is the software we scientists at University of California at Berkeley Jack Allen's laboratory and you can google the pictures have taken MRI scans of the brain the wetware converted into 30,000 dots of electrical activity then run a computer program on this wetware in order to from it extract a photograph of what you are looking at if you don't believe me google it tonight and you will see you will see how the mind tries to reconstruct pictures and how a computer can mimic that process to create a reasonable facsimile of animals dogs cats people airplanes as through a computer program I entirely agree with you except that there is not the same thing as photographing a thought that is a very interesting project about making a series of conversions from activity in the brain to a series of patterns that then through a computer program could be reconstituted and you know what you've just called The Improv onto his head now he's wondering like we know that people can can be blind and then you can put cameras on their heads and making see through their tongues I mean there's crazy things going on now where the world can be brought to you in different data no that's true that's true but I'm really wondering how you can I mean I know that the Homeland Security would like give you a big fat check if you could just see what's on his mind well one thing is you can take a postdoc and put him in the MRI machine have him go to sleep and then the MRI program will generate pictures okay this is coming faster than you think we're not talking about Freudian psychology we're not talk about hocus pocus mumbo jumbo dualism we're talking about photographs of a dream this is coming faster than you realize well don't when you saw it when you buy his book and he signs it for you don't think ugly thoughts and don't dear fall asleep in front of him and out of his case you can do whatever you want whatever you are okay thank you all very much you
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Channel: 92Y Plus
Views: 70,708
Rating: 4.8220139 out of 5
Keywords: 92Y, 92nd Street Y, Neuroscience (School/tradition), genius, brain, Michio Kaku, Antonio Damasio, JoAnn Deak, Robert Krulwich
Id: LS-mNJ5ZiIg
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Length: 78min 33sec (4713 seconds)
Published: Tue Mar 11 2014
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