It’s Alive?! Frankenstein & Consciousness with George Mashour and David Andrijevic

Can we bring people back from the dead? Neil deGrasse Tyson and Chuck Nice discuss restoring dead cells, the nature of consciousness, Frankenstein's monster, zombies, and more with neuroscientist, David Andrijevic and consciousness expert, George Mashour.

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

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk. This is the Halloween show. Chuck, always good to have you there, co-host.

• 0:20Chuck Nice?

  Always.

• 0:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Stand-up comedian and actor. Actor.

• 0:25Chuck Nice?

  Acting like a comedian.

• 0:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, is that what that was? Okay.

• 0:28Chuck Nice?

  Yes, it is.

• 0:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So today, we're gonna talk about zombies, but in a more sort of analytic, scientific context. We're gonna talk about ghosts. We're gonna talk about re-animating putrefied life. Is that it?

• 0:43Chuck Nice?

  Ooh.

• 0:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or just dead life, right? If that phrase can ever even be uttered, such as what?

• 0:49Chuck Nice?

  My lord, by now he stinketh.

• 0:54Chuck Nice?

  Little Lazarus reference there.

• 0:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, is that what that was? Okay.

• 0:57Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, yeah, you know, that's...

• 0:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, of course, I...

• 1:00Chuck Nice?

  I think that, I think Jesus made the first zombie, and people don't even realize.

• 1:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 1:04Chuck Nice?

  He doesn't get credit for that. Jesus made the first zombie.

• 1:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, you nailed that one. There it is.

• 1:10Chuck Nice?

  Yep.

• 1:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There it is.

• 1:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that was before he became a zombie himself.

• 1:16Chuck Nice?

  Well, there you go.

• 1:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, he was spotted in town after he rose from the dead.

• 1:20Chuck Nice?

  Send, send your letters to Neil deGrasse Tyson. Chuck Nice did not call Jesus a zombie.

• 1:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so anyhow, neither you nor I have any expertise in this field, so we're...

• 1:33Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 1:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We have two guests. We're gonna start off with one first, David Andradevich. I think, did I pronounce your name right, David? Close enough, close enough. Thank you for saving me.

• 1:44Chuck Nice?

  Andradevich.

• 1:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, actually, this was, this was spot on, yeah. Oh, God, Andradevich. Yes, yes. You're associate research scientist in neuroscience at the Yale School of Medicine. So you're coming to us from, I presume, New Haven, Connecticut? Yes, yes. Yeah, and you co-authored a recent study, and you managed to restore key cellular functions in the cells of a pig that had been dead for an hour.

• 2:15Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 2:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whoa, okay, Frankenstein pig is what that is.

• 2:19Chuck Nice?

  Frankenpig.

• 2:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Frankenpig.

• 2:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But did it have electrodes and like, you know, a Tesla coil? And

• 2:29Chuck Nice?

  Have bolts in its neck?

• 2:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know bolts in its neck. You had to throw your arms up and said, "It is alive!"

• 2:37Chuck Nice?

  And then right afterwards, you go, "It's alive! It's now bacon!"

• 2:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, I need to disappoint you there.

• 2:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, please straighten us out. I mean, you know, our imagination was just flying there. So what did you actually do? Please?

• 2:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it didn't look as cool as you described now. It's basically what we've done is we developed this technology that is capable of restoring certain cellular functions one hour after that, as you said. And how we achieved that is basically, and actually, what makes this technology possible is two components. So one is a machine perfusion device, which is similar to those heart and lung machines that you hear about in clinics, sometimes called ECMO machines, or which stands for extracorporeal membrane oxygenation.

• 3:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I was gonna say that, but I knew that.

• 3:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tough. Okay, go on.

• 3:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's basically like a heart and lung machine, right? And then we also have, we also made the synthetic perfusate, which is something, sort of a synthetic blood, which we mixed with animals' blood and restored the circulation first in order to achieve this kind of bringing cells healthy again, making cells healthy again, and so on.

• 4:11Chuck Nice?

  So you kind of created some blood, created a blood flow.

• 4:17Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 4:18Chuck Nice?

  Sent oxygen to cells and thereby revived the cells themselves because that's what they need. You kind of fed them and then they kind of came back to life.

• 4:28Speaker 02

  Exactly, that's the key. So the key was to restore the circulation, of course, and for that, we needed the machine.

• 4:37Speaker 02

  And then also we developed this solution that has a lots of different components. For example, it has like vitamins, amino acids, it has the

• 4:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's the chemistry. You need good chemistry going on in there.

• 4:50Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly. Like a drug cocktail, an oxygen carrier and so on. And however, to reach out to those cells to restore their function, basically we needed a machine. So they worked together to achieve our goal.

• 5:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait a minute, David. Are you saying you did not use bolts of electricity?

• 5:10Speaker 02

  Unfortunately, yeah.

• 5:13Chuck Nice?

  Oh, man. Well, and the next time you do it, just fake the electricity.

• 5:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Fake the electricity.

• 5:19Chuck Nice?

  Just fake it, man, so that we can, because we need that. We need it. We gotta have that. You know, and also make sure that the roof of wherever you are opens up.

• 5:30Chuck Nice?

  And that there's a table that rises.

• 5:33Speaker 02

  And the moonlight.

• 5:34Chuck Nice?

  You gotta have this stuff.

• 5:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, you need the moonlight and the rising table. I forgot about that, Chuck. Yeah, you need the rising table. You need the moonlight coming. You need all of it. And do it at night, all right? Yeah, exactly. So the term we've heard is reanimation. Is that a fair term for this, what you're doing?

• 5:50Speaker 02

  So I would, because we focused on the cellular level. So reanimation usually refers to like other layers or levels of function, like a horror organism functioning. So since we focused just on the cellular level, we wrote it like that. We said, we mentioned, oh, we are restoring certain cellular functions and so on. So we wanted to keep it conservative because I know that we knew that everybody would think about zombie pigs immediately, so.

• 6:27Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, of course.

• 6:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so this brings the question. An hour is sort of a nice convenient amount of time rather than just one minute or five minutes, you know. We all know people have been dead or hearts stopped for that time and you zap them back to life. So how much thought went into it being an hour as opposed to three hours, six hours, 12 hours a day? What sets your limits there?

• 6:52Chuck Nice?

  And what is the level of cellular degradation at an hour?

• 6:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 6:58Chuck Nice?

  That allows, that says, "Oh, we did something."

• 7:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 7:02Speaker 02

  So those are both good questions. I mean, like, one hour just sounds, as you mentioned, it's really, has a lot of implications if we can achieve it at that one hour. And also, what we have discovered before in our lab and also with this study confirmed is that like when cells die, it's not like an instantaneous event. It's like a more protracted series of events. And because of that, there's this like time window in which we can intervene, stop that process and restore the cellular function.

• 7:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not to put a word in your mouth, but what you're saying is that the act of dying and death is itself a continuum.

• 7:46Speaker 02

  It's on the cellular level, definitely it is. From my perspective, yes.

• 7:52Chuck Nice?

  But see, that's amazing.

• 7:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's amazing because we think in binary terms, you're either alive or you're dead.

• 7:58Chuck Nice?

  Or dead.

• 7:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right? You're not one-third alive and two-thirds dead. So this could change the vocabulary. This could change people's awareness of what all this is about.

• 8:07Chuck Nice?

  I'm on the death spectrum.

• 8:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On the death spectrum, Chuck. Okay. Okay. So what this tells me is, what you hinted at, is different parts of the cell may die sooner than other parts. And so the cocktail you feed it, plus the electricity just for show, the cocktail you feed it will have to know, you have to know, what part of the cell needs reinvigorating at what time after death? And that would presumably change as the minutes go by.

• 8:44Speaker 02

  Yes, yes. So also like... Uh, now, science knows there's just not one way for cell to die. There are so many different, uh, processes that can happen and cells can die in different ways. So basically, what we have tried to achieve, besides, of course, restoring this like environment for the cell, uh, to be healthy again and to restore its function, uh, we also, uh, wanted to inhibit or stop these different processes. And that's what we targeted with our drug cocktails.

• 9:16Chuck Nice?

  So what are they? I mean, I'm just trying to think of practical applications. When this, let's say, is fully developed, is this something where I kinda don't have oxygen going to my brain for a long time? And instead of being brain dead, you're able to help me not be that?

• 9:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, I guess what are the limits of this? Yeah. We see where it's starting. Where can you take it? So I think like, well, brain is most susceptible to ischemia, to, to, to loss of blood flow and, and it's been notorious for that. Uh, however, some other- Just that word you used? I like that word, ischemia? Uh, ischemia. It's like, uh- Ischemia. Yeah, loss of blood flow, essentially. Okay, thank you. Thank you. That's a word. Good. And, uh, so what, what happens, like, we're at the moment not sure how it will reflect all the other organs and like what the future will bring us. But we hope that at least we can restore, uh, these vital organs such as kidney, liver,

• 10:15Speaker 02

  heart, lungs, pancreas even, that we have tested, uh, in our, in our study and that we can, by doing so, increase organ donor pool and use these organs for transplant.

• 10:27Chuck Nice?

  Oh, wow.

• 10:29Speaker 02

  So for, for-

• 10:30Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 10:31Speaker 02

  To go that far and, and talk about brain recovery and so on, we're kinda not, we're not sure to which extent brain can recover still because it's extremely susceptible to ischemia. But maybe some other organs might work. So we just hope-

• 10:47Chuck Nice?

  Wow, so-

• 10:48Speaker 02

  That this will increase the organ donor pool, basically.

• 10:51Chuck Nice?

  Well, no, you could end up saving so many lives because you're extending the life of an organ.

• 10:58Speaker 02

  Exactly. Right.

• 10:59Chuck Nice?

  So that gives it, that gives it more time to reach the, the person who needs it.

• 11:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, but I have a question though. If I can get what you're saying with regard to the cell. But an organ is a collection of countless cells, all acting in some harmonious way. And that's not what you're... You're not bringing the organ back to life. You're bringing a cell back to life. How does... How do you bring the organ itself back to life? Or do all the cells say, "Hey, let's just pick up where we left off"?

• 11:30Chuck Nice?

  Well, yeah. Then, "Enter, enter the electricity in the box."

• 11:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We'll get there, Chuck. Maybe we're trying to get there.

• 11:39Speaker 02

  Maybe that was the ingredient that you needed there.

• 11:43Speaker 02

  Because we want... So a cell... So this was all like more of a proof-of-concept study. So we wanted to show whether we can even do that or not after one hour. So, and of course, we weren't even expecting this to happen. So, yet alone seeing the whole organ functioning again. But in order to whole organ function again, we... At least you need a cell function again, then maybe a tissue function, and then a whole organ function where all the cells are communicating together, doing their functions like a concert, and so on. So maybe eventually we'll come to that point.

• 12:24Chuck Nice?

  Gotcha, right. So you're using a machine to tell the cell what to do. So then, why couldn't you extend it to kind of let the machine kind of be like an endocrine, you know, traffic cop, and tell the whole organ what to do?

• 12:39Speaker 02

  Well, that's an interesting question. Well, basically, we kind of limited ourselves to six hours because that was... We had some experience from some previous work in our lab, and also wanted to see whether like... This was more of a yes or no question at that point. So whether we can see that or not. And then now, when we know, okay, we can see that. Okay, now it's actually a next step. So for example, exactly this, we are trying to do two things at once.

• 13:16Speaker 02

  We're trying to do two things in advance of the future. One is, of course, to maybe prolong this perfusion time, maybe to like 24 hours or even longer. And then the other aspect would definitely be to even transplant these organs to other animals and then see whether, like, to which extent this organ has recovered in its function. Wow.

• 13:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, your background is in neuroscience, but this feels, not to put dividing lines everywhere, but this feels more like sort of cell biology. So where does your neuroscience training help feed what's going on here?

• 13:52Speaker 02

  So that's a question of all the questions. Well, I was fortunate enough. So I went to med school before, and then I joined the lab as a neuroscientist. And then this whole technology started in a brain before. And then, so this lab, actually, our lab,

• 14:15Speaker 02

  published a study back in 2019 showing that it can restore certain cellular functions in the brain after prolonged ischemia or lost blood flow. And then after that, everybody was just excited about the findings. And my, so Dr. Shes, my boss' phone couldn't stop ringing because everyone, from a different perspective, would call him and would ask him like, "Oh, have you tried this on the liver? Have you tried this on the heart or on the kidney?" and so on. So what he decided to do is, he decided to do like a shotgun approach, like, let's see whether this can work on every organ at once. And so I was fortunate enough to be that, this was the time when I joined the lab

• 14:59Speaker 02

  and because of my background and also in medicine, so he thought that I would be a good person to lead this project.

• 15:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so is there an ethical component of what you're doing where you bring in maybe a bioethicist to look over your shoulder and advise on where this is or can go?

• 15:21Speaker 02

  Yes, I'm glad that you mentioned that. So the whole study was being overseen by two committees. So one was of course Yale's Institutional Animal Care News Committee, and also we had an external advisory committee to help us plan the experiments, to help us develop the anesthesia protocols so animals would not be in distress and so on, and also to use the least number of animals possible for this study. And of course, one of the authors of our manuscript is a bioethicist, Stephen Layton, from Yale as well.

• 16:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so we got you covered on that end. That's good. Because, you know, because I'm pretty sure you can tell us during the break, which we're gonna have to take in just a minute, how many zombies you stored in the basement. We won't tell anymore. We can save that for the break. I got one last question here. Is there any sort of key chemical ingredient that seems to be the most important, or is it such a cocktail that it's really the full mixture of them?

• 16:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, unfortunately, we would also like to know the answers to that question, so we can, you know, sell it on the market. And I'm joking. It's everything altogether that we think is what makes the difference. So it's also for us, we are constantly asking ourselves a question, like, can we somehow estimate which drug is doing, you know, percentage-wise?

• 16:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly. You have to model that, yes.

• 16:58Speaker 02

  But that is just impossible. There are so many different compounds. And also, when we're doing experiments, we're doing one experiment per day. And so it will literally take us like years and years to even evaluate.

• 17:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To control all the variables, right?

• 17:14Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly. It's too complex, too many variables.

• 17:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow.

• 17:19Chuck Nice?

  So after the experiment, did the pig have a taste for brains?

• 17:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did Frankenstein didn't eat brains, did he? No, no. No, no. But I'll tell you this, just since we are Halloween here. Uh, pigs, correct me if I'm wrong. Uh, and a full grown sort of hog has organs approximately the size of that of humans, right? So they make very good sort of human substitutes in these kinds of studies. Yes. You would do this for a pig rather than a mouse because for, for just that reason. Is that, is that correct? Yes, absolutely. There's a, there's a reason why. So David, thanks for this bit of insight and, and some exposure to your work here. We will monitor that space and maybe bring you back when you actually finally do come to your senses and use electrodes.

• 18:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're welcome. So, do I call you professor or Dr. Andreovich? Uh, just David, David is fine. No, David, okay. That's how we like it here, actually. Makes it simple. Because everything else is a, is a barrier between the audience and what we're trying to tell them. All right, so David, we're gonna say goodbye to you and maybe we'll bring you back in the third segment when we're just sort of chewing the fat on this. Uh, but thank you for contributing your expertise to this episode of StarTalk. You're welcome. Happy to be here. All right. So we learned you can restore and reanimate individual cells and possibly even whole organs. But what about restoring your consciousness? What is consciousness?

• 18:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is it something that can be restored? And what, what's the latest on that? What a mystery consciousness has always been and may continue to be. When we come back, consciousness expert George Mouchur after the break.

• 19:18Speaker 03

  Hi, I'm Chris Cohen from Hallworth, New Jersey, and I support StarTalk on Patreon. Please enjoy this episode of StarTalk Radio with your and my favorite personal astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 19:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back, StarTalk, the Halloween edition. I got Chuck Nice with me. Chuck? Hey! Alright, so we learned about reanimating cell functions after they've been dead for an hour, and even organs that the cells comprise. Fascinating. And what about sort of reanimating consciousness? Well, we can take that to its most basic level, because Chuck, when you go under anesthesia, are you conscious, right? And then when anesthesia wears off, then you sort of wake, you're not asleep, right? Neil? Yeah? I am not conscious right now.

• 20:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, we'll get in line and talk to our expert about that one. We've got George Moucheur. George is the Robert Sweet Professor and Chair of Anesthesiology at University of Michigan Medical School. And wait a minute, this man is also the Director of the Michigan Psychedelic Center. Ooh, we know which decade he went to college in. Sounds like a guy I want to be friends with. We know when this man went to school. And founder of the Center for Consciousness Science. I love it. What a frontier consciousness is on every level, from humans to computers to aliens, other animals, plants, right? Yeah. So... Oh, please, not plants.

• 20:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, you know, the mycelium is that people want to lean that way. Oh, yeah, that's right. Yeah, so that's another show. That's right. So George, welcome to StarTalk.

• 21:04Speaker 04

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 21:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so tell me, what is, what is a clinical definition of consciousness versus unconsciousness? Just, just, so we're on the same page here.

• 21:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's such a great question. It's actually a really big question, because consciousness by definition is subjective, and yet, all of our determinations about consciousness and other people and other species relates to behavior. And we make inferences based on a responsiveness. And in the clinical setting, really, it's about following commands, it's about responsiveness, it's about interactivity. And most of the time that works, sometimes we can be led astray by making inferences that somebody who's unresponsive is actually unconscious.

• 21:52Chuck Nice?

  That sounds more like awareness, because like you say, you're unconscious when you sleep, but you're dreaming, your heart is beating, you're...

• 22:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. The brain is still lit.

• 22:02Chuck Nice?

  The brain is still lit.

• 22:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 22:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, so during general anesthesia, there's actually a lot of brain function that is preserved. I mean, you're still controlling a lot of autonomic functions, there's still activity going on in your primary sensory cortices, connectivity, representation. Anesthesia is probably more about the higher order integration that brings together all of this processing to create that emergent property of subjectivity that we're experiencing right now.

• 22:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So how does this connect to, we read about in their movies that try to talk about near-death experiences, where if I can recount what people say they are, they're sort of clinically dead in some way, their heart stopped. And I don't know that this always includes being brain-dead, but certainly the heart has stopped, and then they're brought back. And then they give a whole story of where they went, where they visited, what light in the sky they looked at.

• 23:04Chuck Nice?

  It was a big white light, it was huge, it was so bright, but yet it did not hurt my eyes.

• 23:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And yet, they're on an operating table where there are lights above them, looking to them.

• 23:14Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I know.

• 23:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what's going on during what we think of as NDEs?

• 23:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, great question, and it's a great example of where somebody who is behaviorally quiescent, they're not doing anything, is actually having this really rich, vivid phenomenology that can transform their lives. And actually, it's interesting, it gets back to that question of the electricity that you were discussing with your previous guest, because what has been identified in dying humans, and also in some very well-controlled animal studies, is that around the time of death, there's actually a surge of electrical activity that goes on the brain. This surge can actually be coherent and well-organized, and it's being explored as a neurobiological

• 24:05Speaker 04

  basis for the near-death experience.

• 24:09Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 24:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is this also, my whole life unfolded in front of me, right before I

• 24:12Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 24:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Kind of thing, is that?

• 24:14Speaker 04

  Yes, I mean, it's, um, you know, there's still a, a big bridge to be crossed between that neurobiology and some of the phenomenology that you're referring to. And these are really characteristic descriptions that go back to antiquity, seeing the tunnel, the light, the life recall. Um, so lots to do in terms of bridging that gap. But I think what has occurred in the past decade or so is a progress in terms of understanding that there can be a neurobiology to this. There can be neural correlates of consciousness around the time of death. So that takes it out of the metaphysical or supernatural realm into the neuroscientific realm.

• 24:58Chuck Nice?

  Is it possible, because our brains are just liars? I mean, anybody who, I mean, whatever you think you saw, well, you most likely didn't, and we're really malleable and, and very easily influenced. Is it possible that people have these very similar experiences because they've heard that people have these very similar experiences?

• 25:24Speaker 04

  It's a great question, you know, whether or not this, um, kind of folk psychology or common mythology around death gets transmitted and people report that. But actually, this is, this is where the, the science is, is quite helpful. And when I, with my colleague, Jim O'Porchigan, here at the University of Michigan, published an article almost 10 years ago in animals, showing that there were neural correlates of consciousness after experimentally induced cardiac arrest or respiratory arrest. There are a lot of people who had near-death experiences who reached out to thank us because they felt like that neurobiology actually helped validate their experience. So is it possible that there is some psychological influence? It is.

• 26:09Speaker 04

  But I do think that there is an emerging consensus that there, there might be some clear neurobiology that's going on around the time of death.

• 26:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because we're all the same species, so you'd expect some common reaction to common causes. Is that, that's where you're going there, right?

• 26:26Speaker 04

  And it occurs across species, too. So we're seeing very similar findings in rodents that we are in humans in terms of that surge of high-frequency activity.

• 26:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so what, can you set a time limit to how long a brain can be, quote, "brain-dead" before it gets re-animated, so that you could, you know, tell us that the Frankenstein-brain "Abby Normal" in the jar, off the shelf, in formaldehyde, that, is it just that we don't know how to reanimate it? Or can you say it can never be reanimated, based on everything we know about physiology?

• 27:08Speaker 04

  So, first of all, I want to make a distinction between what some people refer to as clinically dead, which is primarily from the cardiovascular perspective. So, the heart is stopped with brain death, which is a cessation of all brain function, both cortical and subcortical brainstem activity. So I think what we're talking about in the context of the near-death experience is that cardiovascular death, where you do have residual activity. Again, it's a spectrum, and it's a process. So, it's, it's not clear to me what the, the timing is. This is extremely difficult to study. We see the surge of

• 27:53Speaker 04

  activity in animals at around 30 seconds after cardiac arrest, and afterwards you do get that quiescence of, of brain activity. But this is happening on, on both sides of the divide, if you will. It's happening across the spectrum. So in these critical care patients, you're seeing the spikes of activity prior to death. And there are other examples. For example, terminal lucidity, which is where Alzheimer's patients, for example, who have been non-communicative for years, suddenly start to become lucid. They start to interact right before their death. So, we think that there's a spectrum of that brain activation

• 28:36Speaker 04

  that's going on, but, but the, the temporal window has yet to be defined.

• 28:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But wait a minute. If you know that happens, that in principle is reproducible.

• 28:46Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 28:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whatever is going on to reanimate the severe Alzheimer's patient, you, this is, we're talking about science here, right? So whatever that is, you duplicate it and then put it in a pill and then let everybody take it.

• 29:00Chuck Nice?

  Right, right.

• 29:01Speaker 04

  Absolutely. And, and I worked with a group from the National Institute of Health to make that claim that these examples of terminal lucidity really represent an opportunity to understand that neurobiology, that it's not just structural degeneration, there's some functional component. And if we can bottle that, if you will, understand it, reproduce it, it could be a pathway toward reanimating cognition and communication.

• 29:33Chuck Nice?

  That's amazing. By the way, Alzheimer's, terrible, terrible disease. Grandfather died of it. And what it taught me is that every single thing that you do, your brain is, how can I put it, conscious that you are doing it. When you swallow, you think it's involuntary, your brain doesn't think that's involuntary. Your brain is actually saying swallow. And it's crazy when you watch somebody lose every single bodily function because...

• 30:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's sequence, in some kind, yeah.

• 30:06Chuck Nice?

  It's sequence, thank you, yes.

• 30:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  One by one.

• 30:08Chuck Nice?

  It's crazy, it's crazy.

• 30:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right, right. So George, let's, let's get back to consciousness for the moment. Now that you've basically admitted that combined with our first segment, we can make conscious zombies, that's really what you just said, I'm pretty sure. But what, what, is there agreement on what consciousness is? I guess people can define it, but the fact that books are continually written about it tells me we know very little. Because once you understand scientifically a subject, you don't have to keep writing books on it to say Consciousness Explained or New Discoveries. So I, I think to myself that... Consciousness studies is still kind of in its infancy because of this. Am I wrong?

• 30:53Chuck Nice?

  And that's why you're conscious, because you think, therefore you are.

• 30:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you Chuck for that.

• 31:00Speaker 04

  You are correct Neil. This actually is a fairly young science and even if you think back historically, consciousness as a subject of scientific study was really delegitimized for most of the 20th century. So it's the 1990s, the mid 1990s, when this formal study of consciousness started to emerge. And decades later, we're still asking fundamental questions. For example, are the neural correlates of consciousness in the front of the brain or in the back of the brain? And this is, that's coming up in titles in neuroscientific journals. I'm not exaggerating the consciousness of that. So for as much as we've learned about how to manipulate neural circuitry over the past decades,

• 31:44Speaker 04

  there's still some really fundamental questions in terms of where consciousness is happening or processed in the brain.

• 31:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the issue I have, an issue I have is in physics, you know, quantum physics is a fundamental branch of the field. But there are mysterious things that happen that we can describe with high accuracy, but we don't really understand what the hell is happening. You know, particles disappear and reappear and we can describe it. We know what they're doing mathematically, but can you say, do you understand it? Nope. That's just how nature behaves. What concerns me is I see people trying to apply the mysteries of quantum physics to the mysteries of consciousness as though taking our ignorance in one place somehow helps the ignorance in the other, rather than making it just doubly ignorant. That's just my opinion.

• 32:34Chuck Nice?

  Works for me.

• 32:34Speaker 04

  No, really interesting Neil. And you know, since it's a Halloween theme, we can talk about spooky action at a distance. Because one of the, one of the theories within that quantum realm is that the kind of integration that needs to go on for conscious experience to happen is mediated by a quantum process or quantum entanglement.

• 32:57Speaker 04

  And the the argument has been, as you just very well described, that just because one thing has a similar kind of mysterious quality as another, doesn't mean that they should be connected. Now, we've actually studied this in the context of anesthesia, because some people have posited that anesthetics work by disrupting this quantum interaction. And we could talk about it if you want, but the long and short of it is, we applied general anesthetics, liquid ether, to photons, both classical and entangled. And I'm not a quantum physicist, I'm not gonna pretend like I am, but people are starting to address

• 33:41Speaker 04

  this empirically, so we can either move forward, or just leave that discourse behind.

• 33:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, I know that Roger Penrose, who's a very famous decorated physicist, astrophysicist, has stepped into the consciousness realm, but let me remind people, by invoking quantum causes for so much of what's described, but allow me to say, in this moment, that his Nobel Prize, granted just a couple of years ago, was for black holes, not for consciousness, or, just to be clear.

• 34:13Speaker 04

  Yes, yes.

• 34:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's going on there?

• 34:15Speaker 04

  Yes, and he was part of that wave in the 1990s, and his work, you know, really stimulated that line of thinking.

• 34:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, and I think we shouldn't ignore it, but just, I don't like explaining things with things I don't yet understand. That's, that's never sat well.

• 34:31Speaker 04

  Have to approach it empirically.

• 34:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, exactly. Chuck, what?

• 34:35Chuck Nice?

  So if you're looking for, you know, whether, you know, you're looking at a place in the brain that houses consciousness, we know that the brain itself does house consciousness. And whether it's just these electrical, you know, impulses that are firing all the time. And when that electricity is, plug is pulled, we're gone. Or something else. Could you take it and put it someplace else? If you were to find it and locate it?

• 35:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That sounds like something for the next segment, Chuck.

• 35:13Chuck Nice?

  Oh, okay.

• 35:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What you're talking about uploading your consciousness. That's kind of what you just said there.

• 35:19Chuck Nice?

  Big question, right? Is there something special about this neurobiological substrate? Or is this just about functional relationships of electrochemical activity? That could be reproduced in a non-biological context?

• 35:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we're going to get to that in the next segment. Let's take a break now. And when we return on our Halloween edition, we're talking about reanimating cells, reanimating consciousness, zombies, Frankenstein. And we're gonna have to throw in ghosts somehow in this third segment. Just to, just to round out the Halloween experience. You're watching, possibly listening to StarTalk. We'll be right back.

• 36:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back on StarTalk, our third and final segment of our Halloween edition. And we're talking about reanimating dead cells. That's actually been done and accomplished in a lab in New Haven and at Yale. And we're talking about consciousness, its existence, its absence, reanimating it with an anesthesiologist. So first, David Andrijevic, thanks for coming back to the show for this third and final segment. And we've got George Mashour, who is, George, let me correct me with, I'm wrong with your full title here. A Chair of Anesthesiology, University of Michigan Medical School, and founding director of the Michigan Psychedelic Center.

• 36:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We didn't even touch that subject yet, perhaps. But let's, let's pick up where we left off. There was a question, Chuck. What was your, what was that question where you left us?

• 37:01Chuck Nice?

  Oh, I'm just saying, if you can locate it, can you take it and place it someplace else?

• 37:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Put your consciousness somewhere other than yourself. I love that question. So George, what do you have there?

• 37:11Speaker 04

  I have anything. I don't, I don't know.

• 37:15Speaker 04

  You know.

• 37:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very good.

• 37:16Speaker 04

  Again.

• 37:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Best answer ever. Best answer.

• 37:18Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. That's about as honest as you can get.

• 37:21Speaker 04

  I have to be honest because, you know, really, it's a foundational question as to whether or not consciousness is purely neurobiological or is it functional? And functionalism is a, you know, one approach to thinking about consciousness, which is, this is about the characteristics of a system, not necessarily a set of neural systems. But I think that, you know, the first approach is we have to understand it better in humans who can report their conscious experience before we start thinking about how it gets reproduced elsewhere.

• 37:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of course, because if you don't really understand it in humans, to then say, let's upload it somewhere, doesn't mean make any sense. But I will add, did you not, George, did you not, in different words, speak of what evolutionary biologists call emergence in evolution, where you can study a bird down to the cellular level and you will never know that birds together will flock? That information is not contained in the cellular biology of the bird. It's only a collective emergent phenomenon. So that if you can't identify consciousness in the behavior of cells, could it be emergent

• 38:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  in the ensemble of the behavior of cells that comprise the entire brain?

• 38:44Chuck Nice?

  Ooh.

• 38:45Speaker 04

  Neil, I mean, that's my inclination and that's my perspective. Not everybody shares it, but I do think this is more of a network level dynamic and a network level emergence of subjective experience. And I think that speaks directly to the question of reanimation, regeneration, if you're, and we think about it even in the operating room. We're reanimating from the anesthetized state. That, you know, that is a process of reconnection and reemergence. In fact, we call it emergence from anesthesia.

• 39:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You do? Okay.

• 39:20Chuck Nice?

  So, yeah. But if the sum of the parts is greater than or even different than the individual parts, how do you, how do you find it? Like, what are you able to do?

• 39:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Maybe that very question is wrong, right? Like, how do you find the flock, the flocking in a bird? You can't, right?

• 39:41Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 39:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Maybe the very question is flawed. Just saying.

• 39:46Speaker 04

  We try to approach that experimentally by various measures of integration in brain function, such as connectivity, and how the electrical activities relate to one another to try to grasp that. We do dynamic analyses. But yes, it is a difficult question, but I would agree that consciousness is not going to be found at an individual cellular level. It's going to be at a systems level.

• 40:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I got a question connecting back to George here, because when you anesthetize someone, they can no longer feel pain. There's a lot of their body that has shut down. Other parts still work. Of course, the heart still beats. So how is it that your anesthesia can do what the suite of things you need it to do, but not shut down George's organs that he would otherwise try to animate that would otherwise be non-functioning?

• 40:48Speaker 04

  Yes. So I mean, if you turn the anesthetic ion up, you can shut down the organs. There's no doubt about that. At the concentrations that we use to suppress consciousness, I really do believe it's a kind of disassembly of that emergence process. You're creating inhospitable conditions for the emergence to occur, for the connection, for the communication to occur. So in the brain, you can still have local areas that are functioning in meaningful ways, even representing the environment, and we've tested that empirically. But it's that higher order synthesis that seems to be disrupted.

• 41:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Interesting. And just to clarify something you mentioned earlier, just to throw a little more physics in the conversation. The whole idea of a quantum entanglement, by the way, anything on the level of atoms and molecules. And the deep chemistry that goes on among them is quantum. The quantum forces are operating all throughout. So quantum entanglement is you have two particles that know about each other's existence from separated by a distance. And then something can happen in one where the other one responds instantaneously to it because they're entangled and not faster than the speed of light. It's an instantaneous, in the lingo of quantum physics, instantaneous collapse of the wave

• 42:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  function because the two particles share the same wave essentially. And so if consciousness goes beyond just a local spot in the brain and it really surfs quantum phenomenon, then maybe quantum entanglement really matters. And that's just a frontier. Just wanted to clarify all of that. The Vulcan mind meld. Oh. The Vulcan mind meld. It can hap- it can happen, people. Vulcan mind meld is a quantum entanglement. Oh my gosh. Right. You heard it here, people. There you go, people.

• 42:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So George, can you reanimate a brain? Do you think? Not now, just at some point, do you think?

• 42:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like we know. Yeah, David comes to you and said, the brain dead. They drag him off the table. And he said, no, I got this. I got this. Put him on my slab and I got this.

• 43:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, again, I don't know the answer, but the question really is going to be, you know, what is reanimated? Are we reanimating cells that are functioning in independent ways? And this gets back to the organ recovery. Or are we going to be able to?

• 43:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Similar challenge.

• 43:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's even more pertinent for the brain. Are we going to be reanimating that network level emergent phenomenon that has manifested to us as consciousness? And I think those answers are going to be distinct.

• 43:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But so David, how much of what you do?

• 43:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is, I mean, I have to think at some level, there's some electrochemical things happening. That's how we were taught about the brain, right? It's not just chemicals, there's like, there's synapses. Uh, you know, why else would electric shock therapy work, you know? So, uh, is there no electrochemistry going on when you reanimate shell cells? Even if it's just the chemistry that you introduce?

• 44:16Speaker 02

  So, no, unfortunately not, again. But I would say, uh, so we kind of restored the environment of the cells and actually we targeted their functions because they were in that process of dying. But maybe in the future, like if you want to restore the whole function of the, of the whole organ, we might do something like that. Like, for example, in the heart, we have seen also in our study that we, there is a restoration of each heart cells, uh, cell, individual called cardiomyocyte, actually they contract. You can see that if you take a tissue, uh, tissue of the, of the, of the heart to look at under the microscope, you can see they're, they're contracting.

• 45:01Speaker 02

  However, in order to heart to function properly, you need them to, to communicate together and actually have that heart chambers contract, uh, in like a synchronous way. Yes, so similar thing is in the brain. You, you can have a, a single neuron or brain cell firing, but in order to actually, I guess, get to the point of consciousness awareness and so on, they need to act coherently. A concert, there has to be a concert. Exactly, exactly. Right, right, right. So this level, I mean, the heart, it's well known, you can, uh, electroshock the heart, but for the brain, I'm, you're not that which.

• 45:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow. Okay, so, so other than in the film World War Z, where the zombies somehow could move really fast if memory serves.

• 45:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Most zombies portrayed are kind of slow moving and they even are a little bit dim-witted. And so the implication there.

• 46:00Speaker 02

  They're tired, man, they've been dead.

• 46:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They've been dead, it's hard. You have to cut them some slack. They're a little tired. Don't give them a trigonometry exam. So, so what it says is the restoration of life. Um, in these movies as possible, but it's a lesser version of what it was before they got.

• 46:18Chuck Nice?

  Always.

• 46:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what we learn is that in a zombie state, they still function, but in a diminished condition, not only physically, but also neurologically. So is there some, in your organs and in the brain, does it like work fully or can it, can there be, is there a spectrum of how it could perform once you reanimate them? Let me just start with David.

• 46:46Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 46:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Could it half work?

• 46:48Speaker 02

  So that's, that's a good, like, do we want them to half work? Uh, that's also a question. Uh, because what's the point if, uh, let's say we want to.

• 46:58Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 46:58Speaker 02

  If the goal of our, our study is to recover the organs to be able for transplantation, like you don't wanna ha- make them half work and then, because nobody would like, uh, to have that heart or to get your deliver, they're just half working. So, but maybe, maybe this is just like, uh, a one step. We have this analogy in our lab, like if you break a leg first, you need to, you're not gonna run the next day. There's, you know, uh, like a, a time period where you need to recover first, start walking again, and then able to run after, after some time.

• 47:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  David, I hate to be the first to tell you, but that saying is not deep. If you break your leg, you're not gonna walk the next day.

• 47:46Chuck Nice?

  I know, we, we say it like this, if you, you crawl before you walk.

• 47:49Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 47:50Chuck Nice?

  That's kinda, that's kinda how we say it, but I get it. You guys are scientists, you're in a lab. You gotta make things difficult, you gotta make it difficult. I get it, I get it. So wait, let me ask this then, cause Neil just brought up a super fascinating point. Uh, when you talk about coming back, uh, on a, on a spectrum with respect to consciousness, how much of consciousness is agency? If you were to come back, but like halfway, that's, is that you? I mean, like, are you still really you? And how much of being you determines what consciousness is?

• 48:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh, ooh. Because by the way, George, a third of the mornings I wake up, I ask myself, am I still me or am I someone else? I ask myself that, just, I know it's

• 48:42Chuck Nice?

  Damn, you're getting deep in the morning, man. That's how you start your morning?

• 48:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, I never really needed coffee. That's just, that's my jumpstart thought.

• 48:49Chuck Nice?

  I start my morning like this, "Oh, Jesus, I gotta do this again."

• 48:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I wake up and I just say, "Am I still me?" And so is there some minimum expression of the brain function where someone can say, "Yeah, I'm still me."

• 49:04Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 49:04Speaker 04

  Taking it out of the realm of zombies. We, we try to probe this with inducing reanimation from anesthesia in the experimental setting, where we are stimulating with electricity, or we're driving a certain set of neurons. And we see behaviors that emerge. And we've asked the question, actually, in these terms, are these zombie rats now? They're, they're, they look, they look awake, but do they have phenomenology that's associated with that, that wakefulness?

• 49:33Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 49:34Speaker 04

  Uh, we think about it with the emergence of patients from general anesthesia. What, what's that minimal self that is emerging? And, and that process of the, the self reconstituting after an anesthetic leads to very similar questions. Is this the same person emerging as, as the one that went under? So I think, uh, not addressing the, the really big questions, but utilizing anesthesia as an experimental model can help get at some of those questions of the emergence of the self and the, the pathway or trajectory of that self reconstituting.

• 50:12Chuck Nice?

  Wow, that's crazy, because even if you just were to stop certain parts of the brain from talking to one another, you could dramatically change someone's personality and make them kind of feel like, "I'm, I'm not really me. I would never do that." You know, like, "I, I would never do that," and, you know, and they're doing it.

• 50:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We interviewed Oliver Sacks a few years back. If you're interested, you can check out our archives. And what we learned in that interview, because he has, he's has, he suffers, if I can use that word, the condition of, is it face blindness? He, he does not recognize faces, whatever the word is for that. And I shouldn't use the word "suffer" because I asked him If you could go back and take some magic pill and remove this affliction, would you? And he said, no, he wouldn't because the fact that he had that affliction is what sent him on this journey to study neuroscience. And he published books. He's got a feature movie made after him. My question to you is, well, I learned that at one point he looked in the mirror and did not recognize who he was looking at.

• 51:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's how severe that face blindness manifested within him. And so are we to say that something broke in his consciousness?

• 51:26Speaker 04

  Yes. Well, I mean, this gets back to, you know, Chuck's earlier point, which is there's so much that we take for granted that is all wired and encoded and processed. I mean, we just assume that if we see our base, we know it's ours. There's some people who can't recognize that, you know, the hand that's attached to them is theirs, that that body ownership is disrupted. So the conscious experience is there, you seeing the face, the patient seeing their hand. Now we're getting to another level of self. This is me. This is my hand. This is my face. And so there's a, there's really a spectrum of conscious experience from that foundational

• 52:11Speaker 04

  just sensation of the world, a sense of self, and then putting all that together.

• 52:16Chuck Nice?

  Wow. By the way, if I just want to say, if you smoke enough marijuana, you can look at your hand and it's not yours anymore either.

• 52:23Speaker 04

  Chuck, I wouldn't know.

• 52:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, says the man who runs the psychedelic institute.

• 52:29Chuck Nice?

  The psychedelic institute.

• 52:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so George, I say publicly, and tell me if I'm out of line here, that first, the brain barely works.

• 52:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well enough to interpret objective reality. So that when people start stirring in chemicals, the the assumption that somehow they have a deeper understanding of reality from my from where I stand cannot possibly be true. It might be some different reality, but not an objective reality. So the psychedelics that you presumably study as founding director of the psychedelic institute. What would you say is the long term goal of that? Because it can't possibly be, let me ask the person on LSD what's really happening here. And that will advance my the scientific frontier.

• 53:21Chuck Nice?

  Hmm.

• 53:22Speaker 04

  So I look at psychedelics in the same way that I look at anesthetics. Their their tools to manipulate consciousness allow us to study the brain and study perception. Anesthetics help us modulate the level of consciousness. Psychedelics help us modulate the content of consciousness.

• 53:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By the way, I don't know if you knew this, but alcohol also influences your state of consciousness. Just in case you didn't know that, so I put that in your in your list.

• 53:50Speaker 04

  Absolutely. That goes that's goes along with the anesthetic, actually, acting on very similar. So I think these are tools. You know, I don't romanticize or stigmatize research with psychedelic drugs. We need to be rigorous. We need to be responsible. For me, it's really about understanding the brain, not, you know, using this as a tool to understand reality. Now, some would argue that your your phrase, objective reality, isn't meaningful because it's the brain that's that's generating this reality.

• 54:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Those would be philosophers who don't actually do science. So those those concerns do not worry me.

• 54:34Chuck Nice?

  I mean, but you're talking about what's external.

• 54:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Correct, correct.

• 54:38Chuck Nice?

  Your objectivity is.

• 54:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excuse me, no, that's why we have machines to make the freaking measurement. Okay, then we all gather around the machine and say, do you all agree what this machine says? And we say, yes. And it didn't depend on whether you had coffee or whether someone else, okay, with how awake you were. And the more you do this, the closer you are to an objective reality, to the point where it repeats often enough, you move on to the next problem.

• 55:01Chuck Nice?

  So. However, that is always external.

• 55:05Chuck Nice?

  Okay, the measurement, the only way the measurement can be made is because it is external, okay? The only way it can be observed. There are some realities that are not measurable.

• 55:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not yet.

• 55:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we gotta land this plane here.

• 55:23Chuck Nice?

  Oh no, this is too much fun.

• 55:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  George, again, you were with the University of Michigan. David, you're with Yale University. Great to, I have an academic soul, so I'd love reaching out to the resources that reside within the nation's universities. So, thanks for being on StarTalk.

• 55:40Chuck Nice?

  Thank you.

• 55:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Chuck, always good to have you, man.

• 55:42Chuck Nice?

  Always a pleasure. This was fun.

• 55:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, this has been StarTalk. This is a Halloween edition. All right, Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. As always, keep looking up.