Pod Insights StarTalk Podcast StarTalk Live: Big Brains at BAM (Part 3) About this episode Our exploration of the human mind concludes with Neil deGrasse Tyson, Eugene Mirman, neuroscientists Mayim Bialik and Dr. Heather Berlin, and guests Michael Ian Black, Paul Rudd and Bill Nye.
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http://www.startalkradio.net/show/startalk-live-big-brains-at-bam-part-3
Transcript 6,289 words · 16 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.
0:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Welcome to StarTalk Radio. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson. I'm an astrophysicist and director of New York City's Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History. The following show is the third part of a live show we recorded on February 24, 2014. Because that show went on for a long time and all of it was great, we had to create a third part. This is without precedent in the archives of StarTalk. Our show was recorded at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, known as BAM to the locals. And in addition to my co-host, comedian Eugene Mirman, we were joined onstage that night by neuroscientist Heather Berlin, Bill Nye the Science Guy, comedian Michael Ian Black,
1:03 Neil deGrasse Tyson? the actor Paul Rudd, and star of the hit TV show The Big Bang Theory, Mayim Bialik. Some great science fiction storytelling involves power of the mind. Telekinesis, you know, mind control, mind reading. Is anyone working on this? Is it in the future? Or is it just a pipe dream?
1:24 Heather Berlin? Well, there are studies, let's say something like mind reading. There are studies now where you put someone in a scanner and you show them different pictures or even movies, and you see what the sort of neural signature is of that. And then you, again, put them in the scanner. The experimenter doesn't know what they're looking at. They're only reading out their brain activation. And they could very reliably predict what the person is seeing. And then if you take that a step back, and you can even look at what a person is imagining. So, over time, the more precise this gets, I can definitely envision someone just reading someone's neural sort of activation and predicting what it is they're thinking about.
1:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, you'd have to walk around with some kind of neuromapped visor, so that you can detect if someone is being turned on or turned off, or be highly useful socially.
2:08 Heather Berlin? Yeah, if you're autistic.
2:10 Eugene Mirman? You're describing like, super extreme guesstimation.
2:12 Heather Berlin? Yeah, you could be wrong. The more we understand about the brain, the closer you will be to getting right.
2:17 Bill Nye? But successful charlatans, or so-called mentalists, or magicians, they have this ability at some very reasonable...
2:24 Heather Berlin? Right, but...
2:24 Bill Nye? Probably through facials. Go ahead.
2:26 Mayim Bialik? That's not mind-reading, right? That's a very subtle, fine-tuning into body language, gesturing, shifting of, basically, the air around people. But there's nothing magical, mystical about it.
2:38 Michael Ian Black? Your grandmother is here and she agrees.
2:45 Bill Nye? I'm getting something.
2:48 Bill Nye? It came in on the headpiece.
2:51 Michael Ian Black? But, I'm sorry, if we take what you're talking about, Heather, maybe 10 steps further. Is it possible, in the future, it would be possible to kind of record your consciousness and then market that as, "I would be able to live as you for a day", through a VR, virtual-reality playback?
3:06 Bill Nye? Ooh.
3:06 Heather Berlin? Hmm, I don't know if you could ever... That's a very...
3:09 Michael Ian Black? Just say yes.
3:10 Heather Berlin? Philosophical question.
3:12 Bill Nye? I'll tell you what.
3:13 Heather Berlin? Yes!
3:15 Speaker 06 I wanna be a lady for a day!
3:17 Bill Nye? Yes, for a day.
3:18 Speaker 06 What would you do?
3:20 Bill Nye? I would buy that URL right now, man. Ground floor.
3:25 Heather Berlin? But actually, another study that I'm involved in, we're doing something called hyperscanning, or dual-scanning, where we can scan two people at the same time, having an interaction, and kind of seeing what's happening in the space between two people. Because as I said before, I can never get into your brain or really know what you're thinking. And that's what communication is. It's about the space between. And now we're seeing what's happening in your brain when you're actually really taking in what I'm saying, and vice versa.
3:47 Mayim Bialik? And also, as scientists, I'm sure we'd all agree, yeah? There are things that we can't see and that we can't understand, but there are also things that we know now as scientists, things like pheromones. There are things that occur, for example, between two people that are not necessarily detectable in all the other ways we're looking, but there's something that happens that, again, we don't need to write off as magical and mystical. We may not be able to measure it yet, but yes, I think we'll get there in more ways.
4:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, so let me end the show with this exploration. Heather, you're on really, dare I say, dangerous territory. Because the more you know what the brain is and what it does, as a scientist, what any scientist wants to do at the end of the day is control it. Yeah, that's the evidence that you know what it is you're doing. You want to make predictions. Make predictions. Have those predictions come true and you say, "I know how this thing works." So if the brain is your laboratory, and you say, "Oh, I've just discovered what makes two people fall in love." Now you make a love potion number nine, and you control people's behavior and conduct. Do you have another team of ethicists behind you, looking over your shoulder at your conduct?
5:01 Eugene Mirman? Yes, it's the CIA.
5:05 Heather Berlin? Yeah, I mean, there's a whole field of neuroethics, which are talking about issues. But yes, I mean, ultimately, what we're going is from correlation to causation. When I say we're going into the brain and implanting electrodes for a good cause to treat psychiatric illness, we're controlling emotions. And, you know, if somebody who was a psychopath-
5:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Well, emotions that are socially regressive.
5:22 Heather Berlin? Yeah. But if we know exactly what the right formula is for, say, love, I mean, you can stimulate an emotion in someone and they'll label it as love. But no one's there overlooking my shoulder saying, you know, there is an IRB, there's a board that, like-
5:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? IRB?
5:35 Heather Berlin? The, yeah, Institutional Review Board, yes.
5:39 Eugene Mirman? That makes sure that you don't make people fall in love when they're not supposed to.
5:45 Heather Berlin? Exactly.
5:47 Eugene Mirman? Feel super safe.
5:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, so the day would surely come where you can make someone smarter if they can afford to pay you. You could cure them if they can afford that. We have all kinds of neurological disorders. I'm just wondering, what is the dystopic future of this and what is the utopic future of this?
6:06 Heather Berlin? Well, one issue is that it could be that only people who can afford, let's say, the neural implants, get them, and then they have an advantage. And then everybody will have to, so like, performance-enhancing drugs, you know, in sports. The reason they outlaw them is because if one person has it, they have the advantage everyone else has to do with it.
6:20 Mayim Bialik? Same with mental illness, right? In terms of access to mental health care and mental, you know-
6:23 Heather Berlin? Exactly. I mean, things-
6:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right, once one person has a mental illness, everybody else is like, "Hey, I have a mental illness."
6:28 Mayim Bialik? No, but I think what you're getting at, there's a dangerous possibility of sort of narrowing the field of who is well, who is smart, who is desirable, who is accessible, who gets access to care, not to bring it down at the end, but that could be dangerous.
6:41 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, and so, so let me ask each one of you, what's the scariest future of neuroscience you can think of?
6:48 Heather Berlin? Can't we end on a positive note?
6:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay.
6:50 Heather Berlin? What's the happiest?
6:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? What is the greatest? You work in this field. What is, 50 years in the future, what is that world gifted to us by you and your research colleagues? 50 years from now, what is that?
7:03 Heather Berlin? Well, what I would hope is that we can really have a full-scale map of the human brain, going all the way from the genome to function and to mind and brain. And once we have this full map of the brain and how it works, then we can help prevent things like Alzheimer's. So rather than looking at treatments, we're going to look at prevention. You know, if you can go in and tweak the genome a bit, so that people don't get these kinds of mental disorders to begin with, then we don't even have to worry so much about the treatment side of things. So that would be wonderful.
7:30 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So you, can you treat the genome in an adult?
7:32 Heather Berlin? Yeah.
7:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And then that fixes their brain as an adult?
7:36 Heather Berlin? That would be great if we can do that, yeah. If we can even do it in an adult.
7:57 Bill Nye? You've got to ask, though, from an evolutionary standpoint. Why is it that mental illness persists? If it's really especially dangerous, wouldn't it have been eliminated from the gene pool? So I suspect it's not, in the biggest picture, that deadly to have a mental illness if it's manageable. That is to say, germs and parasites are much more likely to kill you than being mentally unstable. Different. I just wonder about this whole thing, when you go to predict the future, without taking into account, let's say, the flu that killed more people in 1918 than World War I did.
8:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The other thing is, these questions, I think, are really only useful to a society that can afford it.
8:37 Heather Berlin? Mm-hmm.
8:38 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right? The people that are more successful at having an overall health in their tribe or their society might do better than...
8:45 Heather Berlin? Well, there are two things there. One is that certain things do persist, like, for example, being a sensation seeker or being really impulsive. That's a quality that got people out there and, you know, discovered America, right? These kinds of traits which we might call, you know...
8:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? By the way, that probably killed more people than who actually survived and came back.
9:00 Mayim Bialik? Autistic ability and mental illness, right?
9:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right.
9:02 Heather Berlin? Yeah, there are some positive things about being at the extreme ends of what we consider to be normal. There is no such thing as normal. But what studies do show is that the most amount of any disease, cancer, you know, all sorts of physiologic diseases, the thing that causes people the lowest quality of life and distress are mental illness, because they don't die from it, but they have to suffer their lives.
9:22 Mayim Bialik? And often, they have children and pass on genes that may be predisposing to future mental illnesses. It's a really sad discussion, I don't...
9:30 Heather Berlin? We're trying to find something uplifting.
9:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We've got to wrap this up. So, let me offer some concluding remarks here. You know, I studied the universe, and the interesting thing is that there's this universe inside our heads that is perhaps less well-known than the universe extends back to the Big Bang in time and in space. And so, it's curious, maybe the big challenge here is you're using your own brain to study a brain. You're not some other entity studying the brain. And that prevents some questions, perhaps, from even being asked. You don't even know the right question, because the brain is asking the question about the brain. Carl Sagan is famous for the saying that humans, conscious humans, are a way for the
10:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? universe to know itself. No, not the universe, we're in the universe, and we use our brain power to decode the universe. I'm intrigued by the fact that the real future here might just be in our minds, and maybe we will learn what questions we're not asking yet. And those are the questions that keep me going every day, because that's the future of discovery in any field. So, join me giving a very warm thank you to this brilliant panel.
10:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's Q and A time. We have some microphones on the aisles. What we prefer is just to find one person to direct the question to, because if all 12 of us answer, it takes all night. So if you can be specific about it. Sir, you're up front.
11:10 Speaker 07 Hey, how are you doing?
11:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Hello.
11:11 Speaker 07 So you talked a little bit about the idea of there's these people, superhumans, right? And so there are people out there who have what I think is called savant syndrome, who have some kind of amazing mental abilities. They can, they can like learn new languages in a week, or do really rapid calculations. So what's different about these people's brains? Is this something we all have inherently able in our brains? And could we happen to enable that ability?
11:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, a great question. I think, you know, we all want some of that ability, right? So, so what's up with that?
11:41 Eugene Mirman? How can we all become magic?
11:46 Heather Berlin? With savants, they seem to be wired slightly differently, and so they seem to have these usually these isolated areas of specialization, but sometimes at the cost of other parts of the brain, development of other parts of the brain. So it's not necessarily a good thing to be very, very good at just one thing and at the cost of other things. The only way I think we can enhance our cognitive abilities is with working at it. It's like anything, like with, you know, losing weight, you have to work at it. So I don't think there's a sort of magic pill, but it has to do with the way that their brains are wired slightly differently.
12:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, so using the word wiring, so in the future you can adjust the wiring. If you have a savant, is there an ethical question about whether you would change that about that person?
12:27 Heather Berlin? Yeah, I think there is. I think it's, it's, I mean, it's with like anything. Even with a psychopath, they don't come in for treatment.
12:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Gestures too.
12:36 Heather Berlin? For example.
12:38 Eugene Mirman? Even psychopaths.
12:40 Heather Berlin? They might enjoy being that way, you know? So if they're not a threat to other people, or if they're not in distress, I don't think that we should go around just changing people for the sake of it.
12:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Question here, yes?
12:52 Speaker 08 Yeah, so since we have the comedians here, I don't know if you guys have thought a lot about the intersection between comedy and neuroscience? I have, yes.
13:00 Eugene Mirman? Yeah.
13:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Sure.
13:02 Eugene Mirman? I wrote a paper on the physiology of laughter in college.
13:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Actually, he did.
13:07 Eugene Mirman? Yeah, it was all wrong, but I wrote the shit out of it.
13:14 Speaker 08 You know, these guys are up here providing great comedic interjection, and not everyone can do that. Like, not every brain works that way. So, maybe we could hear from like, one comedian and one neuroscientist. Like, why...
13:26 Mayim Bialik? Or how about a neuroscientist who is a comedian?
13:30 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Shemaya! Can I add that, on The Big Bang Theory, her timing is impeccable.
13:39 Mayim Bialik? That's my mother. Thank you, Mom. That's your mom.
13:43 Speaker 08 Wait, what?
13:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? From 1991 to 1994, she was Blossom on the show. Blossom, yes.
13:52 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And you were the young Bette Midler in The Rose.
13:54 Mayim Bialik? I was, in Beaches, yeah.
13:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yes.
13:56 Mayim Bialik? No, I mean, I'm happy to let you guys also speak to it. I mean, in terms of what's funny and why are things funny, there is a really interesting field of sort of understanding the timing. It's complicated social interaction, but I think, for me, as an actor and as a scientist, what I'm aware of is we're constantly scanning and tracking. People can do it better than others. You know, stand-ups can do something that I can't do, right? I can't do improv. There's a different set of skills that actors and performers have. But, you know, the joke that we tend to be neurotic, that we tend to be constantly looking to make someone feel something is a very complicated thing about being an actor. And I didn't think about it as much when I was younger, but when you meet other actors and when you talk about process, which a lot of people laugh, they figure like, "Oh, we're paid to be funny, or we're paid to make people believe something."
14:41 Mayim Bialik? It's a very complicated process by which I need to make you feel something. I need to make you believe something, and I need every single person to feel that. So, if you're a stand-up, you're working with a room of people. When I work in front of a live audience, I need everyone to feel something. And it's a really complicated interaction, especially if you work with a live audience. It's very different than not, because it is a constant tracking.
15:03 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Heather, are comedian subjects of your...
15:05 Heather Berlin? Well, yeah, actually, so this is really exciting stuff. This is a new area of research we're going to. It's actually the neural basis of creativity and improvisation. And so, what we find is that, whether it's jazz improv or comedy improv, there's a certain neural signature involved when people are improvising. So, you can put people in a scanner, and even freestyle rappers, right? You give them a memorized rap and then they can freestyle. Or you give a musician a memorized piece or improv. And when they're improvising, what they find is that a part of the prefrontal cortex, the medial prefrontal cortex, becomes extra-activated. And that has to do with internally-generated ideas. And the dorsolateral part of the prefrontal cortex becomes deactivated. And that has to do with sort of self-awareness and monitoring your behavior. So you almost go into this free-flowing state. If you become too aware, you mess up.
15:50 Heather Berlin? You're not good at improvising. You have to kind of lose yourself, so to speak. That's what the neuroimaging shows.
15:54 Bill Nye? I have a follow-up. Is there any connection between improv and optimism?
16:00 Heather Berlin? Uh, I don't know. Actually, wait, one of the studies showed, actually, one of the studies showed that when they were improvising, they had increased activation of the amygdala, which could be related to positive feelings.
16:12 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's your brain part.
16:13 Eugene Mirman? Yeah, it's kind of my thing.
16:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's interesting to know. Right here, sir.
16:19 Speaker 09 Yeah, hi. I actually had a couple of questions, but then when you guys mentioned eugenics... That's kind of your thing.
16:28 Eugene Mirman? What's your question, Himmler?
16:38 Speaker 06 Too soon, too soon.
16:41 Speaker 09 That kind of shades my question, doesn't it? I was actually, all I could think about was the movie Idiocracy. Now, I don't know if any of you guys have seen that.
16:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Idiocracy.
16:51 Speaker 09 It's kind of a scary look at what might happen if... If dumb people keep breeding. Thank you, yes.
16:59 Eugene Mirman? Luckily, make-believe puts you on.
17:00 Speaker 09 If, you know, okay, so my question is to the neuro folks over there. I don't know if you've seen anything going in that direction or not, or...
17:11 Eugene Mirman? Have you seen a genetic predisposition, predisposition in society to become idiots?
17:18 Heather Berlin? I didn't see the movie, so I can't speak to that. Well, this is gonna be, I'm trying to be like sort of PC. Well, one thing is that with evolution in the past, right? If it was survival of the fittest, then those who just couldn't make it, couldn't make it. And they would die out. And then there would be certain traits that would have evolved and survived. But, but now, we have all sorts of ways to keep those people around. Exactly.
17:44 Heather Berlin? It's kind of messing with evolution a bit.
17:51 Mayim Bialik? Yeah.
17:51 Heather Berlin? So who knows what's gonna happen?
18:11 Speaker 10 I've got an in-depth and specific question, guess to the scientists and I guess to the neuroscientists here. Based on quantum theories of the mind, what's your take on the idea that consciousness originates at the quantum level? And if you're familiar with Schrodinger's equation, the very fact that observing something changes the outcome. So the mind observing consciousness, what's your guys' take on that?
18:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, I can offer something on that as well. So quantum physics has sort of mysterious properties that are real, but they defy anything your five senses or more have ever experienced in your life. So you say, "Well, that's weird, but it's real. It happens. Particles pop in and out of existence." You look at it and then it changes into something else. This is the behavior of the universe on the smallest scale. Because it has all these mysterious properties, what I have found in my experience watching people think about the world is they have this urge to insert quantum physics where there's something where they don't otherwise understand what it is. So we don't really understand consciousness, quantum physics must be at work, alright?
19:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So it's this, and in fact, the more they invoke quantum physics, that's the evidence that they know least about what it is they're talking about.
19:30 Speaker 10 Well, I admit that. I don't know what I'm talking about.
19:32 Mayim Bialik? No, but I think the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, I mean, I do appreciate this notion that any observation of something alters what it is, how we perceive it, and how we describe it. I appreciate that.
19:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? However, when I observe you, you don't pop into a different quantum state. You're a macroscopic entity. Large things average out these principles so that we have a macroscopic world that lends itself to macroscopic discussions. If we were the size of particles, yes. Me beaming eyes at you with a light would pop you into some other part of the universe, yes. But you're big, so it doesn't happen. Okay.
20:13 Speaker 06 Is that a fat bill?
20:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's what I'm saying. Okay. It would be cool if we were like particle sized and you walked through a doorway. Okay? You would diffract. Okay? Because that's what light does. I mean, it'd be funny if Planck's constant were much larger than it is. Weird stuff would happen all the time. Okay? So, yes.
20:35 Heather Berlin? Can I just bring us to the brain for a second? I just want to diffuse this theory. Because I always get this question about the quantum theory. Roger Penrose, who's a mathematician at Oxford, and Stuart Hamerhoff, who's an anesthesiologist, they came up with the quantum theory of consciousness, basically saying that at some level, at the structural level of the neuron, is where these quantum effects can sort of take place and that's where consciousness lies and the rest of it. But, but there's no evidence for that and also, the temperatures at which these effects would have to occur, they'd have to be cooler than the temperature that the brain is currently at. So there's a lot of things that go against this idea, but again, people tend to want to put together something mysterious with something else mysterious, but as far as we know from the field of neuroscience, there's no evidence.
21:15 Speaker 11 Can I ask a follow-up question about this?
21:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, only just quick, but go.
21:19 Speaker 11 Doesn't this imply, this idea, does that imply then that consciousness has mass?
21:23 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I gotta say, you guys, as an engineer... Wait, wait. At some level, you can measure the, like with a logic analyzer or whatever, you can measure the voltage without screwing up the circuit. At some level.
21:36 Michael Ian Black? I don't understand what you're saying.
21:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wait, wait, wait, wait. If, one day, we establish consciousness as the sum of some energies within the brain, then by E equals mc squared, consciousness has a mass equivalent.
21:50 Michael Ian Black? That's what I'm saying.
21:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's it, okay.
21:52 Speaker 06 Thank you.
21:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yes, sir.
21:56 Speaker 11 Okay, so, tonight's discussion was mostly centered upon human neuroscience, for obvious reasons. But, there was a few mentions about neuroscience and consciousness and whatnot of other species. And we do know that some species are quite smart, and not just like our close relatives, like great apes, but also toothed whales, some birds like parrots and crows, and even, I recently saw the video that looked like it was unedited, of an elephant painting an elephant.
22:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Was that on YouTube?
22:26 Speaker 11 No, it was not.
22:28 Eugene Mirman? I saw a dolphin playing chess, is that real?
22:33 Speaker 11 My real question is, what might consciousness be? If it has arisen in different lineages of living things, what might consciousness be for them? And also, what might it be for, say, a possible alien life form?
22:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We got a Hindu here.
22:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So Heather.
22:55 Heather Berlin? Yeah.
22:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Heather, so conscious, big-brained mammals out there, can we learn about our consciousness by studying them? You work on lab rats to learn about other things.
23:05 Heather Berlin? I don't work on rats, I work on humans, but yeah.
23:07 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, you work on, excuse me. Did you hear what she said there? I don't work on rats, I work on humans.
23:11 Heather Berlin? Well, they're different, they're different.
23:12 Mayim Bialik? Different IRB protocol.
23:14 Heather Berlin? Exactly, totally different protocol.
23:17 Heather Berlin? So, they're two different things. There's intelligence, there's consciousness. A bee can have consciousness, it could feel a sensation, it can sense something, it can do something very simplistic. So you don't need to be able to play chess to be conscious. We know that in certain creatures, like in dolphins, in whales, in humans, there are certain types of cells called spindocells, especially in animals that are social, and that that might have some kind of link up to awareness, or at least some kind of a self-awareness. But until we have a fundamental theory of what consciousness is, we won't be able to know for sure what something has. We only can look at behavior. Even with humans, in the lab, you have to just ask them, "Did you see that or not? Were you aware of that or not?" That's the only measure we have.
23:52 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I saw a comic of two dolphins, one swimming next to another, and they're referring to the humans up on the shore, and one dolphin says to the other, they face each other and make noises, but there's no evidence they're actually communicating.
24:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yes, right here.
24:27 Speaker 11 Yes. First I have to say, what an awesome panel. And Bill, you did great in the debate.
24:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Thank you.
24:38 Speaker 12 I'm really starstruck just being here. But anyways, I want to ask to the neuroscientists and to Neil, because I think you've been onstage. I think a lot of you guys have been onstage with him. It's a rather controversial position held by Sam Harris.
24:51 Mayim Bialik? Who was one of my colleagues at UCLA. He was in my neuroscience class.
24:56 Speaker 12 Let me preface this by saying I think he's a brilliant orator. I think he communicates very well. I just know he's got some... He's a great thinker, too. But it's trying to parse out whether it's... Whether we agree or not, or whether there's consensus. And the question is about whether or not we have free will.
25:11 Heather Berlin? Oh, yeah, I can answer that.
25:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Free will.
25:14 Heather Berlin? So, as far as we know from neuroscience...
25:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Point is, Sam Harris recently published a tract on the assertion that we do not have free will, and the evidence cited for it comes from neuroscience.
25:26 Eugene Mirman? I must answer this, I have no choice. Sorry, you guys. Or do I?
25:38 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Free will, what's up?
25:40 Heather Berlin? So, as far as we know, it started with Benjamin Libet studies in the 1980s and all the way until modern studies now. But the sense of free will is kind of an illusion. Free will is an illusion in the sense that your brain decides first, and you become aware of it after the fact. And we know this from a whole series of studies for measuring neural activation. There's even studies now where you can put somebody in a scanner, and you could predict, for example, up to 10 seconds now before they're going to decide whether to go left or right, or press the left button or right button, by just reading their brain activation.
26:09 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The brain pre-decides.
26:10 Heather Berlin? Yeah, the brain... It's called the readiness potential. So, it kind of is gearing up, and you can start to read how the neurons are firing, and that it's going to go sort of toward one way or another. At a certain point, you can make that prediction well before the person becomes consciously aware that they've decided to go left or right.
26:25 Mayim Bialik? Big N, too. Talking big N.
26:26 Heather Berlin? Yeah, that's a big N there. Right. It's pretty well established that, yes.
26:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, but does that alone negate free will? Your brain has free will, presumably.
26:37 Heather Berlin? The brain decides. Your perception of "I made the decision" only comes after the brain has already kind of decided.
26:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, we are slaves?
26:47 Bill Nye? I made the decision is my brain that's eye-making the decisioning.
26:50 Heather Berlin? Right.
26:51 Bill Nye? So, let me ask you. What is this phenomenon? "I sure hope I don't see my keys in the trunk of my car and close the lid on it." What is that? You know what I'm talking about?
27:06 Eugene Mirman? You know you're getting keys in the trunk.
27:10 Bill Nye? You feel that you're gonna make a mistake, but you go ahead and make the mistake anyway.
27:13 Heather Berlin? So this is the thing, everybody's talking about consciousness, but much of our behavior, much of what we're doing is happening outside of awareness. So you're already halfway there before you're realizing, "Oh, where am I going? What am I doing?" And so if we had to be consciously aware of every single move we made, the brain doesn't have the capacity to do that. Consciousness has a limited capacity, but the unconscious processes seem to be unlimited.
27:35 Mayim Bialik? Which is not to say we also couldn't call that free will, right? In an unconscious way.
27:39 Heather Berlin? You're unconsciously, yes, you're unconsciously making decisions freely all the time.
27:45 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Good answer.
27:46 Mayim Bialik? Good. You did it.
27:50 Speaker 13 Sir, go. Okay, the question is kind of following up on the issue of awareness and heightened awareness and the use of psychotropic drugs and hallucinogenics in treatment of brain disorders.
28:03 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, okay. Yeah, so...
28:04 Speaker 13 And I have one other question. How many people on the panel are left-handed?
28:09 Mayim Bialik? Ambidextrous, yeah.
28:11 Heather Berlin? We'll get rid of them quickly.
28:14 Heather Berlin? Eugenics, no, just kidding.
28:16 Bill Nye? No, no. Once again, the left-handed people have certain advantages to certain things. It's hilarious old joke, you want your kid to grow up to be a left-handed relief pitcher because he or she is gonna, well, so far, make more money.
28:29 Heather Berlin? Actually, people who are left-handed have less lateralization, so language tends to be more lateral... It's not completely in the left brain, but there's more...
28:36 Bill Nye? Lateralization?
28:36 Heather Berlin? More activation in one hemisphere of the brain than the other. So like, language tends to be lateralized, or there's more activation in the left hemisphere. But people who are left-handed, there tends to be more activation in the right hemisphere, above and beyond those who are right-handed. So there's less lateralization, there's more sort of distributed across the brain activation.
28:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I'm about 20% left-handed.
28:57 Heather Berlin? But the point of the psychotropic drugs, the treatment, there were actually now studies that where I'm at, they're using ketamines as a treatment for depression, which used to be a club drug called Special K, and if you take too much of it, you can dissociate, it's not good.
29:09 Mayim Bialik? We're doing that later.
29:12 Mayim Bialik? In the name of science.
29:15 Speaker 06 Hey, man, you guys like wanna dissociate?
29:19 Heather Berlin? I got some Special K.
29:21 Mayim Bialik? But I think also, treatment for depression, it's sort of one set, but there is a field that's looking at sort of understanding altered states of consciousness, and our perception of altered states of consciousness probably beyond the scope of...
29:34 Heather Berlin? And even using drugs like ecstasy for therapy and treatment for PTSD.
29:38 Mayim Bialik? And therapeutically with well-trained and very elaborate supervision, it can be very helpful.
30:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Is there any mental state beyond the one that is alert and bright that can be chemically induced that is a greater mental state of awareness than the one you started with? Because it appears that every time you do anything chemical to the brain, it disrupts your ability to know what reality is.
30:26 Heather Berlin? First of all, even just in our non-drug-induced state, our perception is different than what's necessarily out there in reality. So there's all sorts of illusions. You don't see what's right in front of your face. So there's that. So anytime you add a certain kind of chemical, you change the neurochemistry of the brain. It's not going to say that you're going to be more aware. You're just going to have a different type of awareness and perception.
30:44 Mayim Bialik? But when you have things like synesthesia, when you have senses crossing from LSD, those kinds of experiences, these are kind of qualitative or quantitative questions, right? Yes, you're having more experiences that are much more complicated and much more trippy than what we're experiencing in our normal state. But I think that's subjective also.
31:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And you've read about these conditions?
31:05 Mayim Bialik? I have.
31:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah.
31:07 Mayim Bialik? In Life Magazine.
31:10 Speaker 06 So my follow-up question is, the way you see blue is different than the way I see blue.
31:18 Speaker 06 It's like, really red? Red, yeah. It's like, the same?
31:23 Speaker 14 On this side of the... Something I've always been fascinated with. You guys talked about telekinesis, mind-reading and all that. Where does déjà vu fall into the spectrum? We've all experienced it. We've all had that moment, or many moments, that we know it's coming, but we don't know why.
31:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Have you asked this before?
31:45 Bill Nye? I waited for one of you, I'm sorry.
31:47 Eugene Mirman? It's only because I'd already heard you ask that question.
31:52 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Have you heard George Carlin comment on Deja? He says, "Have you ever walked into a room and you were sure it has never happened to you before?" That's deja de. So what have you guys say about that?
32:03 Heather Berlin? Um, I'm not an expert in this area, but I think that something is triggered in the brain where you get a sense of familiarity and then you attribute that to what's happening around you. And there's also studies that show when you lose that sense of familiarity, some people think that a person they know very well is an imposter. So they think like their husband or wife is an alien. But, and sometimes that same neural circuit is activated in any situation and they feel like they've been there before, they've experienced it before.
32:25 Mayim Bialik? And that's, I think that's sort of speaking to the sort of redundancy that occurs in the brain, that the notion is that there are many ways to get to one destination. And sometimes pathways get triggered that have this sense of familiarity because you've literally activated a pathway that is redundant. I mean, everything's got to fit in there. Sure, there's miles and miles and miles, but there are certain things that are going to trigger redundant kind of pathways that also, again, have that sense of, "I've done this before." And your brain thinks it has.
32:50 Heather Berlin? Yeah, and also the other thing with that, memories are malleable. Each time you re-remember something, you can reconstruct it. It's different than the memory of your iPhone. The picture that you look at will stay the same, you know, 10,000 years from now. But every time you remember something, it slightly changes. So we can rewrite history in a way.
33:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The last question of the evening, yes.
33:09 Speaker 15 If someone was born in space, how would that affect the way their brain develops?
33:20 Speaker 06 That's great. Well played.
33:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? How old are you?
33:25 Speaker 15 Nine.
33:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You're nine? It's past my bedtime. Is it past your bedtime?
33:30 Eugene Mirman? When you see your parents, let them know they're irresponsible.
33:38 Eugene Mirman? Unless you drove here.
33:41 Eugene Mirman? Child genius.
33:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, that's a brilliant question, first of all. Second, I can take it only so far, maybe Heather and Mayim have some other comments on that. But, we evolved to be on Earth with our force of gravity and the kind of light that's here. So, there are all these things that shape what eventually we call common sense. Things fall down when you let go of them. In fact, the act of saying "let go" means to drop it. Whereas in space, letting go doesn't drop it. It just sort of stays there. So, your awareness of what is normal is really different. And we don't really know, it's kind of unethical at this point to just do that experiment.
34:28 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Let's see what happens to my kid after she's born in zero G. So, we don't really know. But, from the experiments done, there are things about your ears. Inside your ear, you get a sense of balance. At the fitness center, I do that little balance thing, so you can do it, sorry. So, your sense of balance comes about because you're in a gravity field. If you born in space and that's all you know, and then we put you here on Earth... Did you see the end of the movie Gravity? No. In it, Sandra Bullock, who's been a long time in space, she-
35:03 Eugene Mirman? The only accurate part of it.
35:07 Neil deGrasse Tyson? She crawls up on the beach and she realizes she hasn't had to walk in a long time. Her sense of balance had grown accustomed to being in zero G. And had forgotten what it was like to walk on Earth.
35:22 Bill Nye? Dr. T, I gotta, I gotta interject this.
35:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Do it.
35:26 Bill Nye? You don't know that.
35:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Don't know what?
35:28 Bill Nye? You don't know that if a kid were born in space, that he or she came back to Earth, couldn't figure it out. You don't know, like, he or she may have actually a whole different, deeper understanding of inertia and physics and friction than...
35:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I admit, we don't want to run that test.
35:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Uncle Bill is right, we don't know, okay?
35:52 Eugene Mirman? Our closest guess is Sandra Bullock.
35:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, yeah, best evidence is what happened at the end of the movie Gravity.
36:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Thank you all for coming to StarTalk.
36:07 Speaker 06 Thank you, Michael Stewart.
36:12 Speaker 06 I'm gonna hug her.
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