StarTalk Chat Room: A Deep Dive Into the Cosmos, with Neil deGrasse Tyson

Startalk Neil deGrasse Tyson your personal astrophysicist this is a special installment this is where we take an in-depth look at the cosmos possible world series episode by episode and unpack some of the content that you've seen I got with me Chuck nice it's right who do just do this in front of Heather Berlin a friend of Startalk yeah thanks for coming back on brain expert neuro neuro sure ready to talk about episode 5 the connectome the connector who were my new words at least in my vocabulary in the connectome and it's an entire episode that explores basically the wiring of the brain yeah but we do it through a story told by a case where it's the first time I think brain waves were ever measured hmm to have some understanding that there's something real going on in mind it's not just whatever it is you think it is we can measure it write something about it yes and which we can it pivots on a story of a boy who suffered from epilepsy right so Heather could you just update us well give us the foundation of what epilepsy is and how people used to think about it and how's this boy how's he doing that how's the boy doing he's 130 right okay I mean you know it's many how far back you go right they used to think it was you were possessed by evil spirits you know and then and as you say in the episode Hippocrates was sort of one of the first people who said no this is actually coming from the brain called sacred disease right it was interesting and yeah we're pretty sure he was referencing epilepsy yeah he made that reference yeah and then and then you know went through a series but I would say around like in the 1800's was when they first realized this was a brain disease and that it was come from electrical you know problems with the electrical activation let's say so it'd have to be late enough in the 1800s so that we'd have some sense of electricity right so then to say hey let's put this with that because the physicists were were rapidly making discoveries yeah Ben Franklin Moran of Court made a lot of a guy progressive progress in this he published a book experimental researchers into electricity right so Europe knew him as a scientist that's right we knew him as a as a well we also know him as the science there's a beer-drinking founding father we know what was that Benjamin's there is no reference to a science on that bill that is truck just want you to know that is true ok yes had that been in Europe they would have had his kite his the key absolute that lightning bolt they would have stuff in I'm just saying yes yeah they honor their scientist in deeper ways than we do here yeah it's a great example of how all the scientists are interrelated exactly yeah when you make a discovery in one fields it could have implications at which II frog-leg yes the Italian guy whose name is electrical impulse and the nerves if they have anything to do with each other at all well yeah exactly exactly sure his name begins with L first name basis racist Ouija who Luigi Galvani givanni nice cool all right and then it was until the early 1900s where we can actually measure the electrical activity in the brain with the invention of the EEG and so we still use that technology today to diagnose epilepsy I mean there's there's some you know other ways that we can look at it but that is sort of the gold standard still I mean it's a more advanced EEG system but we're so measuring the electrical activity more advanced is because we can measure now lower-level activity or more precision or is our ability to interpret better or we can localize it in the brain better than all these and then we combine that with other with neuro imaging where we can actually look inside the brain and look juicy T scan or an MRI and to see if there's any lesion in the brain that can be let's say the focus of the epilepsy so you have to know what the brain should look like without the lesion right so you have healthy controls and take a look at your brain becomes a facebook status now there are a number of different causes some of them are genetic you're born with it others are what we call acquired meaning that if you have so you get it later in life and it could be related to having a lesion in the brain a lot of brain trauma brain trauma we even see we can induce an up Litella both epileptic seizure in surgery when we are doing brain mapping so a person is doing surgery let's say to remove a tumor or to remove stock I just might have to stop why would you want to an accident so we're doing something else in the brain so when we are people are in surgery and we let's say we remove removing a tumor or actually we're removing part of the brain that's the focus of the epileptic seizure because that's sometimes a treatment to remove where the seizure starts his name ben Carson Oh what does he have miss fear ectomy oh man come to him no it was one of the first he was one of the progenitors of the hemispherectomy only in small children finding that the brain could recover if you removed large pieces of it that the associations and the workloads were distributed to other parts of the brain that knits up the slack okay Chuck that's why we have her [Laughter] we cut the corpus callosum which is the connections between the two hemispheres so if a seizure stored in one atmospheric couldn't spread right over okay so that's another option that was the first one to measure right to contain it exactly but now we can go in and remove that if we find the focus then we can remove that but during surgery sometimes we want to make sure if for example we don't remove the language area of the brain so we do electrical stimulation piece by piece while the person is awake during surgery and talk to them and make sure like which part is involved in language it's usually start messing up they can't speak we like okay don't touch that part but in the course of that but we do these tiny sort electrical impulses but sometimes that can trigger a seizure in people so we can accidentally trigger and not the full colonic time you know where they're moving around many things but we can see it via the electrical activation Oh basically is what it is is that the neurons start firing in sync at the same time which we don't want we want the neurons to be evenly distributed because then it becomes like brain noise right if they're all if is it like a dislike if everything's going at the same time it's almost like your brain doesn't know what to do yeah it's like miscommunication so it's not communicating in the right way and it's problematic and not everybody has the movement some people just have what we call ops on seizures where they just know to call absence ops which is like absence but with a French accent when you have a bowel movement alright you got no more you go into the baseball okay okay missing the traditional motor cortex where they get the full body movements which is what we often think of what the seizure is a different type of seizure but where they suddenly can be talking and then just lose consciously just stare off into space for a few seconds and then suddenly come back oh so he's a little so it's like this seizure where the brain activity is going but it's not affecting the motor cortex and you just suddenly become unconscious but your eyes are open you start off into space and you come back again so there are all these different ways in which seizures could occur they're all different types of can you diagnose it today before someone has ever had a seizure diagnosed that they would or could have you know I mean we could but normally we wouldn't look in somebody who's never had a seizure before for seizure activity so I mean theoretically you could record then see if a seizure happens to occur but it's unlikely that we okay but also way away but it also means you're missing some data because the pre Marcy the pre we're pretty morbid was I mean that would be like the pre before the disease it would morbid I don't know okay so it seems to me that would or could be highly useful to but you'd have to scan so many and you don't know who the one is gonna be and there's some genetic link so maybe it runs in your family you'd be more like oh yeah so let me ask you this I have a friend who fell while he was mountain biking okay now he did not hit his head or maybe he did and we're not sure he fell on his back yeah okay and he fell on his spine and then he started having kind of alcohol the micro seizures but what would happen is his leg would involuntarily just kick right for no reason at all and this went on for months and the doctors were like hey man you damaged something we don't know exactly what you damaged right and then after about seven months and I'm talking about every four or five minutes his leg would just pick out just pick for no reason and he went through life like that for seven months and then it just went away interesting I don't know if that was seizure activity although you can fall and not hit your head and the brain shakes within the skull and then you can get micro lesions in the white matter which is the connectivity which might have happened but it could just be a basic motor problem it is okay my diagnosis official so tell me about the concept of the connectome right this is we use the term in the in the in the in the show and the show is very cosmos is very forward-looking we'll take some cutting-edge things and see what you know how we can explore what that could do for us so where's the connect state of the connectome now well so the connection is this idea if we can sort of map out every connection in the human brain sort of the way it's wired all the wiring which is actually just a very difficult task in and of itself so there's a project called the Blue Brain Project in the Sun and Switzerland run by Henry Mac remand he's gotten like a hundred billion or no not a hundred billion I would say a billion euros to do this and he spent one year euro per neuron that's not because there's like about 86 billion neurons and that's so that's 1 billion dollars so if you do the math it's yes yeah what's a conversion okay so it's a lot of money yeah a lot of money a lot of any currency it's a lot of money yes a lot of people a lot of effort and and the most we could do is sort of map out the specific connections in one tiny little column you know maybe sort of a millimeter of cortex and so you can imagine doing this over the entire brain it's a huge project then the next question is we'd get some information what you gonna do with that right what do we do with that information I mean obviously information is good for you know for many things but but that's so controversy in the field about is it worth it to invest all this money in this project in terms of like what the benefits are when we could be investing in I don't know you know research and Alzheimers or whatever and the idea is that theoretically this can help with those endeavors something yeah wiring to me is not the same thing as what signals are going over the wiring right that's the activation okay so what does it mean to have the wiring if you have no idea of what the person is thinking all exactly I mean so ultimately the first step is to sort of get a map a brain map of all the connections they don't by the way all of our brains are different and and also while our brains are active they are changing the wiring in time so it's not a static thing right so that's the other issue so then like oh well we want to map that plus function and then it gets to be a very overwhelming difficult learning money that people might want to spend on other things even if even if it's an objectively interesting topic yeah the the fertility of the results might not measure up to other places you could be researched exactly like there are other interesting yet for example they're doing work at the Paul Allen Brain Institute in Seattle where they're looking at mapping the genome and seeing how those the genes map out on to brain development and you know looking at that I think that could be more fruitful in many ways but so so I think you know their pluses and minuses with it it's not it wouldn't say it's it's a it's a bad endeavor but it's just a question of resources how much we go this seems like they should be spending money on better ways of seeing into the brain right because that will solve the issue that you're talking about you know what it is i right so it actually relates to some of the things you often say about like invested research in NASA because those discoveries are going to be related to other things so some of the research are doing to figure out the connectome is actually related to developing new techniques to look into the brain and look at it in a micro at the micro scale these are the offers from that same line of reasoning right so in that way that is a benefit you didn't even see what's coming there in front of you and it's you know and by the way I mean that could revolutionize it because let's say for instance you come up with the means of looking into the brain that is democratized so that it's not as much money to look into everybody's brain now you can start to actually get a better sense of what that map is and they also have they actually have this video game where people can play that adds the data to it I think it's called like I minecraft I'm pretty sure it's called my crap yeah so I think it has benefits and also the other the other aspect of it is that some people think ultimately if you can like map out all the wiring of your brain and download it somehow that would like give you you know immortality which I don't I don't buy that argument okay so yeah okay so the real connectome investors they want their stuff that's what they like to preserve yeah that's the you know there's this okay forget it I'm getting ready to go on a head we got to bring this to a close thank you for being back on Startalk give us some insight into epilepsy - by the way that episode was one of the saddest for me just thinking of the plight of the child and they I remember just there's a lot of sad stories in the episode yeah and the patient who had the lesion yeah yeah yeah just it was and he was the first corridor yeah basically yeah yeah yeah it's a repeated turn alright alright all in going to take a break when we come back we'll chat about episode 6 of cosmos possible world on Startalk we're back sar talk and right now we're gonna talk about episode 6 yes Chuck you were saying you'd like that episode I did very much yeah it's quite the profile of Carl Sagan's role yeah Pauline figured Sagan's role as a sight what impact he had on the path that scientific research took yeah coming out of the 1950's into the 60s and right on up through the 70s and 80s you know it's funny as Heather brought it up in you know before we went to break talking about how one scientific discipline is connected to another yes and that's the whole thing with well if you don't know it is because you were taught that here's your geology book right and that that's that book right now put that down and pick up the biology book you know who's gonna what that can't possibly leave you in a good way to make cross-pollinated connections yeah I mean I'll be there yeah cross pollinated but like um man who's your I see now so you have to forgive me but he works here at the museum with you and we were talking about olivine and Halloween table yeah it was the chair of the division of physical sciences you're right and so that's what he does he talks about the formation of minerals in the in the birthday in solar system right yeah yeah but who would think that these so-called rocks that we find here have a direct connection to you know the cosmos in whether physical phenomena stupid things a phenomena thank you so so Carl Sagan I think was one of the first you know their turns we have today that we just take for granted these are words stapled together that you don't even hear as stapled together anymore okay so astrobiology asked us to different see different fields coming together you're two different astrophysics that came first okay we got that one right that's back at 18 I late 1800s right astral geologists astrogeology bio geology all of these terms are the tacit recognition that creative juxtaposition of discoveries can lead to a whole other discovery that would otherwise be completely impossible because nomen stovepipe will ever go there right that's what that is so what do you think of the animations yeah I loved it I mean what I like about it is the fact that it brings me into the story in ways I otherwise would not be you know and sometimes I find myself looking at the animation and going whoa the thing is you know the the pedigree of that animation comes from the fact that Fox which was acquired the Fox animation studios along with 20th Century Fox and 21st Century Fox were all acquired by Disney okay but they were all under the same house in a family that included National Geographic so we have cosmos airing on National Geographic in collaboration with Fox talent that come from their Animation Studios right so we didn't have to shop hard to find people who would have the talent to do this yes and what something I always liked about the animation is if you look at the facial expressions and just gestures of the eyebrows and the the cheeks there's very subtle movement it speaks volumes it speaks volumes yeah you're feeling the characters even though they're like animated yeah you know you think of animation you think of like Bugs Bunny cartoons I'm not as a serious medium to communicate historical drama and so I said sometimes they'll do something in the animation it I react to it as if I'm watching people you know the actual people I feel kind of silly your kids laugh at you you know you know and I also love seeing it makes the scientists that are no longer here like Piper like looking up at the sky as a kid yeah and it brings you into it it's like okay I get it now and he has really good vision yeah yeah so you know I mean I find that you know that's fascinating one of the things I'm glad that such a person who had really good vision became an astral person that yeah because because it makes sense yeah yeah yeah think about it of the of your five traditional senses mm-hmm vision is I'm stating the obvious but it bears stating your vision gives what what what's the point of your senses they give us information about the world around us so that we can choose to interact in whatever way is in the interest of our survival okay that's what our sense is do all right and so sight is the one sense that can detect information about an environment from the farthest distance right okay that makes sense okay because you can certainly see a heck of a lot farther than you can hear then you can hear okay or smell is progressed and that was good but still not as far right not enough nuts not right you know maybe a dog dog dog dog so but that's on earth but of course we can take our sense of sight beyond Earth right and the farthest thing you can see with the unaided eye is the Andromeda galaxy it's visible to the unaided eye and it's 2 million light-years away that's pretty servile alright so here's kuiper with extraordinary acute sense of sight and so I'm good with that yes it's very cool so what I also found interesting you know when they talk about Carl Sagan is as I'm now of course for me maybe other people aren't looking at it like this when they're watching the show mm-hmm because I know you I know your story yeah so I'm looking at this and I'm like here is the dude doing cosmos who was actually mentored by the dude who did cosmos to matter who's the dude who's portrayed in the story right exactly it's super cool though I'm like looking at you and I'm like people I don't I don't you know I don't know if you want to tell the story but you know your your actual interaction and intersection with Carl Sagan is pretty pretty cool story well we told it in the in the cosmos 2014 but maybe not everyone saw that one section of one episode of that series six years I'm happy to tell it again yeah we tell me I think it's great and by the way I think it's part of the entire profile of his character yes and and now you broke his heart it broke his heart man no so I'm applying to colleges I'm in high school here in New York City public schools right and I'm and my application is dripping with the universe right it's dripping and I'm accepted at Cornell University right but I don't know if I'm gonna go yet because I have other I'm waiting for other decisions that other colleges and so so big brain problems stop big brain problems where should I do Cornell yes Stan where I did not apply to Stanford or Yale oh no you did not want to have the Boris manners of a Yalie you sound like Thurston Howell the third who ever remembers that from from Gilligan's Island he was a Harvard person in it anyhow so unknown to me the admissions office sent my application to Carl Sagan he was already famous he hadn't done cosmos yet but he was on The Tonight Show and best-selling books and I interviewed so he was already faint as famous as any scientist had been you know since probably since Einstein and he did they sent my application to his attention he wrote me a letter and let it comes into mail and it's Carl and I'd opened it up and it says hi I'm Carl Sagan and I heard I just understand you're thinking about colleges I do astrophysics here and I bite you to come visit to help you decide and let's just let me know sign Carl that's amazing sign Carl that's awesome and I get the letter and it's like and mom and daddy map deep dabbed at ed should I go and I get and his New York City he's an ethic of New York is it five hour bus ride or so and so I arranged the visit that we arranged everything and I go and he meets me in the front of his building there's on a Saturday he's there Wow okay and each taking his shows giving me a tour of the lab and I'm in his office and he said I'll never forget this job I'm sitting across from his desk and he doesn't even look he reaches back grabs a book as one of his books that he wrote any luck yeah there's like the no-look pass and basketball right he's a NOLA grab just grab anything it's a book he wrote anything behind me is something I wrote okay pulls it out signs it to me I still have that book okay sign to kneel future astronomer okay sorry Carl alright so see the sign to intellectual gangsta because that is Carl the gangster so but that's not where it ended right so we're done any walk outside it begins to snow as it does so often anything without right on and it's so it begins to snow it might have been lake-effect snows I'm not sure I love Lake effects shows yes here they speak highly of you as well a will do an info on lake effect snow yes it's a fun concept but anyhow so I'm there and he says he writes down here's my phone number it snows heavier and the bus can't get through come spend the night with my family and you leave tomorrow this guy he's clearly saw something in you well so here's the thing I and I had people when I told to some people that story they said you should have just said the buster couldn't go through that okay go have dinner with him and see if library talk astrophysics so so the point is to this day I treat other students the way he treated me that's very I mean if I'm at the desk and that's the student comes by not gonna and I'm I would say a Barak I'll got to call you later I got a student coming in I got a this exaggerated but only a little bit right a little bit so I just said to myself that's I have to be that if I'm ever wear anywhere near that otherwise what what am I doing here so so this there's a passing of the torch well I think he understood the value of not only education in general but the value of a mentor to a student was that experience the single greatest influence to causing you to become now probably the world's most renowned science communicator and I say that objectively not as even though we saw in your paycheck well yes and that's why I had to say I said I could have a bias just close the possible sources Chuck is a wholly owned subsidiary of stock radio so yes no no actually you only partially owned you do well you got your own that a little bunch of crap which is always great so I would say it influenced my influence what kind of a scientist I would become hmm interesting and I think back on and now now I'm behind my desk and someone comes in pardon me I learned this from Carl Sagan who should I make this down so because I as is clear from the story I already knew I wanted to do astrophysics I'm great really even before I knew of him right so he wasn't he didn't influenced my career arc he influenced my career attitudes and perspectives oh and that's important that's a shame that part of the shape Club it has that part but the other part you're talking about had already lived form from the time you were a kid all right some people know what they want to do so you know that's cool you told them no you're not doing it you're not gonna turn it right back and endorse to my decision okay just so you know that's cool okay so now what appear drops on the on the thing but here's the deal yeah irrespective of how great Harvard might be or any other institution to have somebody of his prowess and stature to reach out and invite you what was it cuz I gotta know what would make you say forget all that I gotta go over here yeah yeah so I didn't care about Harvard's legacy okay I still don't really I don't I'm not into that so I'm kind of with you on that because that light doesn't wear Harvard ring I don't wear it you know I don't ever legacies are for other that's other people's stuff no a legacy is what people are so a person wants if they themselves don't have that's not so and you have your own legacy you don't need a letter legacy is the luminosity shed upon them by others who've actually achieved things so that's exactly what I meant but thanks for making me look stupid City beaming down and the others so I tried I don't instead of radiation so you're wrong yeah yeah I don't radiate your own damn radiate your own life you don't worry about being lipice I had nothing to do with it what it was I wanna know yeah tell you okay at the time I'm in middle school and into high school I'd subscribe to Scientific American and my favorite part was a session called about the authors and for every author even the double authored papers I picked everyone for that was on astronomy and physics for every author I made a grid of the colleges that had accepted me and whether the author got their undergraduate degree their masters the PhD or where they were on the faculty and for every one of them and I made a checklist how old were you 16 okay so no know that I was applying to college at 17 I'm 17 okay it's the same 60 and 70 right so then I made this list and I put a check for each of the schools that I was accepted where all these people came from I said if I'm gonna be a scientist one day with the stature of who has been vited to write for Scientific American that's one of the hallmarks of Scientific American actual scientists write those articles but basically then what is right so I put and it made the list and then Harvard was like two or three times longer on that grid than any other school I was accepted to Wow so I just said that's that makes sense that bet that's that's it and then I would later learn that part of the reason why it was so long is the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory the government doing astrophysics has their base co-located with a Harvard College Observatory so so there's a larger complex there of course but so it but that's great right so whatever my interests are there's gonna be somebody in arm's reach that could who can actually support it supports support that interest Wow so I made this list of what schools were in state and basically would accept a high C student and by that I mean the Jews did you so that's why so I I wanted to come up with an objective measure that was not swayed by any legacy or oh you but surely your own hard work it's like no money balled college acceptance that's pretty cool if analysis is Moneyball then then let the ball roll right on but anyhow so just to close that out okay so we got Carl Sagan Gerard Kuiper who later we credits the naming of these all these objects in the outer solar system Kuiper belt that's right where Pluto is found get over it Pluto is the first and most prominent member of the Kuiper belt to let you know but but anyhow this just and the in the episode we addressed some of the tension that's between scientists and the competitiveness I think if that's kept in check it can be good to pump your your your your your creative urges to get ahead or just stay ahead but anyhow I think it was a that episode had to be in there just so you knew what Carl Sagan's actual legacy would become in this world I just love the fact that you use this opportunity and Kuiper as a means to throw shade on Pluto it's like you kids you let me need me to throw shade it's already so far out it lives in shanxi where's the Sun is that it over there but paw is that the Sun so far away that he kicked Pluto out of the Harvard club and put him in the Friars play anyhow so we have a debt of gratitude to Carl Sagan for 1/2 pioneering astrobiology for including sort of biological using these disciplines and bringing it to NASA to help explore yeah this so all of that they would all look very different were it not for call landscape that's excellent right plus we wouldn't be here if he weren't here either because he was in the first episode that then became the next wooden and third episode and I'm the host I thought she was gonna say because he's your father chocolate Carl is your father that we start referencing star wars it's time all right all right Chuck we got in this episode that was just episode six next week episodes 7 & 8 when we take a look and in-depth behind-the-scenes discussion [Applause] you

Channel: StarTalk

Views: 122,432

Rating: 4.9356351 out of 5

Keywords: startalk, star talk, startalk radio, neil degrasse tyson, neil tyson, science, space, astrophysics, astronomy, podcast, space podcast, science podcast, astronomy podcast, niel degrasse tyson, physics, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Chuck Nice, Heather Berlin, The Man of a Trillion Worlds, The Cosmic Connectome, electroencephalogram, EEG, epilepsy, seizures, absence seizures, Blue Brain Project, Allen Institute for Brain Science, Carl Sagan, science communication, astrobiology, Cosmos, Harvard, Cornell

Id: mSuHYrVho98

Length: 36min 2sec (2162 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 23 2020