Mind Control & Neuroprosthetics with Cindy Chestek and Parag Patil

Are we nearing the singularity? Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-hosts Chuck Nice and Gary O’Reilly learn about brain machine interfaces and prosthetics you can control with your mind, with biomedical engineer Dr. Cindy Chestek and neurosurgeon Dr. Parag Patil

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.

• 0:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk Sports Edition. We're doing an entire episode on neuroprosthetics. And I don't even know what that means because my co-host Gary O'Reilly came up with this and created a show around it. Gary, how you doing, man?

• 0:32Gary O'Reilly?

  I'm good, Neil. Thank you.

• 0:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent, excellent, excellent. And you come to us from the UK.

• 0:36Gary O'Reilly?

  Mm-hmm.

• 0:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Accent didn't otherwise give that away. Former soccer pro and current professional soccer commentator.

• 0:42Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes.

• 0:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we love that about you. And every third show, I want to remind people that we see your sexy legs in a photo on your Wiki page.

• 0:50Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, scary.

• 0:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You have your own Wiki page. Gary O'Reilly, soccer pro. So we've got you there. Chuck doesn't have a Wiki page yet, but we're working on that. Chuck Nice, how you doing, man?

• 1:00Gary O'Reilly?

  What's up, Neil? How's it going, Gary?

• 1:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, all right. We're all good. We're all good. So, so Gary, just give us the overview before sort of we introduce the guests.

• 1:11Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, here we go.

• 1:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What prompted this and where's it going?

• 1:14Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, spoiler. Not a lot of sport in this show. And I guess our audience will be cool with that. Once they realize where it is, we're going to go with this. We're going to take them somewhere I hope they really want to go to. But in the now, in 2022, people with limb paralysis or amputations can restore some of their movement with the aid of prosthetics. You know, something like a running blade or some more sophisticated electrical engineering robotic tech. But think about this. What if you could hook up a human brain interface and then found a way to record neural signals and decode them to learn our very own neural language? It's been done. It was called the Six Million Dollar Man.

• 1:56Gary O'Reilly?

  Ah, this would enable Chuck, a prosthetic user, to control ever more complex movements.

• 2:04Gary O'Reilly?

  Just by thinking. And a brain machine interfaces, or if you prefer, neuroprosthetics are taking the world of biomedical engineering to a new place. And that place is exactly where we are headed in this show.

• 2:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  OK, none of us have expertise in any of this.

• 2:20Gary O'Reilly?

  I know, but that's why we have guests.

• 2:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Other than the fact that, other than the fact that we, I presume, have brains, that's about, that's where the, that's where it ends.

• 2:27Speaker 02

  Speak for yourself.

• 2:28Gary O'Reilly?

  Exactly. All right, first off, we have Dr. Cindy Chestek, Associate Chair for Research in Biomedical Engineering, Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where she runs the cortical neuroprosthetics lab, which focuses on brain and nerve control and fingers. So that side of this subject is covered. On the other side is Dr. Parag Patil, Associate Professor of Neurosurgery, Neurology, Anesthesiology and Biomedical Engineering, again at the University of Michigan. His focus is neurosurgery with emphasis on neuromodulation therapies for movement disorders. So we are really going to get into this deeply.

• 3:12Gary O'Reilly?

  And Neil, these are our guests.

• 3:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  OK, that is beautiful. Welcome, guys, to StarTalk.

• 3:19Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 3:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thanks for having us. Yeah, and I see you, you work in the same institution. So you guys like work together, I presume.

• 3:25Speaker 03

  Yes, absolutely. I, I do not do surgery. That's for a long time.

• 3:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right.

• 3:31Speaker 03

  So we do the engineering side.

• 3:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you have strongly overlapping Venn diagrams in the mission statements. And I think that's where, that's where all this matters. So I want to know just, each of you, just if briefly tell me how you, let's start with Parag. Parag, how did you get interested in this?

• 3:48Speaker 02

  Well, so it, actually, when I was 12 years old, I saw Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. And there's a scene where Luke Skywalker gets his hand cut off. And it's played with-

• 4:00Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 4:00Speaker 02

  Exactly. You did not.

• 4:02Chuck Nice?

  First I find out you're my father, then you take my hand.

• 4:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 4:06Chuck Nice?

  Okay. Sorry, had to do it. And I just, you cannot bring up that scene.

• 4:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's in case no one remembers that scene. Chuck just reenacted it for us.

• 4:16Chuck Nice?

  There you go. Right.

• 4:17Speaker 02

  Thanks Chuck. A couple of days later, there was an article in our paper about a computer-controlled knee, and that was being done at MIT. And basically, the 12-year-old me said, "I want to go there and I want to do that." Well, that was in the 80s and we weren't quite ready and it took me, I guess, 40 years to get to the point we're actually developing those kinds of devices.

• 4:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You said it was a computer-controlled knee?

• 4:42Speaker 02

  At that time, yes. There was a professor named Robert Mann who was working on a computer-assisted knee. Now, this is back when, you know, computers, the laptop, hadn't been developed yet. So it was quite an accomplishment.

• 4:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow, yeah. So a knee, that was like big time stuff. I'm just thinking.

• 5:02Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 5:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If all you bring to this show is a knee, I'm thinking we got the wrong guy, right? So I'm assuming the feel has moved well beyond the knee since the 1980s, I presume. What's that Chuck?

• 5:15Chuck Nice?

  I was gonna say, a knee is like kindergarten compared to a hand.

• 5:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right, right.

• 5:21Chuck Nice?

  I mean, am I wrong when I say that the hand is the most complex-moving part of the body? Is there anything else that has more complexity to its movement than the hand?

• 5:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, depending on how you count, there might be 20 degrees of freedom in here, right? Like, how many of them you actually use when you're going about your life is debatable? There's very few things I do that require, you know, all of them. But yeah, no, it's extremely complex and no way to make a robot right now, right? Like, for anything that requires the human hand, parag doing surgery, you know, assembling lots of things, we still have the hand and that's the most advanced motor controller we have.

• 6:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, so just so people just who are on the same page, tell us what you mean by a degree of freedom.

• 6:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, okay, so a degree.

• 6:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a very engineering thing, right? And so we want to know what that means.

• 6:12Speaker 03

  Okay, so it's sort of moving along one direction of movement. And I need to have full control along that dimension. I need to be able to stop anywhere. Like, I need true freedom along that line, right? And that's my degree of freedom. And so, you know, your thumb can explore probably a three-dimensional space. So I can call that three degrees of freedom. Sometimes we control the thumb as a two degree of freedom, but it's a consistent direction of movement, and I have to have full control along that degree of movement.

• 6:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it'll be up, down, left, right, forward, back? And I think twisting is also a degree of freedom, right?

• 6:47Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 6:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Rotation?

• 6:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, so for example, yeah, so like, you know, the orientation of a point. So technically, to control a whole point, you'd need six numbers, or six degrees of freedom. Rotation and the X, Y, Z.

• 6:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 6:59Gary O'Reilly?

  So while we're on the explanation cycle here, what is a brain interface system, a BMI?

• 7:09Gary O'Reilly?

  What is that about? How does that work?

• 7:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, so yeah, that definitely requires some unpacking. So a brain machine interface is where we record from the brain, we apply algorithms to interpret that brain activity, and then we use it to control some kind of external device. For example, like a prosthetic hand. Or we also stimulate, if you have like a paralyzed muscle, you can take brain signals and, you know, turn them into stimulation commands for a paralyzed hand.

• 7:42Speaker 03

  So that's a brain machine interface.

• 7:43Chuck Nice?

  That's pretty well.

• 7:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is Dr. Frankenstein. You bring something back to life that had no movement.

• 7:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it's more like fixing broken wires.

• 7:51Chuck Nice?

  I love that Cindy was like, "Well, I wouldn't quite characterize it that way."

• 7:56Chuck Nice?

  Thanks, Neil. Patients are much better-looking.

• 8:03Speaker 03

  It's more like fixing a broken wire, right? Like, you know, if you have a spinal cord injury or an amputation, you know, it's, the signals are perfectly good in the brain. You just have to somehow get them where they're going. And so, you know, it's replacing that, that descending pathway with a machine.

• 8:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what the neck electrode nodules were for in Frankenstein.

• 8:22Gary O'Reilly?

  In Frankenstein.

• 8:23Speaker 03

  Was that what they were for? I didn't know that.

• 8:25Gary O'Reilly?

  So.

• 8:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, wait, that's what.

• 8:27Gary O'Reilly?

  Are you making this up?

• 8:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Go into his neck.

• 8:29Speaker 03

  I think that's stimulation.

• 8:31Chuck Nice?

  No, serious, that's where, no, that's where the, uh, when, when the lightning charged the machine.

• 8:37Gary O'Reilly?

  Come on.

• 8:38Chuck Nice?

  The, the, the charge was sent into the neck so it could stimulate the brain.

• 8:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 8:44Speaker 03

  Did not know that.

• 8:45Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay, so.

• 8:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cindy, I thought everybody knew that, Cindy.

• 8:48Gary O'Reilly?

  No, I'm with Cindy.

• 8:48Speaker 03

  I just look at them and I had no idea what they were for.

• 8:52Gary O'Reilly?

  I just thought it was a cosmetic thing. Could you hang your jewelry out of your glasses?

• 8:56Chuck Nice?

  No, no, Cindy is like this, listen, I just work on brains in real life, thank you.

• 9:02Gary O'Reilly?

  So, is there, what is the difference between a brain machine interface system and a neuroprosthetic? Is there any difference? Is it the same thing or are they completely different here?

• 9:12Speaker 03

  I mean, I think prosthetic is used very widely for replacing any function that, you know, if you're replacing a function with technology, people will, will call that a prosthesis. A brain machine interface, I think, is when you're connecting it to something outside the body. You also hear brain computer interface. So if you're just controlling a computer mouse or, or things like that, then it's, you know, not necessarily a BMI, but, you know, in my lab, we mostly control physical objects.

• 9:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yep, Parag, I, I got a question for you. So I'm, I'm going to be last in line to start hooking up machines to my, to my brain, just so you know, last. So when I, when I think of what's going on in the brain, things are happening on a, on a chemical molecular scale. We don't have machines that are that little to interact in the way my brain normally functions. So what is, what is the mismatch? That you're trying, or let me not pre-bias the answer.

• 10:12Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 10:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How are you taking machines and aligning them with the neuroelectrochemistry of our brains?

• 10:20Speaker 02

  That's a great question, Neil. So the brain actually is two different systems that are operating together. So you have all of these cells, little microscopic cells, that have all these chemicals in them and proteins and kind of the biology of them, and they're producing electrical signals. And so you can look at the brain in two different ways. You can look at it as the chemistry and the chemicals that are moving around, and you can look at it as the electrical signals. What Cindy and I work on accesses those electrical signals.

• 11:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, so you don't need the biochemistry if the biochemistry's sole purpose is to make an electrical signal? Because you can just put in the electrical signal, because we got that.

• 11:12Speaker 02

  We kind of can. The thing is that...

• 11:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a polite no, I think.

• 11:19Speaker 02

  The trick is you have to put the right signal in the right place at the right time, or read the right signal at the right time in the right place.

• 11:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, it's a two-way street.

• 11:31Speaker 02

  And you have to know what you're reading. If it's written in a foreign language, it doesn't do you any good, and we don't know what the language of the brain is yet.

• 11:39Chuck Nice?

  So how do you create that baseline? And do you find variation from brain to brain? Because brains tend to be very different from one person to the next. So how do you create that baseline, and then how do you account for any variations?

• 11:54Speaker 02

  That's Cindy's answer.

• 11:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, so the short answer to that is it's a machine learning problem, right? Like, you know, you'd think we would need to understand the brain at a very low level to be able to do this, but we can just use correlations, right? So if we have somebody coming into the lab and we say, "Okay, move your thumb 10 times, move your index finger 10 times," you know, and then we learn that relationship. And we're only recording from a very small number of the neurons. Like, there's many, many neurons in the brain. We get to look at a very small number of them, and we have to deduce that relationship.

• 12:27Speaker 02

  Think of it like your iPhone. Your iPhone recognizes your face. But does it really know your face? Does it really know it's you? No, it has a computer program in it that says, "Ah, that's the face that I've been taught to recognize and turn on." And that's kind of what we're doing.

• 12:45Gary O'Reilly?

  So at the moment, there's no Rosetta Stone, no

• 12:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, good point.

• 12:50Gary O'Reilly?

  code breaker for people in your field to be able to just go, "This is what this means."

• 12:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because that would mean you'd have to standardize it. You would have to localize it to every individual brain.

• 13:02Speaker 03

  Oh, absolutely.

• 13:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Every brain would have to go through some brain interface standardization for that person.

• 13:09Speaker 03

  Yep. Yeah, no, and you're trying to get that down to the smallest amount of data. But basically, if you, you know, you're looking for the same kind of pattern over and over again. And then you relate that to the different movements. But yes, every single person that gets a brain implant, there's a whole calibration routine and they think about all these different movements. And we learn what that is.

• 13:29Chuck Nice?

  So are the motor cortices of the brain centrally located? Or are they like other parts of workings of the brain where they're in different spots?

• 13:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, first, Parag, how many brains have you poked at? Let's get that up.

• 13:43Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I guess I wouldn't quite use the term poking, but

• 13:50Speaker 02

  you know, I would say on average about a, maybe a hundred a year over the past 17 years, something.

• 13:58Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 13:59Speaker 02

  And then a bunch of spines as well.

• 14:02Gary O'Reilly?

  The technical table, that is a lot.

• 14:04Chuck Nice?

  And how many of them have you turned into your own personal zombies?

• 14:09Speaker 02

  I currently have no personal zombies, I'm afraid. So I kind of joke that I'm the doctor that you never want to have, right? Who wants to have, you want to have a pediatrician? You want to have, you know, a primary care doctor, but you don't want to have a neurosurgeon.

• 14:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, you don't. Okay, so you've 100 brains a year for 17 years. And Gary, what did you call that?

• 14:32Gary O'Reilly?

  A lot.

• 14:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A lot?

• 14:34Gary O'Reilly?

  Technically speaking, the pure description of that is a lot.

• 14:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mathematically, that's a lot.

• 14:41Chuck Nice?

  You didn't get a chance to answer the question about the locale of the motor cortices.

• 14:45Speaker 02

  So it's related to the question we were talking about before. So the brain, in some sense, motor is distributed. So we have different parts of the brain that contribute to the motor plan. And then signals converge on something called the motor cortex, which kind of sits about here. And those signals go directly down your spinal cord to your muscles. And so the trick is not only operating the muscles, but figuring out what you want the muscles to do. And that's what the rest of the brain is doing.

• 15:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But you said here, some people will only be listening to this via podcast. So what part of your head were you pointing to?

• 15:26Speaker 02

  I was pointing kind of just above the ears. If you drew a line from the kind of halfway up your head over your ear to your eyeballs, that's roughly where the motor cortex sits.

• 15:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Got it.

• 15:38Chuck Nice?

  Okay, all right.

• 15:40Gary O'Reilly?

  So Dr. Chestek, how are you using assistive exoskeletons to help recapture the use in a person's hand who might have damage, might be an amputee? And how is that process linked into the work that you do?

• 16:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So actually, Gary, we've got to take a break.

• 16:02Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay.

• 16:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When we come back, we will lead off with that question of Dr. Cindy Chestek and her collaborator, Dr. Parag Patil, who we have just learned has been inside the brains of thousands of people. When StarTalk Sports Edition returns.

• 16:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back, StarTalk Sports Edition. We're talking about neuroprosthetics with doctors Cindy Cestec and Parag Patil. And Cindy's an engineer and Parag is a medical surgeon. And they're both focused in the same way with the same mission statement. And we're trying to learn more about what the present and future of this brain-machine interface is. And we left off with a question. Gary, why don't you give us that question one more time?

• 17:07Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay. Came across the term assistive exoskeleton, right? And I was thinking, well, how is that going to work? How is that set within your program? Because it's looking to restore and recapture the movement in a hand of someone who's damaged or an amputee. So if you could explain how that fits in?

• 17:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, so exoskeleton is one of the ways of giving the movement back. So if we're talking about an exoskeleton, we're probably talking about spinal cord injury and paralysis and trying to help somebody that can't move right now as opposed to, for example, a prosthesis or a prosthetic hand. But yeah, we mostly in the lab are trying to stimulate paralyzed muscles. But you can just actuate the hand. And we do also, you know, sometimes just, you know, use a servo motor to move the fingers. And that's another way of trying to restore that movement.

• 18:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but if you do with servo motors, then you're not doing it neurochemically within the nerves of the hand itself, correct?

• 18:13Speaker 03

  No, no. And I mean, let me maybe take you through the system a little bit. You know, so we record from the brain. We get maybe like 100 tiny needles worth of information. You know, we process that.

• 18:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Needles that are inserted in the brain live.

• 18:29Speaker 03

  Yes. And you were asking earlier about...

• 18:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sign me up.

• 18:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, you were asking earlier about detecting the signals. It's really, it's not as hard as you think. It's more like milliseconds and microns is the time scale and the space scale that we need.

• 18:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, we got that. We got that.

• 18:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, so it's not that bad. We got, you know, if we get our signal within like 50 milliseconds, that's going to feel pretty instantaneous if you're trying to control something. But then, yeah.

• 18:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So a millisecond is not a millionth of a second, it's a thousandth of a second.

• 18:58Speaker 03

  Yep. Yeah, that's about the timescale of neurons.

• 19:01Gary O'Reilly?

  How long are these needles? How long are these needles?

• 19:03Chuck Nice?

  Who's counting?

• 19:04Gary O'Reilly?

  In the skull, into the brain? Are they, are they attached permanently? Or they just, you just take them out? It's, it's like acupuncture.

• 19:11Speaker 03

  I mean, it's about a millimeter, right? That goes into the brain and that gets you into, you know, the, the really great signals that you want.

• 19:18Gary O'Reilly?

  Are you keeping those in on a permanent basis?

• 19:21Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 19:21Gary O'Reilly?

  So how do you overcome going through the skull into a brain that is floating freely?

• 19:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, do these people have like skulls when this is happening?

• 19:31Gary O'Reilly?

  So.

• 19:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm sorry.

• 19:33Gary O'Reilly?

  I'm guessing they are.

• 19:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't know.

• 19:35Gary O'Reilly?

  But it was just a fact of you, you, if you had any slight impact on that patient while those needles are in there, you've got all sorts of issues to overcome.

• 19:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gary, they're not playing football while this is happening. What do you think, what do you think these people are?

• 19:49Gary O'Reilly?

  Some of them bump into something, it just happens, we're human.

• 19:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Will you let the woman answer the question?

• 19:53Speaker 03

  This is actually a parag question of why you can have tiny needles in your brain safely, but.

• 19:59Speaker 02

  So, so, so we've, we've, we've had over a century of being able to get into the surface of the brain safely and for patients to heal up well and be able to even go home from the hospital the same day or the next day. These electrodes really rest on the surface of the brain, but they go in just enough to be able to record the activity of the cells. So don't think about it as something going deep into the brain, even though that's something I do with deep brain stimulation, health, hence the name. But this is something that's resting right on the surface. And then, you're right, the brain is soft. And so there's a very flexible wire that comes up to the surface

• 20:44Speaker 02

  where we can then attach it to a, uh, something that, that can, uh, take it to the computer.

• 20:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And this is through a hole in your skull that you have drilled with like a drill bit?

• 20:56Speaker 02

  Yep, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a.

• 20:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I was hoping you were gonna say, no, we have more inventive ways. But that's just a blunt, yep, yep, get it, get out our Black and Decker drill and go in.

• 21:12Chuck Nice?

  Welcome to this old brain.

• 21:16Chuck Nice?

  We don't re-modulate.

• 21:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This one needs new siding.

• 21:18Chuck Nice?

  So, wait a minute. So, I guess for either one of you, when it comes to the exoskeletons that are used for like lifting things and, you know, because they're already in existence, how are they communicating? Because you're telling that what to do. When you move your arm, that exoskeleton goes with your arm. So, how is that machine receiving a signal?

• 21:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, you know, short answer is circuits, right? And every time we use a different output device, we gotta, you know, build a little circuit to control it. I can tell you that some of the biggest problems we run into is if that thing you're controlling is not totally following your thoughts or what you want it to do, you lose that sense of embodiment, right? So, for example, prosthetic hands, they're just not that fast yet, right? And exoskeletons, they're nowhere near the performance of the real arm. And so, you're trying to, you know, maintain that sense of embodiment by doing a good job on the prosthesis.

• 22:16Chuck Nice?

  So, the idea is, you know, to take that sensation of a phantom limb and make it the actual limb?

• 22:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I think that's right.

• 22:29Speaker 03

  That is the win.

• 22:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It sounds like.

• 22:30Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 22:31Chuck Nice?

  Okay, okay.

• 22:32Speaker 03

  And if you did that right, they can use it the very first time they pick it up, and it's gonna feel like their real hand. But I'm not saying we're there yet, but that's the goal.

• 22:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Parag, please tell everyone about phantom limbs, because Chuck just slipped that in there, but that's an actual thing.

• 22:46Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, phantom limbs basically are when you feel a limb that isn't there. And there are a couple of ways that that can happen. If, for example, you lose your arm, you might have the sense that your hand is clenching, even though you no longer have a hand. And so, that's phantom limb. What Cindy is talking about when we talk about embodiment is similar to that, but importantly, different. So, when we, let's say we're using a pencil. You're writing something with a pencil back in the days when people used pencils, and it almost felt like an extension of your body. So, you didn't have to think about it as an independent object. What we hope to do is reanimate the hand and the arm so that...

• 23:32Speaker 02

  The person.

• 23:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The paralyzed, the paralyzed hand.

• 23:35Speaker 02

  The paralyzed.

• 23:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cause you got it.

• 23:37Speaker 02

  So, so, so that it feels like their own again. Right.

• 23:42Gary O'Reilly?

  But all right, let me ask you this question. I mean, from my own experience of surgery being done to me, you get scar tissue, can't help it. Now, if you're.

• 23:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, Gary, have you been operated on your brain?

• 23:54Gary O'Reilly?

  No, that was a waste of time. The point, pointless, pointless operation.

• 24:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're talking about in normal other surgeries, there's scar tissue.

• 24:03Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 24:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 24:04Gary O'Reilly?

  So even if you're inserting, and please tell me how large or small, if you like, these, these micro electrodes really are. If you're going into this through the skin and going into spinal columns, if you're going into the cord, if you're going into the brain, you are going to encounter scarring. So how is that affecting how these electrodes operate?

• 24:27Speaker 03

  So this gives me a great excuse to talk about what I would say is the most science fiction thing my lab does. Right now, the electrodes that we're putting in are on the size scale of like 50 microns, right? And that's big for something that goes into the brain. You're absolutely going to develop a scar around that. And that is limiting the performance. So, you know, you, you wouldn't do this.

• 24:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Again, a micron, that would be 50,000ths of a meter.

• 24:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. So, so 50 microns, you really need neurons to be within 30 microns. And actually, I'd love to talk about the physics of this. If you have a neuron within about 30 microns, you can see the little check marks every time it fires a spike on your signal. Scar tissue pushes that away, right? If I grow a scar around that electrode, those neurons get farther away. That's the hardest thing about making these systems. What, you know, my lab and others are doing to try to get around that problem is we're making wires that are smaller than neurons, right? So my lab uses carbon fiber. Carbon fiber is one of the strongest materials we have access to as engineers. And we can make something that is less than 10 microns, but can still go into the brain.

• 25:34Speaker 03

  And then that there's, you know, yes, there's still some scarring at that point, but it's dramatically less.

• 25:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow. If you're smaller than the stuff that's going on in your body, your body won't even know to make scar tissue. It sounds like.

• 25:44Speaker 02

  Right.

• 25:45Speaker 03

  That's the hope. And I mean, eight microns is still vastly bigger than the kind of wires we have in computer, you know, microchips and things like that. So like, it's not, it's, it's a solvable problem. There's, there's a design space where you can make something small enough to go in, but big enough to get the signal out.

• 26:01Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay, so you're overcoming the scarring issue. Fantastic. You can't just put any material into a human body. So you've got to find biocompatible materials. So where-

• 26:13Chuck Nice?

  Unless you don't like the patient.

• 26:15Gary O'Reilly?

  There is always that.

• 26:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why Chuck is not a medical doctor.

• 26:22Gary O'Reilly?

  That's fair enough. But you see, so where have you gone? Where have you gone for biocompatibility? What materials are you finding the most effective?

• 26:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I mean, there's wonderful materials scientists working on this, but we have a really good menu to work with. So, you know, we work with carbon. There's all kinds of like organic polymers that are in medical devices. Your body actually really likes things like titanium and platinum, right? So there's a lot of medical devices made of those materials. And so that's sort of our menu and it's good enough. There's a lot of like, you know, good conductive materials, good insulating materials. People are making small devices out of glass packaging. That does a good job of protecting electronics. And so, yeah, I'd expect to see a lot more devices that go in the body, you know, over the next 10 years.

• 27:10Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 27:11Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, so Parag, if you've got a damaged spinal column, right? And there are no signals coming out of that, how can you place electrodes in that area to regenerate?

• 27:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just gap, just gap the break.

• 27:25Gary O'Reilly?

  Or do you, or do you bridge it, as Neil was suggesting, yeah?

• 27:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 27:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, so this is a really exciting time because as you can hear, technology is advancing, computational speeds are advancing. And so our options are growing. And so one option is to get signals from the brain and to operate something like a electrical stimulation of the muscle. Another option might be to create a jumper cable in the spinal cord. And people are actively working on all of these because in the end, we don't know what the right answer is going to be and what the one is going to be that's easiest to solve. People are trying to use new materials to bridge the gap, to let your own cells grow and reattach.

• 28:12Speaker 02

  You know, there are lots of different approaches. And so I would say that the approach that Cindy and I are taking is an excellent possibility, but it's certainly not the only one.

• 28:24Gary O'Reilly?

  So when you're, when you're harvest, I'll call it harvesting these signals from a patient's brain. How, how are you interpreting what checkmarks present themselves for you to be able to go, "Right, that's going to mean in ones and zeros, someone picking up a pen, someone holding a cup of coffee, someone waving." So how are we interpreting these things?

• 28:49Speaker 03

  So there's a lot of steps along that pipeline. So, you know, we start with a voltage. The voltage has little deflections in it that mean when the neurons are firing. We then have to turn that into some sort of summary signal. So we, you know, you can just count up the spikes, like for, for some amount of time and, and look at firing rate of neurons. Then that's when you need your, your training data. So you need to say, okay, I know this set of spikes is for this movement. This set of spikes is for this movement. And, you know, usually we're running something like a regression, right? Which is where, you know, you're basically trying to get these, you know, one set of signals to predict another set of signals. Or we're learning some kind of probabilistic model, like, you know, it's like, what is the odds that I saw these 10 spikes?

• 29:33Speaker 03

  You know, when you're moving this direction and, you know, and then, well, then there's even more circuits, right? Cause then we have to turn it into something that goes in the prosthetic hand. So it's, I don't know, it's a fun engineering problem. And there's at least five or six steps down that pathway. And that's all trying to reproduce, you know, what was normally in the spinal cord.

• 29:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So an engineering and statistical problem.

• 29:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. Because it's the distribution of cause and effect with signal and phenomenon has to be modeled.

• 30:00Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 30:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. And that this is, this is your job and your people.

• 30:03Speaker 03

  And the better our model is, the more likely it is that, you know, when you, when you go to grab the doorknob instead of the cup, it's still going to work. So.

• 30:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow.

• 30:11Speaker 03

  And that's challenging.

• 30:12Gary O'Reilly?

  So if I could take away one challenge that you have to overcome to get to perfect restoration of movement?

• 30:25Gary O'Reilly?

  In a hand with all of the, what I would call typical finger movements and thumb movements, what would that be? What would the biggest challenge that I would need to remove right now for you?

• 30:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I would say the answer is probably not intuitive. I need the body to not destroy my devices, right? Like, anything you put in there, I can't make, like, we know how to make tiny electronics. We don't know how to make tiny electronics that can live in the brain and not get attacked, right? It's like a hot, salty water kind of environment. And if I could just make things survive forever, we could make things very small and, you know, and get them into the brain.

• 31:02Chuck Nice?

  So you, what you need is a cloaking device?

• 31:05Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 31:06Chuck Nice?

  You need to be, you need to be able to couch the technology inside of something that the body thinks is itself.

• 31:12Speaker 03

  If we could also teleport, that'd be great.

• 31:14Chuck Nice?

  And then we wouldn't need parag anymore to open the skull.

• 31:18Gary O'Reilly?

  And then the warp, warp drives, yeah, just go down the list, you know. Okay, so Cindy, give me, give me, I mean, okay, so the body, body has a self-defense mechanism and, you know, phasers aren't set to stand, et cetera, et cetera, to carry on the Star Trek analogy. Just how long does this stuff last in the human body? Are we talking days, minutes, weeks, months, years?

• 31:40Speaker 03

  The good, the good news is that the lifespan is measured in years. I just saw an article in Wired. They were talking about, you know, the new record being set at like a seven-year implant that's still functioning pretty well. So, you know, it's, it's pretty good. But of course, you know, if you're gonna get a brain surgery, which you definitely only want to do once, you're gonna wanna last for a very long time.

• 31:59Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, yeah, seven years is not a, is not a good run.

• 32:03Gary O'Reilly?

  You don't wanna be seeing, you don't wanna be seeing a neurosurgeon every five, seven years. It's, I mean, that, that, that in itself is traumatic to have to go through that amount of surgery, particularly in that part of the body.

• 32:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so there's still something I don't understand. So Cindy, it sounded like you, you gave this one, like, that's the only thing left to resolve. But, but the two of you working together, are you saying you, you have?

• 32:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Succeeded in exactly what you intended? Did you recreate Luke's hand? Did you, you know, what are the successes?

• 32:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 32:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Maybe that's really what I'm asking here.

• 32:45Speaker 02

  So I think Cindy nicely talked about the major engineering challenge, which is the brain-machine interface. And I would say from the biology side, we still don't understand the language of the brain. We don't know when we are recording all these signals. What are the signals telling us? And so that's a whole, we need the Rosetta Stone. You know, as Gary said, we need the Rosetta Stone for the brain to understand what these signals mean.

• 33:14Gary O'Reilly?

  Right. So is that, is that basically the hard yards of research? And going through patient after patient after patient? And just making AI work a 28-hour day?

• 33:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I would say my perspective is slightly different on that. Where like, I totally agree. We do not understand the language of the brain. There's so many wonderful neuroscientists that are working on that. But quantity has a quality all its own. So if we could solve the engineering problems and we could get, you know,

• 33:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Beautiful quote.

• 33:41Speaker 03

  A thousand, it's not mine. I think it's Napoleon.

• 33:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Say that, say that quote again.

• 33:46Speaker 03

  Quantity has a quality all its own. So if you were to give me a thousand stealth microelectrodes that the brain, you know, was not reacting to, I'm pretty sure I could get a lot of these degrees of freedom moving, even without necessarily solving the language, just because of the power of machine learning.

• 34:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but Parag, the, you can, we've been focusing this conversation on movement. Sort of the kinetics of the brain-human intentions. But what about thoughts?

• 34:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And where does it, how is a thought, a pure thought, different from a thought that creates movement?

• 34:27Speaker 02

  So that's a great question, and we don't have the answer. So people are also working on these kinds of interfaces to reproduce language. For example, you put the electrodes in the language area of the brain, and you try to interpret what a patient who is unable to speak is trying to say. Ooh. Right.

• 34:50Chuck Nice?

  And also, those thoughts do have, I don't know how to put it, it's not a tangible quality, but a measurable quality. Like, I read this study about how they put these people in an MRI, and they did things to them just thought-wise, and their brain lit up like it was actually happening. You know, so there is that element of it, too.

• 35:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, so that comes in where we're trying to think about where to put these electrodes. So imagine someone is paralyzed, so they can't move. How do we know where in that particular patient's brain the hand area is located? What we do is we have them think about moving their hand, and their brain activates in their individual hand area, which gives us some sense of where we need to go.

• 35:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Even though that hand area has lost its electrical connection, the hand area of the brain has lost its electrical connection to the actual hand.

• 35:51Speaker 02

  Correct. So now...

• 35:54Chuck Nice?

  Trippy.

• 35:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This completely...

• 35:56Speaker 02

  I have to say that if you lose the electric connection, then the representation in the brain changes. It might, just like when someone has a stroke, other areas take over those functions.

• 36:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It might rewire, yeah.

• 36:10Speaker 02

  And so some of that is also happening.

• 36:13Chuck Nice?

  So then how do you account for that kind of neuroplasticity? That, you know, it seems like the brain is always changing. Which, I mean, so you're always trying to hit a moving target.

• 36:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's kind of, okay Chuck, wait, wait. Chuck, put a pin in that. We're gonna take a quick break. And when we come back, we're gonna find out the answer to Chuck's question. And I wanna start bringing up sort of the ethical issues here. Poking around in people's brains to change what they're doing. And maybe even one day what they're thinking. Uh, that's part of the neuroplasticity, neuro.

• 36:50Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 36:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Stick any word after neuro and it will apply at this moment. Okay. When we come back, the StarTalk Sports Edition.

• 37:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back, StarTalk Sports Edition. Talking about the brain with two brain experts, and I love it. We got one coming from the biology side, one coming from the engineering side. And, uh, these are the folks we need to get their heads together and figure out, uh, what the future of the human brain interface, uh, the brain machine interface will become. And so Chuck, we left off with a quick question of yours. Uh, was it, I'll paraphrase it. Was it that we know the brain rewires itself from stroke victims and through other sort of, brain can be opportunistic so that it doesn't completely lose abilities, uh, from an injury versus what it can recover from.

• 37:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So how does that plasticity interfere with your data?

• 37:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, so if it was a brand new brain every day, this would be really, really hard. So luckily, we don't have to deal with that. I can, I can count on things being very, very similar from day to day, even though we do have to recalibrate all the time. Cause lots of mundane things change from day to day.

• 38:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So there's some base truths, base truths.

• 38:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, like it's, you're more or less seeing the same signals from day to day. But of course, yeah, of course, the brain can change. And there's really like two schools of thought in how to do a brain machine interface. I'm like the machine learning club, right? We're just gonna use lots of algorithms, you know, same things they use for autonomous vehicles. There's also like the plasticity club, right? And they're gonna try to figure out how to unlock the brain's natural plasticity. And, you know, surely I control my own brain. And if you just give me my own enough practice with it, that I'm gonna be able to control anything with it. And that's

• 38:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then we just go around the problem and then the problem's not a problem.

• 38:46Speaker 03

  And it doesn't matter where you put the electrodes. It's the brain, right?

• 38:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, you just rewire.

• 38:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 38:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You just go, you just wire around, around the brake.

• 38:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 38:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 38:54Speaker 03

  So.

• 38:55Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 38:56Gary O'Reilly?

  All right. Let me ask you, how long before this, these neural interfaces? Once we get our Rosetta Stone, once we crack and code our signaling? How, how long before this is common medical practice? And if it is, will it be limited to just your motor skills? Or will it have applications for neural damage in the brain? Uh, senses, our hearing, our sight.

• 39:24Chuck Nice?

  Or even more importantly, augmentation.

• 39:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah, of course.

• 39:28Gary O'Reilly?

  How long before we're bionic? There you go.

• 39:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Mm hmm.

• 39:32Speaker 02

  I mean, this is, this is one of those wicked problems that, that, you know, if, if you asked me when I was headed up to college, if I would have something like this, that, you know, has all this information, I can reach all my friends, I, I would have no idea.

• 39:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let the record show he held up a smartphone.

• 39:47Speaker 02

  A smartphone, yeah. Um, the, uh, I, I wouldn't know. And, and so the answer is we're making steady progress. And I think that devices that are brain machine interfaces, you know, you could see them rolling out in the next 10 to 15 years. But at what point will we have something that we want to control our wheelchair in traffic? That's the question. So there's a question of reliability as well. So we're making steady progress, but we don't know. And there may be jumps in technology that we haven't even imagined yet that are gonna be fundamentally important to what we're trying to do.

• 40:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But, but, right, so the, the future of this is, is, the sky's the limit, right? Because you're here working on, on motor skills, motor ability at all, but you're still

• 40:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Poking the brain. Hmm. I'm sorry, you didn't like the word poke. You're, uh, you're, what's the word? Exploring. Probing. Explore. Probing the brain. An electrode.

• 40:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. So when I think of all of the reasons why people are, are institutionalized for mental health reasons. If, once you, Cindy, once you know the brain map, you ought to be able to go in and nip, tuck, cut, paste to change whatever might be a completely regressive societal behavior into someone who, who's a perfectly law-abiding citizen otherwise, or perfectly behaving in ways that we consider normal. But then again, who defines what's normal?

• 41:35Speaker 03

  Yeah. So I, yeah, I agree. In a sense, what we're developing is technologies for interfacing with the nervous system. And the nervous system does all kinds of things and is related. You know, we can, we can help people in so many ways just by, you know, controlling the organs or trying to correct things in the brain. But yeah, I mean, I guess I, I hope that the future has a, you know, robust ethical framework around this. I mean, I think those decisions have to be made, you know, you know, by, by individuals, by in consulting with their doctors and that, you know. Yeah, I don't have an answer to that because that's, that's difficult. But I can say that this is coming and it's probably coming within the next couple of decades. And so now is the time to be talking about it.

• 42:19Chuck Nice?

  So, okay, this is so far off, but I still gotta ask. When you look at the neurochemical interactions of the brain and you look at what you're doing in terms of recording it, codifying it, and then manipulating it, wouldn't it be possible one day to take that and kind of change the way people think? Because like, for instance, something like racism, which is an irrational response to seeing someone different, you would be able to kind of dial that down so that you might be able to eliminate certain human maladies

• 43:01Chuck Nice?

  with with this type of technology. Or am I just too sci fi and too bleeding heart?

• 43:10Speaker 02

  So that's a great question. And so if

• 43:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And by the way, there's a deep morality dimension of that, too. Because that means you're controlling people's thoughts. And you have a nice progressive mission statement that we all, you know, kumbaya, but in the hands of nefarious counterparts to Cynthia and Parag.

• 43:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You guys could start a revolution. So, so, yeah, what do you, what's up with that?

• 43:39Speaker 02

  I think it's like so many things. There's probably a potential to do bad. And there's also a great potential to do good. So, for example, if someone is addicted to drugs, can we put a signal in that helps them get better? I was involved in a trial where we put electrodes in to try to help people with otherwise incurable depression and help them access things like therapy. So all of these things have the potential for good or bad. Frankly, I'm hoping that elementary education gets rid of racism in this country rather than having to put electrodes in everyone's brain. It seems a less risky approach.

• 44:21Chuck Nice?

  I gotta tell you, the way things are going, I'm betting on you.

• 44:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cynthia, can you comment on the ethics of this?

• 44:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I want to say, you know, right now, we're starting out with little demonstrations. We're just getting started with all of this. But it is not too early to emphasize the ethics. And we need to put a framework around this. Like, you know, what you said, like changing people's thoughts by stimulating, that's possible. We're doing it. We are exploring treatments. And so we need to put, you know, the legal framework, the ethical framework, and we need to do that now. And I will say, like, right now, we already have, like, I love the FDA. I enjoy all of our interactions, right? You know, we need regulatory agencies like that. And, you know, but we need to start exploring it now.

• 45:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I love the FDA, but.

• 45:14Speaker 03

  Well, but if we didn't have them, like, like this stuff should have an ethical framework around it. And I don't think we've had enough of a discussion as a society about what that should look like.

• 45:25Speaker 02

  Let me just add that it's so important also to involve the people that you're trying to help and get their ideas and perspectives, making sure that what what they want or what we think will help them would actually be of use to them. And so that's a whole other dimension.

• 45:41Gary O'Reilly?

  Well, right. Yeah, so good point. Good. Yeah. You you are both in the field of biomedical electrical engineering, right? A, is there a group of chemical engineers studying the same thing? And as it is it going to be something like those joining forces that brings this thing to a speedier conclusion and gives you what ultimately you're aiming for?

• 46:05Speaker 02

  Absolutely. So one of the most exciting things is that Cindy and I don't operate in a vacuum. We have a whole team at the University of Michigan. There are probably 40 investigators who are interested in what I call restorative neuroengineering. And there are material scientists, there are chemists, there are electrical engineers, there's data scientists. It's going to take the combined efforts of all these different fields to lick this problem.

• 46:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So generally, that's enabled when there's a journal that comes out that has all those that has syllables extracted from all those fields stapled together into a new word, like biochemical engineering, right? I mean, this has been all the rage in the last several decades. It's how you get you get astrophysics, you get biophysics, you get geophysics, you get geochemistry. So it sounds like you guys need a little bit of everybody to tackle the brain. This this universe probably won't need an astrophysicist, but.

• 47:12Speaker 03

  Physics. Physics comes in here a lot, actually.

• 47:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Totally. I'm all in with the physics. I'm all in with the but the astro parts.

• 47:20Speaker 03

  Astronauts.

• 47:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Maybe a little less.

• 47:22Gary O'Reilly?

  I have another question, because you've got my minute brain spinning here.

• 47:28Gary O'Reilly?

  How are you powering this? I mean, are we getting to the point where you can solar power? Is it close enough to the surface of the skin? And the connectivity? Are you at a Bluetooth? Is this Wi-Fi enabled? Or is this just basic cable at the moment? Are we? How far along are we on those two fronts?

• 47:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, so right now, every device that's inside of a person today, it's probably got, it's got a battery in it, or it's got like an RF coil. So it's radio frequency power. There's a little bit of like optical powering. Where the powering gets really exciting is we're trying to make these implants tiny, right? So for example, we're trying to do infrared, which passes through tissue really well. And we're trying to use that to take our bed of needles and make it a distributed group of like lots of little nodes that can record. And those would get infrared power. But people have looked at all kinds of things for this. Ultrasound, like that's another way of getting power into the body. So, but yeah, lots of, lots of items on the menu.

• 48:31Gary O'Reilly?

  If you have too much power around each electrode, do you not then run the risk of damaging cells? And causing other problems?

• 48:39Speaker 03

  Yes, and that's why you can't just power everything from the outside. Like you can always get power in there. But the question is, did you deliver too much power to the brain tissue in order to power up your device? Right? Because you have to say-

• 48:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You always want more power.

• 48:52Speaker 03

  No, no, the brain does not want more power. Things go very wrong if you deliver too much power.

• 48:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  More power.

• 48:58Gary O'Reilly?

  No, no, no, you can't put a V8 in there, right?

• 49:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, just to be clear, V8 is an old fashioned internal combustion engine for a car that has eight piston.

• 49:10Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, you guys remember those.

• 49:12Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes, dinosaurs used to drive them.

• 49:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, wait, Gary, I just got to ask, just slip in here. So Chuck just hinted at this earlier, but I want to make sure we address this. Because it especially affects performance, either intellectual or athletic performance. If you have the power to influence a human brain, which is such a big part of any form of human performance, what's to stop people? From making themselves better than they ever would have been. Holding aside whether they were injured or missing limbs or had spinal cord injury.

• 49:50Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 49:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just give me that. I'm a, I'm a quote, average, normal, healthy human being.

• 49:55Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 49:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Still give it to me so my reflexes are faster.

• 49:58Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 49:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I can jump higher so that, so that I won't psych myself out.

• 50:03Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 50:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the big game.

• 50:05Chuck Nice?

  We al- we already use, um, you know, uh, chemicals to increase and augment certain brain functions.

• 50:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 50:13Chuck Nice?

  Why not have?

• 50:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As Yogi Berra said, 90% of the game is half mental.

• 50:18Chuck Nice?

  There you go.

• 50:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 50:18Chuck Nice?

  There you go. So like, I want an implant that just singularizes my focus.

• 50:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Focus, yeah.

• 50:24Chuck Nice?

  I singularize my focus so that when you throw a pitch at me.

• 50:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm there.

• 50:28Chuck Nice?

  All I see is like, the baseball is like, big as a volleyball.

• 50:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the stitches are just turning slowly.

• 50:35Chuck Nice?

  I can actually read Rawlings across as it comes across.

• 50:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you know enhancing human performances on the doorstep. So what, where do you see that taking place?

• 50:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I want to say for, for specifically the stuff that we do that involves doing surgery, we are not remotely talking about augmentation. It is, it's nowhere near where we're at. You know, we're trying to get bits per second out of the brain, right? Which is amazing if you're trying to control a prosthetic hand, but not very helpful if you're an athlete, you know, trying to augment your performance. I can say that there's every possible kind of non-invasive way to do this is being explored right now. Right? There's little headphones, there's little things you can wear on your forehead. There's earphones that, you know, theoretically stimulate your brain. There's where we have some of the physics problems, right? Like, you're just, you know, you're, you're trying to get a signal in or out that, you know,

• 51:28Speaker 03

  maybe you can do something and it's worth a try, but like, you know, you're, you're probably not going to see that much augmentation in the near future.

• 51:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But deep brain stimulation either by electrodes that go deep in the brain or by some, like you're saying Cindy, some external device that focuses.

• 51:46Speaker 02

  Super magnets.

• 51:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yep, for example, or probably not, but yeah, for example.

• 51:52Speaker 03

  So I always say that augmentation is nowhere near where we're at, you know, like 50 years, like, you know, not going to happen. However, this whole field didn't exist 20 years ago, right? And 20 years is an eye blink. So by the time you're fast forwarding this technology, I mean, like, I, I don't think that, you know, there's going to be brain implants anytime soon, but 1,000 years is a long time, right? And there's, there's maybe going to be other ways of doing this that are more non-invasive and more safe. And so you can never say never in engineering.

• 52:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But so Parag, if we can actually make permanent positive changes to the brain, then we stitch you back up and Cindy's out of a job because your brain is doing it on its own neurochemically rather than with external help. Is that, is that where you might land?

• 52:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, so that's another great question. So one of the things we do deep brain stimulation for is for Parkinson's disease and to help patients who have Parkinson's disease. And people ask me, well, what will you do if we find a cure to Parkinson's disease? Who will you operate on? And the answer is I will celebrate it. Similarly, if we find a way to cure spinal cord injury, I will celebrate. We will all celebrate. There are so many, I'll start working on the problem of chronic pain. So with every technology, it creates many more opportunities than it does limit our options.

• 53:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But I didn't mean to express sympathy for you guys being out of a job. That was not my intent here. It was just, I'm just imagining if you have a cure for something, then, then so much of what Cindy is describing is no longer necessary. That's all, because the body now handles it itself. So that's a foreseeable future as well.

• 53:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, in a sense, I mean, you know, where there's people that are trying to regrow the spinal cord and there's people that are trying to bridge around it and it's a friendly competition, but it's great if one puts the other one out of business.

• 53:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But if it's just electricity and chemistry, why can't you just solder a new connection across the broken spinal cord? Why is that so hard? Get some physicists in there. We do this all the time. Okay, some electronics people. Just give me a soldering iron.

• 54:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, so unfortunately, it's much easier to do with biological components. So like, I'm a fan of the wires, right? Like, I'm trying to get wires in. But probably it's better if it's like neurons and axons and they can, you know, reform the connections, make new synapses. But on the other hand, you still have the patterning problem, right? Like, they have to know where to go. And so people are using electricity to try to guide, like, you know, regrowth of the spinal cord, for example.

• 54:39Speaker 02

  Neil, we're right on the doorstep. We just need three things. We need the wire, we need the soldering iron, and we need the wiring diagram. Once you give us those three things, we're there.

• 54:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it sounds like the wiring diagram is a tough one.

• 54:56Speaker 03

  That's hard to get back once you've lost it.

• 54:59Chuck Nice?

  Whoa. By the way, Parag, that is everything, so just pointing that out.

• 55:07Chuck Nice?

  You said, "We're right there, we only need three things." I'm like, "Yeah, that's everything?"

• 55:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, but it's deep that you can even list three things.

• 55:16Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, no, no, it is.

• 55:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's, and you can abstract those categories to many other walks of life. You need the tool, you need the materials, the tools, and the diagram. I mean, I think that's, that applies to everything.

• 55:35Chuck Nice?

  But the cool thing is that though every advancement you make touches upon

• 55:41Chuck Nice?

  Other areas of our lives. There's, it's an advancement everywhere.

• 55:46Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes.

• 55:46Chuck Nice?

  Any advancements where you are is an advancement everywhere.

• 55:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, and it's the science and engineering. That's, that's a hallmark of what that, what that is.

• 55:53Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 55:53Gary O'Reilly?

  Well, it's the rising tide, isn't it? This is rising tide that raises all ships. So it's just the benefit of this work.

• 55:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Cindy and Parag, how do we find you on social media? Or, or your lab, does it have a, a home on the internet?

• 56:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, I, I have a great last name for science. So it was, it's a recent immigrant misspelling. So if you search Chastick, you get me and my brother. And so.

• 56:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that's it?

• 56:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 56:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And nobody else?

• 56:20Speaker 03

  So Google, I'm very Google-able and, you know, I run.

• 56:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chastick, C-H-E-S-T-E-K.

• 56:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, so my, my lab and, you know, all the wonderful students, you know, I, I don't do any of this work. They do all of it and I'm always looking for, uh, new trainees and new students.

• 56:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what students are for. Are these the students who you put the electrodes in?

• 56:36Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh.

• 56:37Speaker 03

  No.

• 56:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Coding the programming.

• 56:40Speaker 03

  No electrodes are implanted in students in my lab, so.

• 56:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. And Parag, where do we find, are, are you, how do we find your work?

• 56:48Speaker 02

  Similar to Cindy, uh, P-A-T-I-L. If you Google that and Michigan neurosurgery, my email will pop up.

• 56:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Guys, this has been a delightful interview. I'd love learning about where we are and where we're going in not only engineering, but in all the sciences. And you know, Gary, Chuck, this is going to show up in sports very soon.

• 57:13Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 57:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 57:14Gary O'Reilly?

  And hopefully it will show up in not just sports, but across the whole spectrum of society in such a bountiful class for so many people.

• 57:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, guys, this has been great. Uh, Chuck, always good to have you.

• 57:26Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, it's a pleasure, Neil.

• 57:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cindy and Parag, uh, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll track your work. And if you get any new.

• 57:32Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, please.

• 57:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Breakthroughs, give us, give us a call. We'll put you right back on the air.

• 57:35Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, yeah. Thank you. Thanks so much for having me.

• 57:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Learn about what that is. This has been StarTalk Sports Edition. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. Keep looking up.