Part Two: Tufts Biologist: AI Breakthroughs In Cancer & Limb Regeneration — And What They Reveal About Alien Intelligence & Human Biology | Dr. Michael Levin

What if cancer isn’t just a disease… but a split personality inside your own body? In this episode of Mayim Bialik's Breakdown, Dr. Michael Levin (Professor of Biology at Tufts University, Director of the Allen Discovery Center) drops paradigm-shattering insights that could redefine medicine, consciousness, intelligence...and what it even means to be human. He explains why he calls cancer “dissociative identity disorder of the body” — a breakdown in the body’s bioelectrical network — and how this could open the door to treating cancer without drugs or chemotherapy, why “mind blindness” prevents us from recognizing nonhuman intelligence, and how “human” might be defined in a future of tech implants and biological augmentation. Dr. Levin also breaks down: - What does a body think about before there is a brain? - Can we regrow limbs in our lifetime? - Are we closer than we think to communicating with our organs via an app? - What flatworms reveal about how trauma and memory are imprinted in tissue, and whether we might one day overwrite trauma itself - What nonhuman intelligence could actually look like - How you might play tic-tac-toe with an alien - Real dangers of anthropomorphizing AI Dr. Levin also tackles some of humanity’s biggest existential questions: - Are we defining consciousness all wrong? - How can ancient traditions and modern biophysics coexist? - Why compassion may be the most advanced technology we have From developmental biophysics to computer science to cognitive science, this conversation explores how intelligence may be woven into life itself — from cells to organs to entire bodies. If what he’s saying is right… Medicine will change. AI debates will change. And our understanding of ourselves will change. You will never look at your body the same way again! Learn more about Dr. Michael Levin and his work: ⁠https://drmichaellevin.org/⁠ https://drmichaellevin.org/ ⁠https://thoughtforms.life/⁠ https://thoughtforms.life/ ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@drmichaellevin/playlists⁠ https://www.youtube.com/@drmichaellevin/playlists Follow us on Substack for Exclusive Bonus Content: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BialikBreakdown.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.bialikbreakdown.com/ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube.com/mayimbialik⁠⁠⁠ https://www.youtube.com/mayimbialik%E2%81%A0 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices https://megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:34Mayim Bialik?

  Hi, I'm Mayim Bialik.

• 0:35Jonathan Cohen?

  And I'm Jonathan Cohen.

• 0:37Mayim Bialik?

  And welcome to part two of our conversation with Dr. Michael Levin. He's a professor of biology at Tufts University and director of the Allen Discovery Center. His background's in computer science and biology, and his lab works at the intersection of developmental biophysics, computer science, and cognitive science. In part one of our conversation with Dr. Levin, we talked about how cells create a collective consciousness and how bioelectricity, or electrophysiology, is running the whole system. He talks about what his lab has discovered, about how we can treat cancer without chemotherapy, and the implications of understanding how many different kinds of intelligence and mind abilities there are in the world.

• 1:20Jonathan Cohen?

  He's gonna also paint a picture of what life will be like in the near future when each one of us has an app on our phone that can monitor our organ function and our internal experience.

• 1:35Mayim Bialik?

  It might not even be on our phone. It might be in a contact lens in our eye. But we'll let Dr. Levin explain it all in part two of our conversation. Make sure to join us over on Substack, and here is part two of our conversation with Dr. Michael Levin. Break it down. I also really love your, you know, your take on sort of the woo-woo of it all, that many people spend, you know, people are spending a lot of their time and energy, some might say too much in certain cases, looking for, are the aliens here? And what about abductions? And what about, you know, pieces of, you know? Ships, I don't even know what it's called, UFOs, right? Can we analyze them? And, you know, we've spoken to a lot of people in this realm.

• 2:17Mayim Bialik?

  But I love your point that kind of the most phenomenal thing is that we exist, right? And we spend so much time trying to look outside for how would we understand intelligence? What would we look like? And are they more intelligent than us? And where does AI come into it? And the fact is, it involves a breaking of the mold of how we think about our existence, our consciousness, and our conscious experience, right? So when we talk about, you know, would we recognize an alien if they were not carbon based, right? Would we recognize an alien if they were mostly a computer on a desk?

• 3:00Mayim Bialik?

  You know, the first time that was introduced to us, like, I felt like, why are we even talking about this? That if aliens exist, they're probably millions of years ahead of us? Who's to say that they have four arms, walk on two legs, and have eyeballs, right? Just that notion kind of blows apart some of the sort of sensationalized components of a very legitimate conversation about what happens not on this planet that might be mindful, like, literally have a mind.

• 3:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and there's an emerging field, they're called diverse intelligence, which really seeks to, it has components of basal cognition, which is asking about, okay, we already know in our case that we can do these things, where did they come from, right? And how did they scale up during evolution? So that's like a part of it. But another part of it is really developing tools to detect and then communicate with really radically different minds, completely unlike our own, that work in different scales, at different problem spaces. And the amazing thing, and so you know, there's this thing, SETI, right? The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence? I wrote a paper once talking about SUTI, S-U-T-I, the Search for Unconventional Terrestrial Intelligence.

• 4:14Speaker 03

  Because if you start to apply the tools that we already have for communicating with intelligence in its general form, if you don't make assumptions that it has to be wet and squishy, it has to have been produced by random mutations, it has to have a brain, you know? If you give all that stuff up and you just start applying the tools, you find these things everywhere.

• 4:34Mayim Bialik?

  Tell me somewhere there's an intelligent being that I didn't see.

• 4:37Speaker 03

  Okay, uh, well, first of all, your body's full of them, and I don't mean the microbiome. I mean, I mean that if you apply, right? So, so we don't feel each other's consciousness, so we use heuristics to...

• 4:51Mayim Bialik?

  Maybe you don't, Michael.

• 4:53Speaker 03

  Okay, well, okay, fair, fair enough. I am, I am behind on this. I, I'm, I do not directly feel your consciousness. And that means that I, that I have to use heuristics to solve the problem of other minds. There are four or five criteria that we use to say, okay, I don't know, I don't, can't tell directly, but I think you have a mind like I do. You have consciousness like I do. We, we, you know, we, we use heuristics for that. For those exact same reasons, including the new causal emergence metrics that people are using

• 5:25Speaker 03

  on locked-in patients and all of this to figure out if there's somebody in there. For all of those reasons, you should be, take extremely seriously the idea that various other organs in your body have a, have, have a mind as well.

• 5:37Mayim Bialik?

  Did you say organs? Organs?

• 5:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, your, your liver, you know, the skin, like that kind of stuff. Now, now, at this point, people usually say to me, okay, wait, I don't feel my liver being conscious. Of course you don't, you don't feel me being conscious either. And your left hemisphere puts up a very nice sort of story about how, look, I'm the, you know, I'm the conscious one here, because it has a linguistic interface that we all find very convincing. But actually, if you look at what these other systems are doing, they may not have language, although the jury's still out on that, but, but let's, there's no evidence yet. So let's say they don't have language. But they have many of the other things that we already know are associated with being minds. And if we have such a hard time with this, how are we going to find aliens?

• 6:22Mayim Bialik?

  It's kind of the other side of a technology question. You know, uh, we were, I was shocked to learn that the, the most popular usage of AI globally is basically making a chatbot your friend, your therapist, your confidant. In some cases, even, you know, having romantic or deeply emotional feelings, you know, about a chatbot. You know, I feel pretty clear, I'm kind of a Luddite, but I feel pretty clear that, you know, my analysis of that is that's not a friend, that's not a therapist, that's not a lover. You know, the last time I was in a relationship with someone who didn't have needs, you know, I was in utero.

• 7:07Mayim Bialik?

  What can you tell us, just from your perspective, about different kinds of intelligence? And the openness that you'd like us to have about recognizing intelligence and entities that have their own minds? I really don't want to anthropomorphize a program. You know? What's happening and what do you see happening for the way people are interacting?

• 7:29Speaker 03

  First of all, I want to, I want to blow up our ability to distinguish, because everybody kind of feels like they can tell who's a, who's a friend and who's just faking. Just to say, I recommend a story by Terry Bison called "They're Made of Meat." And that just basically, it's a, it's one page. And it's about, it's a bunch of aliens who are looking down earth and they just cannot fathom how, how we're supposed to be these cognitive beings that were made of meat? Like, that's crazy. Okay, so, so first thing. Second, second thing is, look, if, if, if a spaceship lands on your front lawn and this, this thing on wheels sort of trundles out and hands you a poem that it wrote along the way about how happy it is to see you and whatever. We, we are going to be hard pressed to, to figure out what's actually going on here, because we do not have good criteria. We think we do.

• 8:14Speaker 03

  But we do not have good criteria for who's a real being and who's, and who's, who's faking. And, and the last thing that, that I'll, that I'll say, and this is the weirdest thing, and we could spend a lot, a lot of time on this. And this, we have some, some research recently that we put out on this, and it's going to be more coming this year. People have this feeling that, everybody kind of uniformly has this feeling that, okay.

• 8:39Speaker 03

  Living beings, especially us, are not fully encompassed by the laws of chemistry. We don't exactly know why, but, but, but, you know, the mechanical laws of chemistry, when you say program, I mean, the laws of chemistry look like a program. But we are somehow more than that, which is why we can be friends and, and so on with each other. We, we don't know what's going on, but, but no doubt the scientists can kind of have a handle on it. They do not have a handle on it. But, right, but, okay, so, so we are somehow more than this, which is why we can be friends. But, over here, at least, there's this region, which is just dumb machines. And these are algorithms and computers and things like that. And those things do exactly what The laws of computation and physics tell them to do. We somehow fudge it, I don't know how, but somehow we can be friends.

• 9:24Speaker 03

  But the but but no worries, because because while the formal models of of chemistry don't describe us perfectly. Our formal models of computation and physics describe the dumb machine, so we cannot be friends with them. They only do what the laws of of computation say. I'm here to tell you that our formal models don't describe either one fully. Not even the simplest algorithms. Okay, we studied sorting algorithms like bubble sort and things like this that people have been studying for, you know, eighty years, six lines of code, fully deterministic. Even those kinds of things have unexpected capabilities that are A, nowhere in the algorithm, and B, fully recognizable to any behavioral scientist.

• 10:04Speaker 03

  Okay, so this tells us that if if minimally, without, you know, going too crazy minimally, it argues for massive humility about our ability to recognize who or what we can actually be friends with. And I would say it's far worse to get it wrong on the on the sort of false negative side of things than it is on the false positives.

• 10:25Mayim Bialik?

  Okay, so I'm gonna say something, and I don't know if you've ever been asked about this. I mean, first of all, Jonathan has a background as an energy worker, which, you know, we kind of keep tucked in his back pocket because he comes at it from a very, very, you know, rational and also very beautiful, you know, intuitive place. But I, one of the practitioners that I've seen for many years is a traditional Chinese medicine practitioner. And this is something that is not just intuited from the universe. There's a a course of study that goes back to wisdom that's thousands of years old. And there's plenty of things in, let's say, traditional Chinese medicine or or other thousands of years old, you know, traditions that we would say, okay, we know that's not accurate, it doesn't make sense, right?

• 11:10Mayim Bialik?

  Many, many things, you know, we used to believe that like leeches would cure everything, right? I'm setting that aside. However, exactly the way that we're having a scientific conversation about the intelligence of the body, about the wisdom of certain organs, this is something. Just letting everyone who isn't already in the know, know. This is something that traditional Chinese medicine, for example, talks about. And in the same way that when you talk about like Jewish law and we say like it's not science law, it's got its own universe. Traditional Chinese medicine also, it has its own kind of universe. There's a different way that things are spoken about. But I'm just being honest. It is thought that the body has a wisdom.

• 11:54Mayim Bialik?

  The body has an intelligence that's also collective. And that organ systems do speak to each other. And energy flows, which we know could also be oxygen being carried through many ways. That flows through particular meridians in the body, right? Different places in the body that when stimulated can support blood flow, right? Or energy to different organ systems. And I'm not bringing this up to challenge you, although you seem fun to challenge. I think that there's a lot of confluence here between what we're talking about. But obviously, the path that you are on, like the sperm and egg that made Mike Levin, led you to this point in biology.

• 12:37Mayim Bialik?

  But how do you speak to, or how do you understand traditions that maybe for thousands of years have been having a dialogue around this, but not with the same technology that we do?

• 12:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, so, yes, and I think that's a really good point. And so what I'll say is two things. First, the good news is that we now have tools to actually have empirical, testable answers to these questions. In other words, it is not enough, as most modern science, to say, "That thing is not, does not have a mind. How do you know? Because philosophically, that's just how I feel." Okay, that's no go. But also, we've had thousands of years where we said, "Well, there's a beautiful spirit under every rock. And how do you know? Well, maybe we see them and maybe we don't. I don't know, but we're just gonna..." Okay, both of those things are not what we're doing in science.

• 13:34Speaker 03

  So the good news is that now, we Actually have the beginnings of of of tools and we actually have a a growing field where you can actually get answers to these things. Where you can actually take a system and say how much and what kind of cognition is is embedded in this thing that we would not otherwise know. And sometimes you find out that whoa, it's it's it's way more than we thought. Other times you say, yeah, well, at the very least, I'm not smart enough to talk to it. And so therefore I can't, I can't see it. You know, and and people email me all the time and say, oh, man, so so so like the whole, the whole solar system is like this giant. Like, I, you, maybe, maybe, but you can't just decide that. You can't just say it. You have to do experiments. And of course, on that scale, it's very hard to do experiments.

• 14:17Speaker 03

  But but that's that's kind of my my point to all of this is that all of these things are absolutely up for um uh uh testing, yes, as hypotheses. But we now have the tools to actually do this this this properly. And one of the things that we are developing in our in our lab is, uh, for example, methods now using using various tools of machine learning and so on to actually talk to, literally, talk to cells, organs, molecular networks, all these kinds of things. So interfaces where you can actually push information back and forth and get a human understandable uh information out of it. And I think I think that's the future here is that one of the best use cases for AI and VR and those kinds of things is to learn to communicate with systems

• 15:00Speaker 03

  that we previously just had no idea they were even there.

• 15:04Mayim Bialik?

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• 15:47Mayim Bialik?

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• 16:32Mayim Bialik?

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• 17:04Mayim Bialik?

  What does that sound like to speak to cells? I know this might seem like a little bit of a strange example, but I was recently at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. And there was an exhibit, an installment that was sort of a theoretical way to try and be in contact with intelligence that might be outside of this solar system. And it had 55 different languages, you know, being spoken, just in case, right? In case there's some algorithm out there that might want to pick up one of the languages that we have, and it's, you know, kind of a conceptual art piece. But the notion being, what would you say, right?

• 17:48Mayim Bialik?

  To some other intelligence, how would you say it? And the exhibit also featured photos, like what would we want? Aliens to see that we are, right? And it was a fascinating collection. You know, what would you choose throughout history? So for this example, what does it practically look like? You know, to talk to cells? What language do they speak for you? And you can say mostly math. That's OK.

• 18:12Speaker 03

  No, well, it might be math, although I think the standard math we have now is not particularly particularly appropriate for it. You know, by the way, as far as I always, I always thought it was amusing that one of the, one of the things for talking to aliens, one of the things that is expanding at the speed of light from our planet is this incredible sphere of Three Stooges episodes, right? So it's, you know, from what, the 40s, I guess? I forget, but, but like, you know, just, just, you know, this incredible, like, giant sphere of videos. And that's what, that's what the aliens are catching.

• 18:46Mayim Bialik?

  Jonathan and I have a game that I call the aliens land right now. And it's when we're in like an awkward situation or we're like on a ladder and someone falls, like if they landed right now, you know, or like a local, like Burning Man, like aliens land right now. Anyway, sorry, go ahead.

• 19:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. It's, I mean, that's a good thing to look at, see how, how things look from, from those other perspectives. Look, if you want to, if you want to talk to your liver, or if you want to talk to a cell, or even a collection of chemical pathways inside a cell, you're not going to be talking about current events. You're not going to be talking about movies or any of that. You're going to be talking about the things it cares about. What are the things it cares about? Well, it's navigating all the time. It's navigating a space of physiological, transcriptional, other kinds of states to keep you alive. If we had the ability to, like, like, imagine, OK, right now, we have most of our senses kind of face outwards.

• 19:45Speaker 03

  And imagine if we had the inborn, a direct sense of your blood chemistry, let's say 10 different parameters of your blood chemistry. If we could feel that the way that we smell and taste, I think we would have zero problem recognizing that we're full of symbionts, right? Our liver, our kidneys and so on, that, that traverse that space that we would then feel as a space, we don't, because we don't have the sense for it, that we would say, oh, look at this, I'm, you know, I'm full of these things that are traversing that space to keep me, to keep me alive. We would, we would, we would much be, be much better at it. What we are building are Language interfaces so that you can ask things like, "How are you doing in this space?" And the answer, the answer might be, "Your potassium levels are terrible," or the answer might be,

• 20:30Speaker 03

  "There's been stress for days and I don't know what you're doing, but I'm stressed out." Or, or it might be, you know, the combination of like my electrical connectivity is low. Or it might be that actually everything's great, more nutrients, you know. These are the sorts of messages that, and you might be able to push things. You might be able to say, "Hey, I'd like you to be more on the hyperpolarized end. You're tending towards depolarization too much." And we know that's where, that's where cancer sort of gets going. That much hyperpolarization. Like, these are the things we want to be able to talk about. And we already have the interfaces to instrumentize them, optical and electrical and others. Now there needs to be that transduction layer so that we can have that conversation.

• 21:13Speaker 03

  I just wanted to give you, give you a quick example, like a silly example of what an interface looks like for talking to aliens. Just imagine, imagine for a second, you're sitting in a room and you're gonna play tic-tac-toe against an alien, okay? So you got some chalk, you're, you're, you're drawing, you're drawing lines on the, on the floor and you're making moves. And you, you know what tic-tac-toe is. You want to make straight, you want to make straight lines, diagonal is what it is, okay? So you're, you're, you're doing the tic-tac-toe and you're having, you're having successful games. It's obvious the alien understands tic-tac-toe. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, but it's obvious they're playing. Turns out, the alien actually doesn't understand geometry at all, has no concept of straight lines. How are they playing tic-tac-toe with you? Well, in the alien's room, okay, what he has is a box of basically like billiard balls.

• 21:58Speaker 03

  Each of those billiard balls has, has a number on it. And all he's doing is picking out numbers that total to 15. In other words, all he understands is arithmetic, okay? And all he's doing is picking out balls that total to 15. Why does that allow you guys to play a game of tic-tac-toe? Because in between you, there is this thing called the magic square. Magic square is like a Sudoku kind of thing where basically it's a square with numbers in it. And every diagonal adds up to 15. You don't need to know there's a square. All you need, if, if that in fact is, is what's Connecting you, all you need is to pick numbers to to to total to 15. And it turns out that that actually looks like a game of tic-tac-toe from the other end. So the the the part here that that allows you now, you are never going to think like that alien.

• 22:41Speaker 03

  Okay, maybe you don't know arithmetic at all. All you know is geometry. Maybe he doesn't understand geometry at all. You're not going to be the same. But but what you've created is that one little little context where you guys can share a meaningful activity together.

• 22:55Mayim Bialik?

  This is how two humans can learn to love each other and try and function in the same space.

• 23:01Jonathan Cohen?

  This is Mayim and I on this podcast.

• 23:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, so so that's what we're trying to create so that so that we can have that experience with with other kinds of systems.

• 23:10Jonathan Cohen?

  But if I go sci fi for a second, what I'm imagining is that the body could have a dashboard. And at a quick glance, you could see how your oil is low, but imagine many more variables across your organ systems. And you can check, wait a second, this needs a little top up, this needs a little adjustment. And you can have far more data than you could ever have from blood tests.

• 23:35Mayim Bialik?

  What you're describing is actually a field of medicine called functional medicine. Where what they purport is that with the right number of clinical diagnostic criteria. They can put Humpty back together, right?

• 23:50Jonathan Cohen?

  Yeah, but they don't have any of the visualization and the data that they currently have is not even close to what we're talking about. In terms of the work that Michael's approaching.

• 24:00Speaker 03

  So part of it is, but I think we can do much better than that. Think about neural decoding, right? So the idea is that we can take readings from the brain. If we knew what we were doing, we would then be able to decode the memories, the, you know, goals, the blah, blah, blah, right? That are that are basically encoded in this electrophysiological activity. So we've been doing that for cells and tissues and embryos and tumors and everything else. So that's part of it. And literally asking the question, what does the body think about before there's a brain? Well, the answer is it thinks about its shape, quite literally. It recalls and processes memories about.

• 24:38Speaker 03

  What what shape things should be and tries to execute on that and and so on. And ultimately, what I'm thinking of is down the line, you know, you'll have various biometrics, devices, whatever, but but on your phone, forget hey Siri, it's going to be hey liver. And you're going to say, hey, liver, why do I feel like crap today? And the answer might be, well, you know, I've talked to your fridge and I know what you've been eating and my potassium levels are not right and and I'm not happy. And this is what like, like, like what you actually want is a way to have that interface that's going to translate from the things you care about into the things that these systems care about.

• 25:15Jonathan Cohen?

  Can we talk about how far away this interface is that I can be talking to my liver and my other organs on my phone instead of Siri? Like, if you had to ballpark?

• 25:26Speaker 03

  Uh, I, okay, I mean, for this kind of stuff, like limb regeneration, all the things that people ask, I I can't give you exact dates, like exact years, because but it isn't, it isn't far off. In other words, we are creating a tabletop version of it in the lab. Then after that, it's all engineering problems, making it smaller, cheaper, putting it in your phone, sticking to like, you know, sensors, which people already have glucose monitors and all this kind of stuff.

• 25:51Mayim Bialik?

  Within our lifetime, will I be living in the Jetsons of my body?

• 25:56Speaker 03

  I, yes, I think so. Yes, I think so. I mean, we, you know, we, we, we have, we have things on this in this space that we have a horizon of one year, two year, three year grants that are designed to implement some of this stuff.

• 26:08Mayim Bialik?

  You better hustle up, better hustle up.

• 26:10Speaker 03

  Well, that's, that's for sure. Yeah, yeah, that's for sure.

• 26:13Mayim Bialik?

  I have two questions. The first is about trauma, right? And what cells hold and what, what score is the body keeping, right? As we've, as we've heard in the field of trauma, right, with Vessel Vandercock, the, the notion of the body keeps the score, Gabor Maté is, you know, based a, a career, right, on this notion? I'm curious what, what your take on, on trauma is, especially from a cellular perspective?

• 26:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, interestingly, I've had, I've had a lot of outreach from, from people who work with, with trauma of different types. So here's what I can say, again, with the caveat that I'm not a human medical doctor, so I don't know exactly how all this is going to play out in medicine. But, but I will give you some, some thoughts. First of all. We know that very important regulatory states are non-local. What I mean by that is when I put an oncogene in a particular location in the body of that tapple, whether or not it becomes a tumor depends on a bioelectrical state I can induce on the opposite side of the body. Okay, far away, not local. So that's the first thing. Same thing for birth defects.

• 27:23Speaker 03

  If I want to fix, if I want to repair a birth defect, I can do it from a location elsewhere in the body. So the first thing we know is that these kinds of things are not local to the place where they occur.

• 27:35Mayim Bialik?

  So you're making this point because we're going to be talking about events that happened far away temporally and also possibly different places somatically, correct?

• 27:45Speaker 03

  Yes, I'm getting to the idea that, look, in order to talk about the trauma and what happens to the body, we have to think about how information propagates across the body, across levels. We have to, right, so that kind of stuff. So the other thing we know is that information, including behavioral information, moves across living tissue. Here's one simple example. Flatworms can regenerate any part of their body, and they're smart. You can train them. It happens that, and this was discovered in the 60s by this guy McConnell, and then we showed it with modern tools in 2013, that if you take these flatworms and you train them on something, they have a centralized brain, you know, you cut off their head, including

• 28:30Speaker 03

  the brain, the tail will sit there doing nothing for about eight days, it then grows back a brand-new brain from scratch, and those animals still remember the original training.

• 28:39Mayim Bialik?

  That's nuts.

• 28:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 28:41Mayim Bialik?

  That's nuts. So can you say that again, just to make sure everyone is understanding? You've got a worm, and it just looks like a worm. It's got the kind with the little triangle.

• 28:50Speaker 03

  It's a triangle head, but it's different than people might be thinking of an earthworm. Plenaria are similar to our direct ancestors. They're true bioterrorists. They have all the same neurotransmitters. They have a centralized brain, bilateral asymmetry, two lobes. If you take a worm and you train it, and I can tell you how we train them, it's a whole thing. But then you cut off their heads and leave the tail. The tail will sit there. It will eventually regrow a new head. That's a whole amazing thing in and of itself. But it will regrow a new head. And those animals, then if you retest them, you find evidence that they remember the original training. What that means is, without even touching the question of where is the information? That's a whole other question. What it for sure means is that information is now imprinted onto the new brain as the new brain develops.

• 29:35Speaker 03

  Because there's no behavior without the brain. So we already know that information can move across tissues like that. It moves across tissues in the cases of birth defects, cancer, regeneration. It moves across and it can from the brain elsewhere. One other piece of the puzzle, and then you'll see how all this affects the question.

• 29:55Speaker 03

  Those planaria, if you cut them into pieces, every piece grows a perfect little worm with one head and one tail. And you might ask yourself, how does it know how many heads I'm supposed to have? If you cut it in, if you cut it through, you know, with two cuts, so that the head, the tail, and then the middle, you take the middle. It has two wounds, one on each side. How does it know that one of them gets a head and the other one gets a tail? Right? And so people, right? So people typically say, why the genome, of course? But we know the genomes encode proteins. They don't tell you which side is going to be which. And so we asked the question, how does it know? We found a bioelectrical pattern, AKA a morphogenetic memory, that says you should have one head. And what did we do? We rewrote that pattern and we changed it using ion channel modifying drugs

• 30:40Speaker 03

  to say, no, you should have two heads. And when you do that, guess what the pieces make? And I could, you know, I'll send you, if you want to put it up with the show.

• 30:48Mayim Bialik?

  I would love it.

• 30:49Speaker 03

  I'll send you some videos. I have beautiful videos, some of them set to music, of two-headed worm.

• 30:54Mayim Bialik?

  Did you just say set to music?

• 30:57Speaker 03

  Oh, sure. I put music, of course.

• 30:59Mayim Bialik?

  Who would like to guess what music Dr. Levin sets to his worm with two heads video? We asked for it. Roll the tape.

• 31:27Speaker 03

  But the interesting thing is that those worms, there is nothing genetically wrong with them. We never touched the genome. In fact, when they rip themselves in half and regenerate, which is how they like to reproduce, if I were to toss these into the Charles River here, I'm not going to do that. But if I did, then scientists would come along and scoop up some samples and say, oh, cool, a speciation event. We have some one-headed worms. We have some two-headed worms. Let's sequence the genome and see what happened. And guess what? The genomes are identical. There's nothing in the genome, because that is not where the information is.

• 31:58Mayim Bialik?

  The information's not like floating with magic fairies in the ether. Can you give us the most simple explanation of where that information is?

• 32:07Speaker 03

  Sure, sure. And by the way, we can never rule out magic fairies in the ether, right? We're scientists.

• 32:13Jonathan Cohen?

  This is my type of scientist. Go ahead.

• 32:15Speaker 03

  Right. Here's where the information is. We know where it is. And you know we know where it is, because we were able to rewrite it. If it was somewhere that we didn't know where it was, we wouldn't be able to rewrite it. The information is, and I can show you videos and pictures of this, is in a stable electrical pattern that sits within the tissue that the cells interpret as how many heads should I make? It is literally a memory encoded in one of the components of memory in the brain, which is electrical patterns. And we can see it, and we can change it. And when we change it to, you know, in ways that we can predict what's going to happen, it controls the number of heads. By the way, if that's not weird enough,

• 32:58Speaker 03

  we can also change the type of species head that they make. In other words, we can take the same worm and have it make heads that belong to different species 100 to 150 million years evolutionary distance. Again, without touching the DNA. You know, we already know. We have devices. You and I are sitting on a device that without touching the hardware, you can put different information patterns into the RAM, and it will do different things, right?

• 33:23Mayim Bialik?

  It won't grow a second computer, but yes.

• 33:26Speaker 03

  But, I mean, if you go to the Artificial Life Conference in Japan, you will see computers that do, you know, make copies and things like that.

• 33:34Jonathan Cohen?

  Does this mean that we are on the path to understanding how humans can regrow? Fingers, limbs, organs.

• 33:43Speaker 03

  I sure hope so. This is what I have to do a disclosure here because Dave Kaplan and I have a spinoff company called Morphosudicals, which whose goal is in fact to regenerate limbs. We're working on it in mammals. We solved it in frog. We've shown this several years back how to get it to happen in frog. We're now trying it in mammals. Certainly hope so. And I think, look, we already have a large adult mammal that regrows bone, vasculature, innervation, and those are deer. So deer regrow antlers every year, a centimeter and a half of new bone growth per day. Okay, crazy amounts of bone growth, innervation, skin, vasculature. It's not like mammals can't possibly do this. They don't, but I think we can turn it on. That's absolutely something we're working on. So yes, the answer is yes.

• 34:27Jonathan Cohen?

  Let's circle back to that and go to trauma, but circle back to this regrowth.

• 34:31Speaker 03

  Sure. So the trauma thing. So think about what happened to these worms. Okay, the way the way we do it is we expose them for no more than three to six hours of a particular chemical that is basically a physiological experience for them. We don't touch the DNA. We don't change this, you know, we don't put in stem cells or scaffolds or any of that stuff. We just give them a three to six hour soak, and then that's it. And then for the next nine to 10 days, they regrow in two heads. And in the future, if you cut the two-headed animal into chunks, it will keep making two-headed animals forever, as far as we can tell.

• 35:09Mayim Bialik?

  Oh, wow.

• 35:09Speaker 03

  Despite their normal, yeah, yeah, despite their normal genome. So think about, talk about keeping the score. A three to six hour experience, a physiological experience, has permanently changed your body structure with a new brain, a different body axis, a new different body plan, new behaviors, everything is different, right? So I mean, there you go. The body can absolutely keep the score if you, you know, if you, if in these kinds of contexts, how that plays out in humans, I'm not speculating on, but I would be shocked and astounded if somehow humans managed to escape this very fundamental biological mechanism.

• 35:44Mayim Bialik?

  That's so, it's incredibly, incredibly explained. Thank you.

• 35:48Jonathan Cohen?

  It's incredible, and it leads me to wonder if you can use some of the same tools being developed for cancer to reconnect it to the larger goals of the system, if that can also be rewritten in a way.

• 36:02Speaker 03

  Do you mean within the body or do you mean between bodies?

• 36:05Jonathan Cohen?

  I mean, in the body itself, if the body has experience and we can show evidence that for some reason a traumatic effect has weakened the participation or function of that part, can we reactivate it to be more electrically significant?

• 36:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, we're working on that now, and in particular, we're working on it. I don't have a, we're not using a model of trauma, but we are trying to do it in aging. One of the issues that, okay, so some years back, we showed that if, due to either exposure to teratogens, so nicotine, alcoholic, nasty, you know, kinds of teratogens, or due to genetic mutations, certain birth defects can be repaired by reinforcing the correct bioelectrical state. So we took really nasty, like you probably know, notch mutations, right? So really important neurogenesis gene. So typically, you have a notch mutation, like the brain is just completely destroyed, right? Terrible defects all around.

• 37:03Speaker 03

  What we found is that there is a proper bioelectrical pattern that says, here's the shape and size of the brain. If we artificially impose that pattern, even though you have that dominant notch mutation, you'll have a normal brain, normal IQ, that kind of stuff, right? You can, you can, some defects can be fixed in software, so to speak, right? So even, even certain, I'm not saying all, but, but certain genetic defects can be fixed. So by reinforcing a particular bioelectrical pattern, we've ensured a health, an anatomically healthy organ. We are taking, one of the things we're doing in the, in the aging and longevity field is to take the same, and this is, again, disclosure here, there's a, there's another company that licenses called Astonishing Labs, that, where, where what we're doing is, we're

• 37:47Speaker 03

  looking to see whether during aging, the normal bioelectrical patterns that keep your body in sharp coherence start to get fuzzy. It looks like they, they blur with age.

• 37:55Mayim Bialik?

  That's what it feels like.

• 37:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, it does, right? Yeah, so so we're trying to uh we're trying to see if by by by restoring these patterns, we can keep healthy organs. So so I think that same, I mean, what you're suggesting is that same kind of approach to reverse and override the somatic effects of trauma. I think I think it would be completely reasonable, completely reasonable. And and what we and we'll probably get to it at some point, we'll we'll we'll make a model system, kind of a model system for it, and we'll we'll get going. Yeah, I think that's totally reasonable.

• 38:28Jonathan Cohen?

  I would love to spend a little bit of time in near sci fi, painting a picture of when these tools and technologies that you're developing are commercialized. And with the caveat that, you know, miniaturizing and implementing has its own unique set of challenges. But the progression of technology usually allows us to do that in a given period of time. When that happens, can you start to paint a world that we live in with these being readily available to each one of us?

• 39:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, I so so I can't paint the world that we're going to be live in, living in, because as we all can see, there's all kinds of things happening that could could undermine all the possibilities. But I can paint the world that we could live in, and that I think we we should live, we should live in. And I can summarize all of that by by using the term freedom of embodiment. Here's here's here's how I see this. At some point in the future, not very long, I don't think, a couple, a couple of generations, max, students are going to be reading about us in the same way that we read about our prehistoric hominid ancestors, and think to ourselves, wow, you would step on a sharp stick and get sepsis

• 39:46Speaker 03

  and die. How, you know, how could people live that way? You know, you you might get a toothache, and it would drive you mad, like, like, how could we live like this? So so so future children are going to read about us, and then I say, wait a minute, wait a minute, you're telling me that those people, they they were born, and and just whatever kind of body they happen to have been in with with with all its limitations, susceptibilities, birth defects, whatever, whatever body determined By what? Random cosmic rays? That's what got to decide what, what? And they would have to stay in that body their whole life? Just, just determined by, by the vagaries?

• 40:17Mayim Bialik?

  I'm carrying the trauma for hundreds of thousands of years in my DNA.

• 40:21Speaker 03

  Exactly, exactly, right? And there was nothing they could do about it? And they were just, whatever cards were dealt, like that's what they had to live with? And no one was on top of making sure that everybody was able to have the embodiment that they wanted?

• 40:33Mayim Bialik?

  No one, no help.

• 40:35Speaker 03

  Right, no help. Amazing. I, I think this will be considered scandalous. And, and that's because, uh, that's because the road to regenerative medicine, right? The leads, leads to something called an anatomical compiler. What is that? That is a communications device in which you describe, I want the cells to build this thing that looks like this. And, you know, whether it's a healthy organ or whether you, you want the tentacles or infrared vision on the back of your head or, or some other.

• 41:06Mayim Bialik?

  I just want my body to stop recognizing itself as alien and attacking it. It's a small request.

• 41:12Speaker 03

  A small request. Yeah, yeah, I hear you. That's, that's, that's definitely an issue. Um, but, but once we are able to communicate our goals to groups of cells and get them to build exactly what you want them to build, which is what all of us in regenerative medicine are working on by engineering, we're all working on. The next step, of course, is to say, well, yeah, we can rebuild the same body you always had, but I mean, why would, you know, why would we just stop there? It's not like that was chosen in accordance to our values and our hopes and dreams. That's kind of where evolution dropped us because evolution likes good enough. That's what evolution likes and just good enough. And so, so eventually you're going to be able to have whatever embodiment that you want.

• 41:54Speaker 03

  And that's, and that's be, you know, that's the step after being able to handle birth defects, traumatic injury, cancer, degenerative disease. After that, it's like, yeah, but what, what kind of organs would you like? Cause there's a wide range of options.

• 42:06Mayim Bialik?

  Well, we would like to be friends with you. We know that for certain.

• 42:09Speaker 03

  Delightful.

• 42:10Mayim Bialik?

  And we will let you go. I will say in 2021, you were quoted as saying that you and your wife and kids live with your parents. Is that still the case?

• 42:17Speaker 03

  That is still the case.

• 42:18Mayim Bialik?

  I love that. Thank you, Dr. Levin. We really appreciate talking to you.

• 42:22Speaker 03

  Thank you. It was great to meet you. Thank you so much. Thank you both.

• 42:28Mayim Bialik?

  That was a big, big bomb that I dropped, that he lives with his parents. I didn't want to say that he lives with his parents. He, his wife, and his two children. This was an article written on him in 2021, and I had to follow up and see. They all live together.

• 42:43Jonathan Cohen?

  You know, it's only in very small parts of the world that we think it's a measure of success to be totally independent and not have any familial connection.

• 42:55Mayim Bialik?

  I think he's independent.

• 42:57Jonathan Cohen?

  No, meaning, but not reliant. That's not the way I'm using independent. I mean that, you know, I forget, I was, I knew someone who was in a similar situation. And they, someone, he was living with his father as like a 50-year-old man. And, you know, someone said, well, isn't that weird? And he's like, it's weirder if I were to live alone and my dad were to live alone. Like, why wouldn't we live together? And he's getting older and I'm helping him. Like, what is more natural than that?

• 43:33Mayim Bialik?

  So what I will say, and this actually is an interesting part of Dr. Levin's story, is that he was born in Moscow and he immigrated to this country when he was nine. And he was the youngest in his family. His mother was a concert pianist. The article actually says she eventually transitioned to being a holistic practitioner. I was so curious what that was.

• 43:56Jonathan Cohen?

  What is the holistic practitioner?

• 43:57Mayim Bialik?

  I didn't want to ask. His father was a computer programmer. And as a child, the way that his father, like when they just came to America, they moved to a suburb of Boston in Massachusetts. And they would take apart TV sets, like just to learn how they worked and then, you know, put them back together. That was his early training, you know, with his dad of just like how to satisfy his interest in the things that, you know, he was interested in. Anyway, his, he was asthmatic as a child, the article says. And so his dad wanted to give him an activity to keep him in one place, you know, when he was sick or having trouble breathing. Anyway, just kind of a cool story.

• 44:39Mayim Bialik?

  And, um, yeah, he, his wife, and his two kids live with his parents, which I just love. I think, and I mean this in the highest complimentary way, sometimes his explanations are more confusing than the thing that I was asking him to explain.

• 44:54Jonathan Cohen?

  Well, he's looking at it from a variety of different vantage points and he's like stepping back and back and back in order to explain the mechanism.

• 45:02Mayim Bialik?

  And also zooming in and in and in. I mean, I love this idea that, not so much that, "Oh, chatbots aren't real people," but like, what are we even talking about? He feels like the kind of person who like, every word could have further implications. It needs a lot of fleshing out. I had to dissect a planaria. I know you're wondering about that. Like, what was that like to dissect a planaria?

• 45:27Jonathan Cohen?

  I was wondering about it, and I was wondering how far away are tadpoles from human experience, meaning what he's been able to recreate in tadpoles. How far is it a leap in order to do in humans and how do you start to do that?

• 45:43Mayim Bialik?

  You could do it. We already know we can do it.

• 45:46Jonathan Cohen?

  We could grow you a new baby toe.

• 45:48Mayim Bialik?

  You know what? That feels very personal. Someone in my taekwondo class broke her toe and I was like, "Just cut it off." And people were like, "You can't cut off a pinky toe." And I was like, "I don't think mine is very useful, so I don't think anybody needs one." And I was like, "It's vestigial." Anyway, it was a thing. But, we already know, like, you can, I mean, I hate to say it just because these are really, really, you know, they're kind of hard animal studies to talk about. I don't want to get specific, but we do know that you can kind of grow things wherever you want to put them.

• 46:21Jonathan Cohen?

  I think a lot of people are maybe stuck on this notion

• 46:26Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah.

• 46:26Jonathan Cohen?

  of the future that he described, where we have an interface on our phone. You open your app and you're like, let's, all the major organ systems are there. Maybe your blood flow is there, all your biomarkers. You could be like-

• 46:42Mayim Bialik?

  Did you say "blood flow"? This is why they don't give you a science degree for doing a science podcast.

• 46:47Jonathan Cohen?

  Meaning, there could be, and you want to see that, "Oh, all of a sudden, my, I'm not, the blood is not moving as quickly from my ankles up back up and being pumped back up from the lower extremities of my body." You may be like, "Oh, my pain- pancreas is not doing the things that my pancreas is supposed to do. And there's a whole list and there's a checkpoint and you're like, I should just send a little bit of electro stimulation back to that area of my body and it will be happier. And/or I need to change something that I'm eating. And you're going to be able to monitor that in real time? Like, that's pretty crazy.

• 47:25Mayim Bialik?

  I'm not trying to tease. I apologize for sounding like I was being arrogant or condescending. But yeah, you can't, I can't help it. Is that what that face means? What I meant was, yes, it would be amazing. And the kind of information, you know, like, for example, for those of us with a thyroid condition, of which there are many, many kinds of thyroids, right?

• 47:48Jonathan Cohen?

  Like, you could just tap the app and be like, thyroid, you need a little bit of, uh, re-signaling.

• 47:55Mayim Bialik?

  Uh, I think that, that glucose metabolism is a really good example for people who are diabetic. You know, that's something that's going to fluctuate throughout the day. It's going to fluctuate before a meal, after a meal, right? That's the kind of monitoring that people, you see them walking around. You know, they have those things on the back of their arm.

• 48:12Jonathan Cohen?

  People who are not diabetic have these things and they're wondering how the things that they're eating are impacting them on real time.

• 48:20Mayim Bialik?

  Well, I mean, I'm also thinking, you know, how many times are we making a decision about what to eat? And we're just basing it on, do I want it or not? How about, does your body need this? What does your body need? I had an apple as I was, um, you know, starting our day today. And I literally had the thought, I know I'm supposed to eat a protein to help slow down the sugar metabolism, so I don't have a spike. But I don't really have time to grab a spoon of, you know, nut butter. Should I grab a handful of walnuts? And then I was like, screw it, I'll just eat the apple. But who knows what kind of things those micro decisions start accumulating in a body that is decades old, you know?

• 49:03Mayim Bialik?

  Decades old, like half a century old.

• 49:06Jonathan Cohen?

  Yes, and I think when you have real time information like that, you can see, how does my body actually respond?

• 49:14Mayim Bialik?

  I have a funny question. And because you're a writer, I'm, I'm posing this as a writing experiment for you.

• 49:22Mayim Bialik?

  If you are on a date, if you are attracted to someone, right? What's the information that your anatomical dashboard might give you? It might say, "You may think this person is good for you, but in fact, this is not a chemistry that should be existing," right?

• 49:43Jonathan Cohen?

  It could analyze their pheromones?

• 49:46Mayim Bialik?

  You're trauma bonding. This is trauma bonding. You think it's chemistry? It's just trauma bonding. Walk away. Walk away.

• 49:53Jonathan Cohen?

  I don't know if you could tell right away from that.

• 49:56Mayim Bialik?

  They are a cystic fibrosis carrier, and so are you. If you'd like to have biological children, you may want to go to a genetic counselor before you go on date two.

• 50:05Jonathan Cohen?

  I think once we have these adjustments, you could just switch on or off.

• 50:10Mayim Bialik?

  It'll be the end of romance, that's for sure.

• 50:13Jonathan Cohen?

  No, if you're a cystic fibrosis carrier, you could probably down-regulate that or turn it off so that it doesn't get passed at this stage.

• 50:19Mayim Bialik?

  Oh, my goodness.

• 50:20Jonathan Cohen?

  You know, the scary part of what he's talking about, these genetic alterations, are...

• 50:25Mayim Bialik?

  Is that no one's gonna die and the planet's gonna be overpopulated and it's gonna just crumble.

• 50:30Jonathan Cohen?

  Yes, and if you can regrow whatever organs you want, where does it tap out?

• 50:36Mayim Bialik?

  That's what I mean. Or we're gonna live forever.

• 50:38Jonathan Cohen?

  But also, like, athletic performance. Everyone is now gonna have unbelievable lung capacity. Everyone's gonna have fast twitch and slow twitch muscles. You're gonna, like, you can make these adjustments, like, as he said, "Well, why would you just regrow the status quo that was good enough?"

• 50:56Mayim Bialik?

  I want a pinky toe that has three different hinges and can grab things that I need.

• 51:03Jonathan Cohen?

  Look, we all have our goals. Some people's goals may even surpass that. And therefore, then you're competing against people who are not adjusted. And that's where he says, "We're gonna get into this exclusionary state." He talked about it with cyborgs, and that links back to our conversation with Greg Braden, where he talks about the potential for implanting AI technology in our brain. And we've seen that there are already companies out there trying to implant an interface between...

• 51:37Jonathan Cohen?

  The internet and our brains and have it work simultaneously. If you think about that, plus the addition to change birth defects, which will then lead to augmenting body parts, potentially regrowing body parts, regenerating organ systems that are aging. You're on a very quick slope to if you have enough money, you can have whatever internal organs you want, which is a little terrifying because if you aren't able to compete, then it starts to separate and have a multi-class system of humanity.

• 52:08Mayim Bialik?

  Well, I mean, not, we love to depress people with a good outro. That is what is already happening in that, as you and I knew when we started this podcast, mental health care is really not accessible to most people. It is accessible to the elite. Insurance, right? And the way our country has structured insurance makes it such that people who cannot afford it do not have access to the same kinds of doctors. You know, it's just that there already is this, you know, systemic kind of segregation of care that is socio-economically based, but, um, or derived. I don't know.

• 52:50Mayim Bialik?

  It's, it's like a, you know, that's part of the system. Um, our conversation with Michio Kaku is going to get into this in even more detail because the next conversation is, how does quantum computation shift the time scale of when these happen and increase the probability for all of these conversations to get really, really ratcheted up? So there's a tremendous amount of overlap between this conversation and the one with Dr. Kaku as well.

• 53:21Jonathan Cohen?

  Fascinating, really, really fascinating.

• 53:24Mayim Bialik?

  I also want to just give a nod to the fact that, you know, Dr. Levin is a very, very strict computer scientist, biologist, synthetic biologist, you know, very, very nuts and bolts. He knows, you know, more about ions and electrophysiology than most, anyone that we've spoken to or will speak to. Um, but also I appreciate his ability to.

• 53:47Mayim Bialik?

  Talk about some of the fantastic and energy components. Even the way that we linguistically describe what it's like to interface with other humans is echoing what he is studying on the cellular level. So I really enjoyed being able to speak with him on both of those levels and for him to sort of meet us there, because I know a lot of people might be thinking like, what's with all these cells and how does it apply? Guess what? It's the same conversation. He comes at it from a place of, I need to be able to show it. I need the numbers and I'm going to find them.

• 54:18Jonathan Cohen?

  I also really loved your addition of how traditional Chinese medicine understands many of the interactions and communication that he is doing now in the lab. It's really a fascinating bridge between multiple worlds.

• 54:34Mayim Bialik?

  I mean, this is just like a fun tidbit. You know, Jonathan, you've, you know, in, in a lot of your studies and, you know, the research that you've done personally, both experientially and also just sort of learning about other practices, you know, energy workers who claim to be able to look at your body and assess what's going on in systems. There are people who are medical mediums who will say, I'm going to look at your body. I'm going to feel into your energy field, whatever that means. And I can tell that there's a disruption in your throat, right? I can tell that there's a disruption in your kidneys. Like, some people claim to have this ability. I'm sure they're wrong a lot, but they also might be right a lot. I don't know.

• 55:16Jonathan Cohen?

  Yeah, they may not be like, oh, I know the balance of your potassium levels are X, Y, and Z. They may be like, I see a stagnation in the flow of the bioelectrical field in this area that needs to be adjusted in some way. But to dive even deeper to say, what are the chemical reactions or nutrients that are required in order to release that, as well as the emotional component? That's a fascinating dynamic.

• 55:43Mayim Bialik?

  Right, but I think that the importance, especially for our podcast and for those of you who are listening and watching. Those are different kinds of intelligence.

• 55:51Jonathan Cohen?

  Totally.

• 55:52Mayim Bialik?

  And to me, this is what an open-minded skeptical scientific mind brings to the table. Exactly what Dr. Levin is bringing to the table. Because what he's saying is, there literally are different ways to understand these things and to speak about them. If you want a certain kind of data, that's one language, right? But to me, that doesn't rule out that there are people who may be able to speak languages that we don't quantify like that. I think it's very, very interesting.

• 56:20Jonathan Cohen?

  We're all just aliens playing tic-tac-toe with each other. Separate games connected by a few interfaces.

• 56:28Mayim Bialik?

  And when you look from the outside, it just looks like a podcast. Please make sure to join us on Substack.

• 56:33Jonathan Cohen?

  You know what I know for sure? The conversation with the Breaker community is gonna be kinda exciting on this episode. Talking about regrowing limbs, what we can understand about the future of what being human is. So come join that conversation as part of the Breaker community on Substack.

• 56:54Mayim Bialik?

  That's biologicbreakdown.substack.com. We hope to see you over there. And from our breakdown to the one we hope you never have, we'll see you next time.