Transcriber: Phuong Quach
Reviewer: Elena Crescia A lot of people ask me about
what technology is doing to our brains and even more people ask me, "Should I allow my child
to be on Skype, Facebook, texting emailing and listening to music, whilst they're supposed to be studying
for their exams?" Well I don't think you need
a neuroscientist to tell you the answer to that. So when I started playing
with the idea of what will technology do to future of the human brain
and humanity, I first let it go to the deep,
emotional part of my brain. And the question I came up with
that really bothered me was, "Will I be me?" If technology continues to influence
and shape our brains at the rate that it has
in the last two decades for the next four decades, then at the end of my life, will I be me? Will our children and grandchildren
be the people that we thought they would be? Or will I be her? Some kind of human
artificial intelligence hybrid. Ok, so I'm asking you to come
on a journey with me along the stretch of my imagination, but I look at her and I think I know
she's going to be better than me, faster, smarter, more efficient,
less imperfect. But will she be kind? Will she be lovable, creative, intuitive and philanthropic? The kinds of things
I would like to be remembered for. So when it comes
to technology and the future of the brain I went all emotional first. And then my logical brain kicked in,
and I needed to know. I wanted certainty,
but I couldn't have it, could I? Because these questions,
if we ponder them deeply enough - will I be me, what will technology do
to the future of humanity? - they push us into a space
of ambiguity and disorientation, and there's actually
a psychological phenomenon that describes that,
and it's called "Liminality". It comes from the Latin word for threshold and it's the middle stage of a process where you're no longer
what you were before but you don't yet know
what you will be next. It's a time of fear and uncertainty, like a midlife crisis
or an identity crisis. So liminality is a threshold between our previous way of structuring
identity, time or community and a new way which will be the future. Of course at this point, we have choices. I have no doubt that technology
holds many positives that will make a meaningful difference
to our health and our wealth. But have we really thought about
what it will do to humanity? Some people say
we've already passed the tipping point where technology will be smarter than us. And a lot of people say
that using technology has already affected
their memory and concentration. and I think it's the things
we haven't even thought of yet that are going to change us the most. So technology could be
one of humanity's greatest innovations. But we've kind of been
in this liminal space before industrial revolution, language, fire. So let's look at language. I think it's one
of the most critical innovations that human beings have made. So what does humanity even mean in words? Well, according to Wikipedia,
so yes, I did use technology to find out. It's the human species,
so the total world population, the human condition, the totality of experience
of existing as a human being. And as a virtue, it's a set of strengths
focused on caring for others. And then there was another
really weird one. It was called Humanity Plus. And it's an international
non-governmental organization which advocates
the use of emerging technologies to enhance our capabilities. So already the boundary between humanity
and technology has started to blur. So we can use emerging technologies
to enhance our capabilities. Well, we know that we can take
supplements and medications that can improve our memory
and our concentration, they are called cognitive
enhancers, or neurotropics. Some neuroscientists have been using
transcranial stimulation, which is passing electromagnetic currents
through your skull to change your mood or affect your pain. And we've already got
fingerprint technology, retinal scan technology, and soon I'll have a chip in my palm
that I can make payments with. But does this make us less human? Does it affect our personal relationships? Our sense of belonging? When you think about things like the Internet, smartphones,
wearable technology, driverless cars, do you think
about the negative consequences as well as the positive consequences? Because in terms of how intentionally
we're letting technology into our lives I was quite shocked when I heard
Bill Gates just a couple of months ago say that "if you have high school
or lower education, you will be replaced by artificial
intelligence in our lifetimes". Do you feel reassured that we can
manage the fallout in society should this happen to our children? Or I should say when it happens. So here's an image from
the human connectome project. It's the brain of a four-year-old boy
taken by diffusion tensor imaging at Massachusetts General Hospital. It's beautiful, isn't it? But what will technology do
to the brain of this 4 year old boy? I don't think we really know, because I don't think
we've really thought about it. But some Native American tribes
sit together in a circle and consider the consequences
of their decisions on seven generations into the future. Can you imagine if we did that
about technology? What do you think we would see? I mean already technology affects the different generations that exist
in the world really differently. Some generations spend more time online
than face-to-face and social situations. Some feel more connected. Some feel more isolated. Some people see the Internet
as a place of deceit and superficiality. And other people say it's the only place
they can truly be themselves. Well, technology has rocked our world
and it is not going away. I think it's up there
with man discovering fire and similarly,
it is a chicken or egg situation. So we don't actually know
whether we discovered how to make fire, and then we could eat protein, meat, we could cook meat
and eat protein more efficiently. And then our prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain to do
with articulated speech, so language, and predicting
and planning for the future grew or if we evolved that way,
and then we learned to use tools and fire to make our lives easier
and more efficient. So what will it be with technology? Will we let technology happen to us? Or can we use the power
of neuroplasticity, the ability of the brain to change itself to harness technology
for the benefit of humanity? Let me give you some examples
of how the brain responds to both internal and external environment
and changes itself. So the first one
that I think is really important and I already talked about intentionality
around technology is that if you do something
with positive intent so for example
if you do exercise that you really enjoy, then you release more growth factors
in your brain than if you make yourself go to the gym
because you know it's good for you. So Carl Cotman, a professor
at University of California, Irvine, in his laboratory showed the difference between neural growth factor release in the brains of rodents
that were either sedentary did forced involuntary
or voluntary exercise. So at the simplest level of explanation three groups of rats: one group
kept in a confined space, one group were forced
to run on a treadmill for a certain number
of minutes or hours per day, and one group could roam around freely and get on the treadmill
if they wanted to. The two groups that did exercise
whether they wanted to or not got the benefits of oxygen in their brain but only the group that did exercise
when they wanted to also released a factor called BDNF
or brain derived neurotrophic factor, which encouraged these nerve cells
to grow and connect up together. So I think that already has implications for example for doing work
that you really love. In controversial experiments
on monkeys in the 1980s in the Silver Spring laboratories. Edward Taub created some nerve damage to the nerves of the left arms
of right-handed monkeys and then put their right arms
in a sling for two weeks so they had to use their left hand
to feed themselves and clean themselves. By the end of two weeks the map in the brain
for the left hand and arm had grown and taken over the space of the map in the brain
for the right hand and arm. Pretty amazing, but you've probably
experienced this yourself. If you speak English,
Spanish and Portuguese. So say if I lived in Brazil,
spoke quite a lot of Portuguese, and then I moved to Argentina
and I stopped speaking Portuguese and I started speaking more Spanish then eventually
with disuse of one language that part of my brain would shrink and the part of the brain that was using
more of another language would grow. So there's something that London
cab drivers have that's very special, and that is they learned "The Knowledge",
so just like learning a language. It's a very attention intense activity. By the time they have done "The knowledge" they have a map of every street in London
in their brain and it takes years to do this. And brain scanning shows
that at the end of that period of learning the part of the brain that has to do with
navigation and memory, the hippocampus has grown and there's a picture over here. The hippocampus
is part of the limbic system which is that emotional, intuitive,
deep, ancient part of our brain. We've known for a long time
that a hormone called oxytocin encourages emotional bonding
between mothers and newborn babies by adjusting activity
in the limbic system. In just the last few years, we've seen that new fathers' brains
are also rewired by oxytocin and this seems to be evolution's way of giving men a biological imperative
to stay in a unit family and ensure the safe upbringing
of his children. In the Nordic countries, they're moving to having more
equal maternity and paternity leave so children are being brought up
by parents of both genders more commonly. They've also had a longstanding movement
around gender-neutral clothing and gender neutral toys for children. This year in the Swedish dictionary, they even introduced a word
that doesn't mean "him" or "her", just means "that person". So putting that much intention into changing society
in a certain direction is kind of what I think
we should be doing with technology to harness the uncertainty
of this liminal space by taking what we know about
how amazing our brains are as they change in response to what goes on
around us and the intention that we have. I think we need to look inside, deep
inside to those ancient parts of the brain that store every memory, every smell, every relationship,
every emotion we've ever had, and draw on our amazing intuition,
creativity and empathy. To think about how
we can harness technology to learn more about the universal
or collective consciousness of humanity. Because that level
of connectedness and compassion could be truly amazing for humanity. So I think we need
to take that leap of faith like we've done a few times before
in evolution and believe that maybe technology really could make
us better human beings. (Portuguese) Thank you. (Applause)
