Spark of Genius? Awakening a Better Brain

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Applause] good evening that's pretty incredible throughout time we've been looking at ways in which machines can improve and change our lives I'm dr. rich Besser from ABC News and tonight we're gonna be looking at the ways that people have tried to use machines to improve the function of our brains we have with us on the panel some of the leading experts in this field to get us started in to set the stage what I want to do is is go back over some some histories first looking at the ways people have used electricity to change and understand some of our basic human functions to some of the more recent efforts to try and use electricity to enhance our brains around the same time that Benjamin Franklin was conducting his groundbreaking experiments Italian physician physicist and philosopher Luigi Galvani he was making some discoveries of his own when he zapped the muscles in a dead frog's leg with an electric spark they twitched and he called this discovery animal electricity well in 1803 a public demonstration of his work was done with the corpse of an executed criminal and a local writer described it this way I hope there's no children in the audience on the first application of the process to the face the jaws of the deceased criminal began to quiver and the adjoining muscles were horribly contorted one eye was actually opened in the subsequent part of the process the right hand was raised and clenched and the legs and thighs were set in motion writers like Mary Shelley found Galvani's work inspiring and we found it frightening half a century later Guillaume Duchenne explored the neural pathways of live patients to understand how the muscles in the human face produce expression he used a leftover electrical probes to create grotesque looking spasms which he recorded with the recently invented camera but perhaps the most publicized form of electrical stimulation is electroconvulsive therapy ECT in which patients are treated with an electrical current that induces a full seizure a grand mal seizure this was developed in the 1940s and it was widely used to treat depression until the antidepressants revolutionized the approach to mental illness pills for depression were in electrical stimulation for most patients with depression was out drug treatment wasn't limited however to treating mental illness yes drugs were were developed to fight depression and to fight anxiety but there were also drugs that were looking at enhancing performance making us stronger and faster even drugs to enhance our performance yes and drugs to enhance our performance in the bedroom on campuses drugs like adderall ritalin in medellín have become favorites of some college students who've looked for that cognitive edge but today we're not gonna be talking about drugs we're gonna be talking about zapping the brain and zapping the brain is having a comeback unlike electric shock of the past the new technology sends mild electrical or magnetic current directly into specific areas of the brain in labs around the world researchers are exploring use of brain stimulation with brain disorders including stroke and depression but also in brains that are not not suffering from disorders the military is using it on normal brains to increase vigilance in those people who are operating drones but this is a barely regulated technology in fact you can go on the web I went on the web this afternoon to this website focus and it's a favorite among gamers and a number of the interns in the office went to the site too and were blown away that you can go online and you can buy a devices put it onto your head turn on the current and play your video games without regulation there's very little regulation here right now it's basically the wild wild west so the question how effective is this technology are there any side effects is there any downside to doing this is brain enhancement even ethical the use of any kind of brain enhancement whether it's pills or zapping the brain brings myriad ethical and moral issues we're gonna be exploring those but let's face it we enhance our brain function all the time I start the morning with a cup of coffee it gets me going some people play music to the developing fetus when when they're pregnant we read to our kids to improve their comprehension and improve their brain function so where's the line between appropriate brain enhancement and brain enhancement that we think there may be a little something wrong with this so these are some of the issues that we're gonna be dealing with tonight so I want to go ahead and introduce our distinguished panel our our first participant is a professor of law and philosophy at Duke University she is the director of the Duke science and society program in 2010 she was appointed by President Obama to this Presidential Commission for the study of bioethical issues and continues to serve as a member she's a widely published scholar on the ethical legal and social implications of the Biosciences and emerging technologies please welcome Nita Bharani our next participant is professor emeritus at the University of California Irvine School of Medicine he's also the associate editor of the intelligence journal and the president-elect of the International Society for intelligence research his main research interest uses neuroimaging to investigate the structural and functional neuroanatomy of higher cognitive processes especially human intelligence please welcome Richard hier [Applause] [Music] and our third panelist tonight a neuroscientist whose research uses structural and functional neuroimaging to investigate normal memory epilepsy mental illness and cognitive dysfunction his team developed novel approaches and technologies that combine neuro imaging with transcranial direct current stimulation tDCS to enhance learning and vigilance in civilian and military subjects please welcome Michael license [Applause] now originally we had a fourth panelist Alvaro Pasquale leone due to problems with not george airline or whether i should mention it he was stuck on the runway for hours and is unable to join us but the team will will cover some of his material during during the presentation first richard i wanted to start with you you know we want to try and understand how you can use electricity to to alter the brain without doing something as as drastic as electro convulsive therapy and there's this concept of neuroplasticity and could you could you take us through this area well neuroplasticity is just a simple concept that the brain changes now this might not seem like a shocking revelation but in fact it was really quite a surprise to researchers who for many years believe the brain was essentially static we now know that the brain changes its function and its structure and it's modified by experience and we can measure these things with brain imaging and i was able to do a study on this way back in nineteen ninety two is one of the first brain imaging studies of learning we were interested in what takes place in the brain when when a person learns something and for the something we decided to study the computer game tetris and back in 1992 when we did this no one had ever heard of tetris no one had a personal computer to play at home so I got a copy of Tetris and people came to my office every day and practiced for an hour and we knew they weren't practicing at home because they couldn't I had one of the rare personal computers at the time and the idea was to do a brain scan before and after people learn Tetris now if you don't know Tetris this graphic shows you that individual shapes appear at the top of the screen and slowly fall to the bottom and as they fall you use the arrow keys to move them right left or bring them down the object is to complete rows with no gaps whenever those rows are complete you get a point for that row that row disappears and all the shapes above drop down changing the configuration you're watching Danny's mom play Danny's mom had never played Tetris before and this is her first game and you can see the goal in this particular version of Tetris is to see how fast you can complete 40 lines so you can see the seconds ticking away there on the left and right below you can see it looks like she has from here about 38 lines to go she's completed - so you all get the idea and almost everybody knows Tetris and here's what the brain images look like when people were naive that is before they they practice the first time they played the game we did a brain image with positron emission tomography or PET scanning showing where radioactive glucose went in the brain while they were playing and the red colors in this image show where the brain is most active and you can see very clearly after 50 days of practice when the game is faster and harder and and clearly more difficult making decisions in fact there's less brain activity and this was an indication that learning makes the brain efficient and we have spent many years since we published this in 1992 trying to understand what it is about the brain that really is efficient then about 2008 I got a call from the company that owned Tetris and they had just discovered this 1992 paper and they said would you like to try to replicate it will be happy to fund it and so naturally I said yes and in the next slide you will see the results of our replication study this was studying adolescent girls who were not interested in computer games it was harder to find people who didn't know tetris now but these adolescent girls really had were not gamers at all and what we found after they trained on tetris for three months was something really unexpected the the blue areas show functional MRI showing functional brain plasticity and it the blue areas show where the brain was less active after after practice so functionally the blue areas became less active the red areas show where there was an increase in gray matter I had forgot to tell you that this was inspired by a juggling study where structural MRIs had in fact shown that gray matter actually increases in people who had never juggled before when they learned to juggle and practice for three months there's actually more gray matter in the in their motor cortex so we heard about this and we said jeez I wonder if motor activity that changes gray matter what about cognitive activity let's reprise the Tetris experiment and the tetris company was happy to fund this so going back now to the the red areas in the blue areas the red areas are where there was more grey matter after three months of practice and what's really remarkable about this picture is you see there's no overlap between the red areas and the blue areas we thought the brain would become more efficient in those spots where there was more grey matter now why there's no overlap as a mystery between functional plasticity and structural plasticity so now because of this concept of plasticity there have been a lot of claims that you can change the brain and make people smarter you can actually increase intelligence that experience changes the brain the brain is plastic so why not make people smarter and one of the first examples of this was 1990 when a group published a paper claiming an increase in IQ after listening to a particular piece of music he recognized this Mozart Sonata listen to this for a few seconds do you feel smarter anybody else feel smarter so this really took the scientific world and the public by storm that you could become smarter higher IQ just by listening to Mozart at the time in 1993 the governor of Georgia heard about this and got their state legislature to appropriate money to buy Mozart CDs to give to every mother of the newborn baby in the state of Georgia so here we are some years later iq has not changed this is now referred to as the schmutz art effect because in fact it really couldn't be replicated but it took years every high school science fair I went to when my kids were growing up had a Mozart experiment and I'm sure these were all over the country but in truth it didn't work but it was an example of brain plasticity now there's another fad that is getting a lot of media attention about training short-term memory and that is claim that makes your IQ go up there are now replication studies that show this is not the case but nonetheless it's still out there in the popular press this is an example of the short term memory test that people were trained on for a couple of months this is a little confusing so let me explain ignore the things moving across the top of the screen and just look at the matrix of nine cells at the bottom of the screen every once in a while you'll see one of those will light up you have to remember the position of the cell that lights up and then the next cell lights up and when the third cell lights up if that position was identical to the first one it other words to back you press the button so now when we play it we're for demonstration purposes only showing you the trials across the top and you can see whenever there are identical trials with one in between you press the button now this is called the end back test where n stands for a number like 1 or 2 or 3 if it's and back 1 2 trials that are identical in a row you press the button 2 back there has to be an intervening trial 3 back 2 intervening trials you can imagine what this is like for 4 back or 5 back and the claim is if you train people to do this so they get four or five or even six back their IQ goes up the confusion there are many confusions but one is that short-term memory is identical with IQ short-term memory is important for intelligence but it's not the same thing and I'm going to demonstrate that to you in this 2-minute video clip the scientists at Japan's Primate Research Institute the PRI where au mu is based have devised intelligence tests for chimps one test is for what's called working memory the brain's ability to temporarily store and use information the numbers 1 to 9 are randomly scattered across a touchscreen the chimp looks at them for as long as is needed to memorize the layout then as soon as one is touched the other numbers are hidden and must now be remembered we volunteered Chris the director of this program to demonstrate this test he's a college graduate and a crossword addict but how good is his working memory when Chris reckons he has memorized the layout he touches one when the others are hidden he must try to recall two to nine in ascending order it takes me ages to remember where they're all placed and then I think I've got it it's really very very difficult in 30 attempts Chris only once reached nine without making a mistake as soon as they're blanked over it's like my mind's been blanked over as well when are you moose at the same test he correctly remembered the numbers almost 90% of the time ie almost every time and I've got it right once Chris fears he's let his species down but even when the PRI played a youmu against their best human students who were giving regular practice sessions are you moose still beat all humans so clearly memory is not the same as intelligence so I have a challenge for people who make claims about enhancing cognition I have two of them the first one is show me enhancing cognition in a human so he can beat that chimp and the second one is illustrated in the final video I'm going to show you of another person playing Tetris in world-champion this is not sped up real remember the object is to get 40 lines in this little time as possible it's a real human being it's not the chimp so the second challenge is to get Danny's mom to play like this using electrical stimulation or anything else I would like to see that oh thank you that's brain plasticity we had planned at this point for dr. Pasquale Leonie to present some of his work on using electrical stimulation to try and and address the challenge that Richard just just gave us so Richards gonna present some of Alvaro's work now yes he's done that among others two classic experiments that I know he was going to introduce today so Bri fill out briefly I'll just tell you what they are in the the first was a brain imaging experiment done in a person who was blind this person had no vision from from birth and this these brain images showed this person's brain activation while they did three different tasks these are obviously not visual tasks but the point is in each of these three tasks is included a memory task in a verbal task in all of them you see the visual cortex the back of the brain is activated in a person who never used the visual cortex to see this is a very nice demonstration of functional plasticity that the visual cortex when not used for vision can be used for other things it takes a little bit of time for the brain to adjust and that's what's illustrated in the next in the next experiment that he did with a normal volunteer who stayed blindfolded for weeks and at the end of a only actually was dazed at the end of the second day that would be some volunteer wouldn't it so on the end of the second day what you can see is the the bottom image bottom right hand image in the back of the brain on the bottom there you see this person's visual cortex is now activated doing non visual things so another demonstration that in a person with normal sight if the brain is deprived of that sight for a relatively short period of time the cortex changes and it can be reprogrammed if you will to do other things so I know those are the two things he was going to start with like one of the one of the things that we want to lay out for people to understand is the different types of stimulation of the the brain that are being explored and so if you could could explain to us what the difference is between tDCS and TMS yeah so the tDCS is one species of electrical brain stimulation TMS is magnetic brain stimulation in tDCS or and other forms of electrical stimulation what happens is the brain is an electrical organ so it makes all kinds of sense if you want to change it you should you can't apply electricity to do that now most of us are no strangers to changing our brains if you had a cup of coffee this morning or if you had some other drug that helps you deal with some health issue you're very likely affecting your brain what we're doing here is trying to affect only the brain and leave your heart and your lungs and your kidneys and your liver to do their jobs right so electrical brain stimulation can come in three forms those three forms are a DC current a DC current Ram up stays level and then ramps down at the end of stimulation AC current puts in a sine wave or a wave that travels up and down like this and trns another type of stimulation that's in the literature puts in a string of random values and changes the electrical activity that's traveling through the brain accordingly TMS now is a different kind of brain activity or a different kind of brain stimulation TMS is delivered as a square wave okay square wave means you're flat then you come up you go back down this the square wave the width of that square wave is typically on the order of milliseconds or thousandths of a second right the electrical brain stimulation methods we've been talking about what they do is they change the brain level of activity or a level of excitability from low to slightly higher and essentially turn up the gain on the environment is the idea so that when you see a light it's a little brighter or when you see a or when you hear a sound it's a little more salient among all the other stimuli that are in the environment TMS is different TMS puts in the square wave and that directly activates or forces neurons to be active okay so in TMS you put in a magnetic current and it influences the underlying electricity and it depends on how frequently you repeat that square wave to in terms of the cognitive effect you get with low frequencies of repeating a square wave for example once per second you get a decrease in the excitability of the brain with higher rates like ten Hertz or ten stimulations per second you get an increase in the activity so a lot of the technology we're talking about is is really in the early experimental phases but but not all of it the the TMS the magnetic stimulation you were just hearing about it has already been FDA approved for the treatment of depression and we want to show you a little video here of the experience of one New York hero in in using that treatment I guess everybody wants to be a firefighter when they grow up you want to help people love doing the job and thought that I would be doing the job for 30 years or more when we first got down on the pile it was a bit overwhelming because it was such a huge mess just the amazing amount of destruction that was in front of you you know you really got to see the the sight the smell the taste of the magnitude of the destruction that was there things started to go downhill at first and then things got really bad where I was in a very deep depression I pulled away from my family and friends I slept a lot I was suicidal at a point there was only one way out of it and it wasn't it wasn't good I worked with the psychiatrist for the fire department I don't remember how many but there was probably eight or ten different medications that we had tried at the point where he asked me to retire he said that he had gone through everything that he had in his playbook I guess to try and relieve some of my symptoms I lost my dream job I needed to do something to help I just thought that trying TMS was definitely worth a shot you just sit in the chair you get the treatment which feels like somebody tapping on your head really fast it's just short bursts of the pulses within the first two weeks there was a little bit of a change I started just waking up in the morning before my alarm clock and got up and ready for the day I was sleeping better at night I wish the treatment was available to me before I had to retire I think it would have made a huge impact on how I responded and I believe that I probably could have stayed on the job and continued to being a firefighter well although that's approved by the FDA for use it's really not fully understood how that that modality treats treats depression we want a shift now to talking about the one of the other modalities that Michael talked about tDCS and Michael eyesand is an expert in this area he's been conducting research on this technology and and it's used to increase the vigilant in in drone operators how does that work so first I'd like to say thanks to all the people that watch our backs so that we can sit here in relative safety and comfort and have this conversation so and those people need help they in the video you just saw you saw the Effects of missing intelligence signals that were clearly there in the after-action reports and we need help in doing this better so we were approached years ago we applied to a I'm received funding from DARPA to investigate ways in which we could accelerate training to find the signals that people might identify to prevent things like the attacks that occurred on 9/11 one way to do that is to stimulate the brains of people who are looking at these pictures so when you guys look at pictures you're only capable of one percept at a time all right and that one percept at a time is often shown in lots of visual illusions that you see and I think we have an example of one here so how many people see a vase how many people see two people looking at one another can you see them both at the same time that's it's very difficult if you can it's your special brain the so in this case the brain acts as a winner-take-all system all right one visual percept at a time now the people that are examining images to try to find threats are basically playing a game of Where's Waldo right is there a threat in this image or not and they may look at a whole book of Where's Waldo or an image something like this right where you have to find something specific if I told you in this figure to find let's see can I pick something right here so does everybody see the deck of car that now the game cards how about the Barbie how about the Dora yeah all right so now what if I ask you to find the wrecked car yeah so this is a game that our intelligence analysts play all day every day and they play it for 12 to 14 on 12 to 14 hour shifts now imagine doing that constantly for 12 to 14 hours all right it's a big job and we may and the thing that you're looking for may not be in the image right okay so we have some examples of those images I think that we are going to show you this is what's called a target chip this is in the this was one of the training images that we used when we were doing the study so who knows what that is that is a Humvee image from about five miles away all right so now if we go to the next image we can now does everybody see the Humvee here this is one of the easy target images all right everybody don't be here all right so if we go to the next image you will identify the Humvee for you there it is a up Hemet 310 right there okay so now let's go to a medium image so this is the medium image you guys all see the Humvee all right so the Humvee I believe in this one is over on the left well no I was wrong the Humvee is on the right the missile launchers on the left all right and that's a medium image now we have a difficult image all right everybody see the Humvee and the missile launcher all right but this is what our guys in uniform are doing 12 to 14 hours a day every day and then getting off work and going to soccer practice right so they need help all right if you guys had difficulty doing this the people who we take out of high school run through boot camp do a few schools with and sit down in front of a computer screen are gonna have the same and/or greater difficulty so what are the results does this thing work right so if you look at the green bar these images show the number of correct identifications of targets Oh divided by the number of false alarms okay so at a value of 2.5 here means that you are correct two and a half more times than you are wrong the green bar shows training alone the blue bar shows training plus putting all the gear on your head but not turning it on it's called sham stimulation and the red bar shows training plus stimulation we can dramatically change how good people are at this task after a short amount of training okay so we trained what we did in particular in the studies we showed him images like you just saw we showed them the target chips for an hour and then we embedded those thar chips into the city scenes that you saw and without stimulation roughly two and a half to three times better after the training with stimulation about seven times better with one hour of training on the target chips destiny well Michael has has has demonstrated that this technology can can work it can have a positive effect but they're their questions in terms of when should this be used who should it be used by what are the ethical implications of this and bioethicists Nita fara Hani is writing a book on just that subject tDCS as well as other types of electrical stimulation fit just within a category a very broad category of ways in which we can enhance our brains so that's you know why many of you are here this evening is to enhance your brains to learn something about this topic we go to school we eat good nutrition hopefully sometimes we exercise all of those things are really designed to improve our health to improve our mental functioning to improve our cognitive functioning so as a baseline there's nothing wrong and everything right with us as humans trying to improve our cognition but the question is when is it appropriate to do so when you have a new and novel kind of technology particularly something like tDCS who should have access to it if all of you came here this evening and for the first time you're learning about tDCS should you have in your hands a consumer-based tDCS device that you could apply to your head then up or amp up what's happening in your brains are there any concerns about that should there be regulation of it should there be instructions or informational guidelines that are given to you and what's the context in which it's okay or when it's not okay to use it so you know consider this and we'll start with just I think a couple of images to sort of pique people's thinking about these ethical issues so how many of you had a cup of coffee or tea at some point today most of you how many of you never drink any form of caffeine or eat any form of caffeine so no chocolate either right so so again how many of you never consumed any form of caffeine no chocolate really all right I bet we could find some caffeine in your diet and somewhere but in any event why are we okay with the vast majority of you using a stimulant every day of your life when did we come as a society to think that that's a permissible form of cognition cognitive enhancement where this fellow in the front row either doesn't like it or can't tolerate it or for whatever reason he's not enhancing his brain the way the rest of you are when did we come to embrace that as something that was permissible and good to do and is there any difference between us all having a cup of coffee versus zapping our brains is it really just the same thing is it all just on a kind of gradients of what we consider to be permissible versus impermissible use well we know at least in one context that we're not okay with certain forms of enhancement right so if you pay to go to a sporting events what you're paying for is seeing natural honed talent whatever that might mean right it is a person who has some sort of natural gifts that has worked hard to improve their gifts and therefore there are great cyclists as opposed to one who is a doped up cyclist or they're a great pitcher or they're a great batter or they can dunk a basketball whatever they can do they can do without taking steroids and without taking drugs and without doing things that artificially enhance okay and we've come to decide that that's what we want to celebrate okay that's what sports are about just like we all celebrate baseball and we're not that excited when we discover that our baseball pitchers are actually doping or our baseball batters or doping so the homeruns aren't just exciting we could decide otherwise as a society we could come to think actually instead of watching baseball we want to watch baseball and SH baseball is a league in which everybody dopes okay and it turns out all they do is hit homeruns and I bet if we put it out there and you all got to decide do you want to buy tickets to SH baseball or do you want to buy tickets to baseball market forces would help us decide which league should actually exist and in fact we have something sort of like that what's the wrestling fat you know worldwide whatever that one is that's not real I'm sorry to break it all to you yeah it's not real but nevertheless people still pay big money to watch those sporting events okay but in that context we've decided at least for now until we have spaceball that we don't want to watch baseball we want to watch baseball what about standardized tests so what are standardized tests measuring I'm not quite sure but supposedly they are good predictors of how well you're gonna do in college or how well you're gonna do in second grade or how well you're gonna do in law school or any other kind of thing it supposed to give us a baseline by which we compare individuals and as most of you are aware whether it's in high school or in college or even at younger levels people are already starting to take drugs like adderall or other types of drugs like ritalin the drugs which are stimulants before they take the task in order to prepare or study for that test is that cheating I hear and no but it is that cheating think about it for just a minute in in sports it's cheating because it's artificial enhancement is it cheating if it's for standardized test is it cheating if we start applying tDCS while you study for the test tDCS alone is not going to make you smarter but it could potentially make you identify targets faster and maybe those targets are the vocab matching words or logic games or things like that if you do it while you're learning it may improve your ability to take certain types of tasks at Duke University it's the first University in the country that put into its cheating policy taking off taking prescription drugs for which you do not have a prescription for enhancement purposes to improve your performance I I wasn't part of that decision so I'm not saying that it is a good decision but certainly one University has put a stake in the ground and said it's cheating to do so is it cheating to have tDCS is it not so it let's look at the next slide what what this image is is helping you it's not it's not just a benevolent parent who's helping their child but it should evoke for you a little bit the conversation that happens to society about Tiger parents some of you in this audience might be Tiger parents and if you were Tiger parents and you had in your hands a tDCS unit and you could apply it to your young child and you have a promise that they would do better on standardized tests and we're here in New York so I know that there's this crazy competition to get into schools here in New York so what if I could tell you that if you apply to DCs to your child while they're taking the standardized test they're gonna do better and get into the preschool that will make sure that they get into the elementary school that will make sure that they get into the college and have a successful career on Wall Street right would you use it well they might and is that okay right so parents all the time are making decisions for their children that enhance their cognition in particular ways they're taking them to dance lessons or taking them to music lessons maybe they're letting them listen to mozart or even learn to play Mozart they are getting them tutors they are giving them good nutrition they're encouraging them to exercise all of these things enhance their brains but most of those things we understand at least within a certain parameter what the risks and benefits are now some of them we understand the risk may be that you're ensuring that your child's gonna spend a lot of years in therapy later in life but what we might not realize with tDCS is we don't know what the full scope of the rest and benefits are so if you looking at the next slide were to apply tDCS and it increases the activity the baseline activity in a particular region of the brain because you're putting it in specific spots if energy is conserved in some way which is supposed to be does that mean that it's decreasing activation in some other region of your brain and so what this is showing you right now is the amygdala the amygdala at least before a paper came out this week and suggested maybe all of the studies are wrong supposedly is the area of the brain that's really essential for moral conscience and for emotion and if you have decreased activation in the amygdala then so the theory goes you are less likely to have moral conscience you are less likely to be an empathetic individual less likely to have emotion so suppose you have a child who you decide you really want to get into that super competitive preschool here in New York City and you start applying tDCS to them which leads to decrease activation in a different area of the brain and it happens to be a decreased area called the amygdala are you in fact just producing a little psychopath maybe so psychopaths in part are really smart and lack moral conscience and emotional processing what's the consequence and risk of doing so and should parents get to shape the brains of their children in this way you already shape the brains of your child if you're a parent in many ways but is this way this altering the structure and functions so directly one that's ethically permissible or so the regulations or limitations on who or when you use those types of technologies there are host of ethical issues that are involved with all of the different cognitive enhancement technologies one that we're talking about is electrodes to electrical stimulation but it doesn't have to be that kind of hard stimulation that we're talking about there are other devices that are already on the market just like there are tDCS units that are on the market that could enable you through neurofeedback to improve your cognition as well so we're actually gonna do a little demonstration I think of that yeah and see you know just to half people have a sense of like what are the devices that are out there what are the things that you can do to your brain and I think I need another little help here to make this happen excellent thank you and I have a willing victim up here which is great since he does these other devices I thought we could go ahead and just see his brain and see what he's done to his brain with all the devices that he's been testing in his lab so what I'm hooking up to him right here is a really simple EEG device okay which measures electrical activity and brain and this is actually just gonna measure through the single electrode right here that is on his forehead you see that little device right there and it's grounded over here on his ear is that comfortable I bet yeah so what we're gonna measure is just really simple alpha and beta waves which correlate to attention and meditation and we're gonna look at how well he can pay attention while all of you are watching okay and so we're gonna go to the screen here and what you're gonna see is his brain activity so what he wants to do is have as much green as possible and [Music] as he gets higher up if he can he's gonna get a little neurofeedback because you're gonna hear the Seto okay let's all be let's all be very quiet if you can pay attention for a minute [Music] that's pretty good that's pretty good right we should give him a little round of live if he were to continue working with this device for a while what he would do is be able to get in that green band much more quickly and much more regularly and what that may correlate with is an increased ability to pay attention and things like school or watching his Facebook page or any other activity which might require increased attention and concentration which is a form of enhancement and in fact when they've done studies to see whether or not this in fact changes your brain it in fact also just like the images that we saw earlier changes the gray matter in your brain when you do neurofeedback like this that's neat do you wonder how it is that we got it up there on the screen yeah so real time you were watching his brain activity and his brain activity was being recorded through that electrical signal through the electrode right here which was a dry electrode which was communicating to the iPad that they brought out here which they wouldn't have had to bring out here they just wanted me to be able to see it and interact with it because the range was long enough to go back there because it was communicating via bluetooth and many of your devices communicate via bluetooth right and how secure do you think Bluetooth is not particularly secure and this is not a terribly frightening device because it's not actually applying electrical current so even though he willingly let me put it on to his brain I couldn't SAP his brain I could start to see some of the neural signatures that were in his brain and I could start to see for example if he was getting drowsy or if he was paying attention you all saw him stopping paying attention I don't know what he was looking at instead of actually participating in the experiment for us but imagine now if you're in the workplace and we can require you to wear this all day long know how much you're paying attention how distracted you are imagine if your neural signature could help us figure out what your ATM password is you don't have to imagine too much about these things because they already are true we're already using neural signatures for passwords to be able to unlock devices or there was a study that came out recently that suggested that we could actually figure out a person's ATM password simply through reading EEG information from their brain and there are companies that are already piloting using devices like this in the workplace to try to measure productivity and insurance companies who are piloting having truck drivers wear them because the leading cause of accidents in this country is drowsy driving not drunk driving that's all wonderful in the potential upside but there's no protection right now no legal protection no constitutional protection no structure in society that gives you any form of privacy over your neural function and just like through Bluetooth I could read his brain activity if he was wearing the device or if I forced him to wear the device as part of his employment force is a strong word there Bluetooth technology governs a lot of the different consumer base tDCS devices what happens if somebody hacks into it what happens if somebody starts lapping your brain take the device off that's the first thing you should do right but these are the kinds of questions that we have to start asking are there privacy concerns are there context in which we shouldn't be using it is it cheating if you use it in particular context like a school study or a school setting these are all the types of things that I think we need to be talking about more product Michael earlier we were talking about ETCs and other ways people try and stimulate their brain and we I think you've all used the analogy of the cup of coffee and is the the electric brain simulation better than being caffeinated up in some tasks yes alright so there was a recent study done by a colleague of mine named Andy McKinley who's at the Air Force research labs one of the smart truly bright guys coming up in this field what Eddie did was he sleep deprived people for 30 hours and did cognitive testing the whole time right so you were talking about rich was talking about subjects being blinded these were also very good subjects right that stayed in the lab to do this after 30 hours of sleep deprivation they got either brain stimulation no brain stimulation or caffeine people who got brain stimulation were good at tasks that were administered that hour one is called the Mackworth clock test I don't know if you guys have ever heard or seen of this but it is the very definition of dull and boring right so what this task does is it takes a little dot and it runs it around a screen like this in clock positions and every once in a while it skips one when it does that you have to press a button every time it skips people who underwent brain stimulation we're good at this task for it six hours after stimulation people who got coffee we're good for between 30 minutes and two hours and people who got no stimulation went immediately to sleep not really because Andy kept them awake but they they certainly felt like it Andy did additional tests where caffeine and brain stimulation had roughly similar effects so when we're talking about the magnitude of the effect here and Neeta and I were talking about this backstage earlier is that I can't download information into your brain using this thing yes but what I can do is I can push your natural abilities what's I can tell you one thing that we're doing right now that has a way bigger effect than tDCS and that is speaking to you so if I told you the scallops are really good or I measured your brain activity looked at the difference between eating scallops and eating steak plus it placed it on your head and then stimulated to try to push your preference toward scallops I'd be still be more successful with speech fascinating did you have a device with you yes they did well I have the electrodes yeah so it's a very simple device and the electrodes are super important because right now we have a ton of data that tells us about how good these things are cognitively but you really have to take care of the skin so it's a very simple device right this has electrodes on the inside right and then on the outside and here are the holders this holders flexible can put it in any conformation you might want we simply chose this pentagonal arrangement because it mimics what most other people do by putting the electrode in one spot and so you simply take this thing and you put it on different spots in the head to influence different kinds of behavior right so this is one of the things that's super critical for applying this right is that different spots in the head do different things so if you want to apply change function a you'd have electrode configuration a you want to do configuration B you'd have electric configuration B so what you see here is you see somebody actually performing these target identification tasks with the electrodes on their head and this is just cane it was in my lab she told me to tell you she's awesome she really did something that to tell you that if I if her picture went up on the screen here it's kind of funny but anyway she just is performing this task what she's doing there is all the red circles that you see where the red and the yellow overlap those are correct choices and where the there's a yellow alone those are mis identifications and where there's red alone she's identified something as a target when it's really not alright so we give the subjects immediate feedback as they're going through the task as part of the training now before everyone in the audience rushes out the they're electrodes in their battery you have some safety concerns here I have big safety concerns here and I'll tell you mostly why what we have is we have a whole bunch of data on tolerability but not a lot of data on safety okay and there's a subtle but important difference tolerability means we can apply this to people and at the end of the day there's still a walkie-talkie they get up from their chair they walk away and they continue to talk normally right that's what we know there is not one single study out there who has taken electrical brain stimulation done a whole bunch of good neuroimaging before stimulation applied the stimulation done some more neuroimaging applied some more stimulation done some more neuroimaging and said thumbs up there are no detrimental changes to the brain that we see write a diet study does not exist and so we need to do that kind of work before we can say it's both safe and hour before it's tolerable and safe right now we have a lot of data on tolerability not safety do we ever do that with drugs I mean do we ever get that kind of like no detrimental effects anywhere in the brain you know for for really anything we don't get that kind of like here's the baseline before anybody ever took it too you know lots and lots of applications here's afterwards it seems like a slightly higher level of expectation of safety than we have with existing devices and existing drugs that are on the marketplace well I can tell you what I think is normal and that's the standard I'd like to see and I mean I it's a standard that I kind of by right because I test every device I've ever used on me before I put it on another human being and I have the scars to prove you can be dumb about how you apply this because I have burned my forearm up and down by applying these electrodes in a bad way oh and you can see this fear this is a series of electrodes that we tested as we were going through to develop the one that I showed you a minute ago which and afterwards if you want to see it you can come up and look at so on the left are conventional sponge electrodes applied to my forearm right here all right and what you can see at the end it's not super clear but it's I hope it's you can see this is their raised areas and there's redness and that's on the scalp if and it's hidden by hair most of the time when it's not hidden by hair you can see this on people's foreheads alright so we tried some different kind of electrodes also cause plenty of redness if this in the third column where you see the electrode that's part and part square bottom row you can see a a spot on my skin there that is discolored it's brown right well that when they wiped the conductive paste off of my arm that plug of tissue about the size of a dime wiped away just like and it had kind of the consistency of snot all right so you can do that and I said I so I had a dime sized hole in my arm for a couple of weeks and people kept telling me I should bandage it and I kept saying I can see my muscles move down there it's kind of cool yeah so and then we went through a whole series of other electrodes until we got to the ones that we use in the lab now and are used by the Air Force as well that the most the are the most mark they leave is the pressure mark from the Rings right almost no redness almost no sensation and I can tell you all about them in incredibly boring detail but basically we spent a lot of money and time trying to make sure that we can at first principles care for the skin so that we could deliver this to the brain a question for you all so if you learn a function while using one of these stimulation methods when when you no longer have that current going on are you still able to perform at the enhanced level Richard you wanted I think most of these techniques I I don't do this kind of research myself because before I read I'm retired now this stuff came up came along after I retired if I wasn't retired I probably would be working on this but it's my understanding that the stimulation often occurs before the task is done kind of warm up the brain in this sense isn't there isn't that right well there's two kinds of stimulation yeah right so one is called online stimulation online stimulation means that the training and the tasks are simultaneous there's offline stimulation awful and stimulation means that you precede the task with stimulation okay and there's two different ideas there so you can feel this right you can feel it on your skin the electrical stimulation so there's a problem there scientifically and that is that if no it's on the placebo effect is that Maximum Overdrive and so you may do better just because there's somebody that's doing something uncomfortable to your skin it's preventing you from falling asleep during these boring tasks right so what we do is a sham procedure where we ramp up the current and ramp it back down we make sure the subjects blind we make sure the blind in this case doesn't mean putting something over your eyes blind in this case means ignorant all right so that they don't know what stimulation condition they're receiving either active or sham blyat we also run the electrode connectors through box that has wiring in it that's obscured by an opaque lid a but opaque box with an opaque lid so that the person plugging in the machine doesn't know if electricity is actually moving through the box and into the subject so we double blind everything in this way we also do within subject studies within subject studies means that the same person who gets sham treatment gets active treatment and we cross them over so that the order is randomized when we do that if you learn something during stimulation the memory is a memory like every other memory and it sticks with you all right if we took the tasks that dr. Hyer showed us earlier with the two back remembering the position of the lighted blocks and the tic-tac-toe diagram you that you're not there trying to teach somebody something what you're trying to do there is enhance something called working memory that I often call pizza memory right so pizza memory is basically in the days when there were phone books which I remember right you would look the number in the phonebook you'd repeat it to yourself while you walked over to the phone and then date myself again you would dial into the phone and hopefully you could remember the number and if that number if you'd if you were to pizza every day you to remember the number if you ordered pizza once a month you wouldn't remember the number and you have to hold it in memory and that's call that's part of the working memory we can enhance working memory during stimulation or with stimulation that precedes the task and afterwards you go right back to baseline so let me just raise one issue which is just to take that and consider if your physician did well in medical school and pass the medical boards via tDCS or some other form of enhancement and then stopped doing that once they pass the boards and were your position would you be psyched about going to that person and would you think that they were misrepresenting what their actual medical training was and this is one of the issues that's actually happening is people are using these forms of enhancement while they're in school and then they get out of school they're no longer using it maybe they have things in working memory but their skills and their abilities may not actually be fairly represented by the types of degrees and accomplishment that they have behind their name so kind of ethical conundrum that arises from your question does that also hold for for chemical stimulants things improve focus yeah I mean in fact chemical stimulants are what are much more common today and caffeine of course being the one that were the most comfortable with but lots of drugs like ritalin adderall modafinil the people are using today or things people are using temporarily while they're in a kind of competitive stage of life then they get to the next stage of life and we think and rely upon those types of different types of credentials which might not actually represent their skills or abilities so you gave a an incredible demonstration there about privacy issues around this and and the lack of regulation that's going on but this this is not a drug there are applications we're talking about in the medical field but when you're talking about performance where would you see regulations coming from where what part of government might be responsible for regulating well the student drug administration is in fact looking at these devices to consider whether or not to regulate them whether it falls within the Food and Drug Administration's purview depends on whether or not they are classified as medical devices that's why the company that you were noticing earlier with the slide focus fo dot see us focus they are sort of trying to stay under the radar by claiming that they're for gaming purposes rather than for enhancement purposes and if they're gaming purposes then they're not a medical device because they're not intended for the use of diagnosis or treatment to the disease once the FDA says hey that's a sham game that isn't going to work with us and that's actually a medical device it could fall within their purview and then it would be part of what they would actually regulate I just want to add that if you are undergoing surgery you might want your surgeon to be wearing one of these devices and if they're not if there's research that shows they can perform better if your surgeon chooses not to do that and there's a mistake is he guilty of malpractice for not putting so so that leads to this this question after you the standard okay question dumb cop to all of you what is your prediction for where these technologies will take us fifty years from now is that where it's gonna take us I have kind of this secret fantasy that I'll be transported 50 years into the future to see how this all comes out wouldn't that be great because we could be completely wrong about this fifty years from now it could be very common as common as a cup of coffee I don't think these things can be banned it's like banning alcohol I don't think they should be banned I think we should just we need to deliberate about what the appropriate context use and you know if regulation regulation is to ensure that they're safe that they're effective that we get the kind of information we need to understand if you apply it that you may end up with you know being able to see your muscles without intending to do so like you know if it really works and it really works to a noticeable degree then parents are going to demand the right to give this technology to their children they're gonna demand it it's just such a trickier area because giving it to your child is not the same as influencing and shaping their brain and ways that we were never able to do before now that's what all new technology does but it's a little a little harder when you're talking about the relationship between parent and child versus a consenting adult who has the competency capacity to make decisions for themselves and to be self-directed about what they choose to do as opposed to a parent making a potential little psychopath here's here's a question from Natalia who is in the off-site audience in Manila in the Philippines can any of these treatments improve focus for people with ADHD is research there's actually been some research on these devices these EEG devices some of the studies suggest that doing neurofeedback playing you know games attentional games with these may be more effective than using drugs like adderall and Ritalin that in fact neurofeedback changes your brain and can change our brain permanently as well so there are some in that eye and tDCS I know that there's been some ADHD studies as well if you wanna yeah there's three there right now there are three trusts three studies that show positive results and there's a clinical trial going on fourth if for ADHD at NIH that's funded by NIH so I don't believe it's done yet but we'll know the results of that in the next couple of years for sure so Bob Bob Yaffe wants to know about adverse effects over the long run for TMS and and PVCs and and and I'll ask you specifically Michael you know you're using this in in the military are there concerns that what what is giving a positive benefit right now in terms of identifying targets may have a long-term effect on those people's brains so I think there's a couple ideas mixed up in that right so I think tDCS TMS what have you in terms of brain stimulation it's gonna be a lot like going to the gym meaning that if you go once and do the training once you'll reap the benefits of going once nobody wants to get the benefit to go to the gym once right what that is is sore muscles for a few days so we're going to have to think about this in exactly the terms that are suggested by the person asking this question what are the effects of repeated administration over long periods of time right now we don't have any good data on what we know for a fact is that skin yeah you can't keep delivering it to the same piece of skin over and over and over which is problematic because if you move the electrode you change the piece of brain that's being stimulated and so I think there's gonna be a lot of work and a lot of progress is gonna need to be made on the electrode skin interface before we can do a good job of learning even approaching the problem of what's it like for long term intervention and is there concern that the stimulation of one part of the brain will affect have untoward consequences and in an in another part of the brain there's no question that the brain is not simple it's not that one spot on the brain does one thing and a different spot does something else a lot of people think this is the way the brain works but in fact even for the most simple task areas all over the brain are orchestrated so if I tell you press a button when the light comes on and I brain and I do a brain image with the technology that shows me what's happening in your brain millisecond by millisecond in the half second it takes you to press the button you will see all all areas of the brain are lighting up it's really quite phenomenal the brain is not simple when people to ask me this question I asked him where is right turn in a car is it in the hands is that in the brains and in the wheels of a steering linkage where is it right turn is the group of things working together and so by analogy if you put better tires on the car that might be what tDCS is if you put better steering wheel or a better linkage that might be what TVCs helps but you can help any way along that path where you decide to stimulate right but just because you're helping right and so you might improve your steering well but if the steering wheel comes at the cost of the brake pedal yep right that's a problem right and so I think the question was really what one do you choose it breaks or you have a great new steering wheel and maybe we don't know that's that's one of the questions that we don't know and and that's one of the frightening parts of it is repeated stimulation may improve one function in the brain it may come at the cost of decrease activation in another region of the brain it is all integrated which means you may have much broader impacts all over you know the brain and meaning distributed functions are going to be impacted or could be a specific skill set or specific type of thing like emotion is very significantly impacted while you're improving a particular type of cognition well get some hints when gamers using these things show up at the emergency room that's true or in jail right go on that Pleasant expose we are we are just about out of time and I want to thank our three panelists for what I I found to be a really stimulating [Music]

Channel: World Science Festival

Views: 115,466

Rating: 4.7688513 out of 5

Keywords: Spark of Genius, Awakening a Better Brain, Nita Farahany, Richard Haier, Michael Weisend, Blanca Li, Richard Besser, enhance the brain, TCDS, TMS, electrical stimulation, drone operators, Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, brain magnets, New York City, NYC, world science festival, World, Science, Festival, 2015, full program, Big Ideas Series

Id: yfYOkvQNpsA

Length: 79min 35sec (4775 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 19 2015