Dr. Terry Sejnowski: How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI
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Welcome to the huberman lab podcast, where we discuss science and science space tools for everyday life. I'm enter huberman and am a professor of neurobiology and optimo gy at stanford school of medicine. My guess today is doctor Terry snooky.

Doctor Terry synsi is a professor at the salk institute for biological studies where he directs the computational neural ology laboratory. And as the title suggests, he is a computational neuroscientist, that is, he uses mad as well as artificial intelligence in computing methods to understand this overarching ultra important question of how the brain works. Now, I realized that when people here terms like computational neuroscience algorithms, large language models and A I, that I can be a bit overwhelming and even intimidating.

But I assure you that the purpose of doctors say nosy is work. And indeed, today's discussion is all about using those methods to clarify how the brain works, and indeed to simplify the answer to that question. So for instance, today, you will learn that regardless of who you are, regardless of your experience, that all your motivation in all domains of life is governed by a simple algorithm or equation.

dr. Signal key explains how a single rule, a single learning rule, drives all of our motivation related behaviors. And IT, of course, relates to the new modulator dopamine. And if you're familiar with dopamine as a term today, you will really understand how dopamine works to drive your levels of motivation, or in some cases, lack of motivation, and how to overcome that lack of motivation. Today, we also discuss how best to learn, doctors said.

Now you shares not just information about how the brain works, but also practical tools that he and colleagues have developed, including a zero cost online portal that teaches you how to learn Better based on your particular learning style, the way that you, in particular, forge for information and implement that information. Doctor signaled. You also explains how he himself uses physical exercise of a particular type in order to enhance his cognition.

An, that is, his brain's ability to learn information and to come up with new ideas. Today, we also discuss both the healthy brain and the disease brain in conditions like parkinsons and alzheimer's, and how particular tools that relate to meta control function can perhaps be used in order to treat various diseases, including alzheimer mentis. I am certain that by the end of today's episode, you will have learned a tremendous amount of new knowledge about how your brain work and practical tools that you can implement in your daily life.

Before we begin, i'd like emphasize of this podcast is separate from my teaching and research erles at stanford. IT is, however, part of my desired effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, i'd like to thank sponsors of today's podcast.

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Great to be .

here we go way back. And i'm a huge, huge fan of your work because you've worked on a great many different things in the field of news science. You're considered by many a computational neuroscience ence.

So you bring mathematical models to an understanding of the brain in neural networks. And we're also going to talk about AI today, and we're going to make IT accessible for everybody, biologist or no math background or no to kick things off. I want to understand something.

I understand a bit about the parts list of the brain. And most listeners of this podcast will understand a little bit of the parts list of the brain, even if they've never heard an episode of the podcast ast before. Because stand, there are cells.

Those cells are neurons. Those neurons connect to one another in very specific ways that allows to see to here to think. I said a, but i've come to the belief that even if we know the parts list, IT doesn't really inform us how the brain works.

This is the big question. How does the brain work? What is consciousness? All of this stuff.

So where and how does an understanding of how neurons talk to one another start to give us a real understanding about, like, how the brain works? Like what is this piece of meat in our heads? Because IT can just be okay. The hip campus remembers stuff, and the, you know, the visual cortex perceive stuff.

When you sit back and you remove the math from the mental conversation, if that's possible for you, how do you think about corner, how the brain works? Like at a very basic level, what is this piece of meat in our heads really trying to accomplish from, let's just say, the time when we first wake up in the morning in our little groggy, we make IT to that first cup of coffee or water, or maybe even just to you and ate first thing in the morning. What is going on in there?

What a great question and you know I have a um of a patch lin, I wrote a book, companies of brain and in that there is this levels diagram and and at levels of investigation at different spatial al scales from molecular at the very bottom to h synapses and neurons circus neural circus, how they're connected with each other and then brain areas in the cortex and the the whole central nervous system spent ten orders of magical your tent to the tenth in space al scale so you know where is consciousness in all of that? So um there are two approaches that neuroscientists have taken uh I shouldn't say neuroscientists, I should say that scientists have taken uh and the one you describe, which is, you know let's look at all the parts that's the bottom up approach.

You'll take IT apart and just in reduction this approach and you make a lot of progress. You can figure out you know how things are connected and and understand how development works underwater connected. But it's very difficult to really make progress because you quickly you get lost in the forest.

Now the other approach which has been successful um but at the unsatisfying is the top down approach and and this is the approach that psychologists have taken looking at behavior and trying to understand know the the laws of behavior this is the behavior is uh but when you know even people in A I we're trying to do a top down three programs that could replicate a human behavior, intelligent behavior. And I had to say that both of those approaches you know bottom up or top down have really not gotten to the core of answering any of those questions, the big questions. But there's a whole new approach now that is emerging in both neuroscience and A I at exactly the same time at this moment in history is really quite remarkable.

So there is an intermediate level between the implementation level at the bottom, how you implement some particular uh mechanism and the the actual behavior of the whole system is called the algorithmic level is in between. So algorithms are like recipes. They're like, you know when you bake a cake, you have to have ingredients and you have to say how how the order in which they put together and how long and ah know if you if you if you get IT wrong, you know IT doesn't work.

You know that is just a mess. Now IT turns out that we're discovering algorithms. We've made a lot of progress with understanding the algorithms that are used in neural circuits. And this, uh speaks to the computational level of of how to understand you the function of the neural circuit. But uh i'm going to give you one example of an algorithm, which uh is is when we worked on back in the nineteen nineteen, when Peter dan read montague postbox in lab and IT had to do with a part of the brain below the cortex called the basic gang, which is responsible for learning sequences of actions in order to achieve some goal.

For example, if you want to play tennis, you know, you have to be able to accord IT many muscles, and at a whole sequence of actions has to be made if you want to be able to serve accurately, and you have to practice, practice, practice well, what's going on there is that the basically gangly are basically is taking over from the cortex and producing actions. That get Better, Better, Better and Better. And that's true not just of the the muscles, but it's also the true of thinking. If you want to become good in any area, if you want to become A A good a financial, if you want to get become a good doctor or nurse scientist, right, you you you have to be uh practicing, practicing, practicing in terms of a understanding what uh you know what's uh the details of the profession and what works, what doesn't work and so forth. And and IT turns out that the space al gangly interacts with the cortex, not just in the back, which is the action part, but also with the prefrontal cortex, which is the thinking part.

Can I ask you a question about this briefly? The basel gangly, as I understand her, involved in the organization of two major types of behaviors, go, meaning to actually perform A A behavior, but the basal ganger also instruct no go, don't engage in that behavior, and learning a, an expert goal swing, or even a basic golf swing or tennis racket swing involves both of those things.

Go and no go given what you just said, which is that the basal ganglia are also involved in generating thoughts of particular kinds. I wonder therefore, if it's also involved in suppression of thoughts of particular kinds. I mean, you don't want your surgeon cutting into um you know a particular a region and just thinking about their motor behaviors, what to do and what not to do, they presumed ly need to think about what to think about but also what do not think about.

You don't want that surgeon thinking about how their kid was a breath that morning. And um they're frustrated because the two things interact. So is there go no go in terms of action and learning? And is there go no go in .

terms of things things I mentioned the preference cortex and that part the loop with the basic ganga that is one of the last to mature in, uh uh you know, early adult red. And you know what? The problem is that if at lessons is not the no go party for, you know, planning and action isn't quite there yet.

And so often IT doesn't kick in to to prevent you from doing things that are not in your best interest. So yes, absolutely right. But one of the things though is that learning is involved and and this is really so of a problem that we cracked, uh, first theoretically in the nineties and then experimentally later. H by recording from neurons and also brain imaging in humans. So IT turns out we know the algorithm is used in the brain for how to learn sequences of actions to achieve a goal.

Uh, in its simplest possible algoma, you can imagine, is simply to predict the next reward you're going to get if I I do an action will I will be give me something a value and um and you learn every time you try something, whether you got the amount of award you expect IT or less, you use that to update the synapse is synaptic plastic so that the next time you'll have a Better chance of getting a Better reward and you build up was called a value function. So the cortex now over your lifetime is building up uh A A lot of knowledge about, you know, things that are good for you, things that are bad for you. Like you go to a restaurant, you order something, how do you know what's going to, right? You've had lots of meals and water places, and now that is part of your value function.

This is the same algorithm that was used by alpa goal. This is the program that deep mind built. This is an A I program that beat the world. Go champion. And go is the most complex game that that humans have ever come a, played a regular basis.

far more complex than chess.

as I know. That's right. So go with the chest, with chest to something like checkers know. Another is the level of difficulty is another, your way of above IT. Because you have to think in terms of of, of, of battles going on all over the place at the same time, and the order in which you put the pieces down her can affect what's going to happen in the future.

So this value function is super interesting. And I wonder whether, and I think you answer this, but I wonder whether this value function is implemented over long periods of time. So you talked about the value function in terms of learning a motor skill, say, swinging tennis racket to do A A perfect tennis serve or or even just a decent tennis serve.

When somebody goes back to the court, will take on the weekend once a month over the course of years, are they able to tap into that same value function every time they go back, even though there's been a lot of intervening time and learning that question number one. And then the other question is you think that this value function is also being played out in more complex scenarios, not just motor learning, such as what's A A domain of life that for many people involve some trial and error IT would be like human relationships. We learn how to be friends with people, we learn how to be a good sibling um we learn how to be good romantic partner, right? We get some things right.

We get some things wrong. So is the same value function being implemented? We're paying attention to what was rewarding.

But what I didn't hear you say also was what was punishing. So we only paying attention what is rewarding or we're also integrating punishment. And we don't get an electric shock when we get the serve wrong, but we can be frustrated.

You identified is uh some a very uh important feature h which is that rewards are, by the way, you know every time you do something, you're updating this value function every time and and and accumulates and answers your first question. The answer is that it's always gonna be there IT doesn't matter.

Is is a very permanent part of your experience and who you are and um and interesting ly in and behaviors knew this back in the one thousand nine hundred and fifties that uh you can get there two ways of trial air you know small rewards are are good because you're constantly coming closer and closer to getting the what you're seeking Better tennis player or being able to make a friend. But the negative punishment is much more effective. One trial learning.

You don't need to have you know hundred trials. You know what you need you know when you're training a red, do some task with small food awards. But if if you just shock the rat boy, that rat doesn't forget that.

yeah, one really bad relationship will have you learning certain things forever.

And this is also ptsd post dramatic stress disorder is is another good example of that that can screw you up for the rest of your life. So so but the other thing point, and not something really important, which is that a large part of the preferable cortex is devoted to social interactions.

And this is how humans, you know, when you come into the world, you don't know what language you going to be speaking, you don't know what the cultural values are that you're that you're going to have to be able to become a member of this society. And as things that are expected to you, all of that has to become through experience, through building this value functions. So this is, and this is something we discovered in the twenties th century, and and now is going into A I called reinforcement learning.

In A I is a form procedural learning as opposed to at the condition level where you think and you do things cogito thinking is much less sufficient um because you have to go step by step with procedure learning. Uh, it's automatic. Can you give me an example.

a procedural learning in the context of a comparison to code of learning, like they're an example of perhaps like how to make a decent cup of coffee using a you purely knowledge space learning versus procedural learning, okay. And where procedural learning wins. And I I can imagine one, but you're the true experts here.

Well, you know, no, you know a lot of examples. But logis, since we've been talking about tennis, can you mentioned learning on a place tennis through a book.

reading a book that's so funny on the plane back from nash really yesterday, the guy sitting across the isle for me was reading a book about um maybe just working on his pilot license or something there and I I looked over and could help nose's diagrams of the plain flying. I thought i'm just so glad that this guy is a passenger and and not a pilot. And then I thought about how the pilots learn.

And presumably, IT was a combination of practical learning and textbook learning. I am when you stupa dive. This is school by dive certified. And when you get your certification, you you learn your dive tables and you learn why you have to wait between dives and said gas exchange in a number of things. But there is really no way to simulate what IT is to take your mask off underwater, put you back on and blow the water out of your mask like that. You just have to do that in a pool, and you actually have to do IT when you need to for you .

to really get real. This is really essential for things that have to be executed quickly and and uh expertly to to get that to really downpours. So you don't have to think um and this happens in school, right?

Other words, you you you have classroom lessons where you are given exploit IT instruction but then you go to homework. That's procedure learning. You do problems, you solve problems.

And you know, i'm A P. H. D. physicists. So I I went through all of the classes, Young and three, medical physics and IT was really the problems that really were the core of becoming a good physicists. You know, you can memorize equations, but that doesn't an, you understand how to use the equations.

I think is worth highlighting. A lot of times on this podcast we talk about what I call protocol. So would be like, get some morning sunlight in your eyes to stimulate your supervise matic nucleus by way of your right. Again, when cells audiences of this protests will recognize those germs basically get sunlight in your eyes in the morning, set your, and you can hear that a trillion times. But I do believe that there is some value to both knowing what the protocol is, the underlying mechanisms.

There are these things in your eye that you know and code the sunrise qualities of light set and then send them to your brain is set at a but then once we link knowledge, pure knowledge to a practice, I do believe that the two things emerge some place in a way that um let's say reinforces both the knowledge in the practice, right? So these things are not necessarily separate. They bridge in other words, doing your theoretical physics problem set reinforces the examples that you learned in lecture in in your textbooks. Invite versa.

So this is a battle is going on right now in schools. Uh, you you know what you just said is actually right? You need both. We have two major learning systems. We have a cognitive learning system, which is critical. We have procedure learning system, which is subcritical basal ganglia, and the two go hand in hand a if you want to become good at anything that the two are going to help each other. And what's going on right now in schools in california at least, is that they're trying to of the procedure.

That's ridiculous.

They don't want students to practice because is is is going to be, uh, you know you you're stressing them. You don't want them to be to feel that you know that they are having difficulty. So but but can do every .

is listening. I'm covering my eyes. I mean this this would be like saying, um gonna so many examples like here's a textbook on swimming and then you're you're going to go out to the ocean someday and you will have .

never actually .

swim right and now you're expected to be able to survive, let alone swim. Well.

lazy is crazy, I tell you a barber oakly um has and I have A A moke massive open online course and learning how to learn. And IT helps students. We aimed at students. But IT actually has been taken by four million people, two hundred countries, ages ten to ninety. What is this called learning?

How to learn? Is IT? Uh, is there a pay wall?

No, it's free, completely free. And um you know, I get incredible your feedback, five letters almost everyday you to get a few more OK. I did episode .

on learning how to learn my understanding of the researchers that we need to test on the material. The testing is not just a form of evaluations. IT is a form of identifying the errors that help us then compensate for the hours and learn. But but it's it's very procedure. It's not about just listening and regardless ata you .

you know you put your finger on IT, which is that and this is what we teach the students, is that you have to uh the the way the brain works right is is not IT doesn't memory things like a computer but you you have to have to be active learning you have to be actively engage in fact um when you you're trying to solve a problem on your own right, this is where you're really learning by trial and error and this procedure system but if someone tells you what the right answer is, you know you know that just something that is a fact that IT gets store away somewhere, but it's not going to automatically come up if you actually are face with something, it's not exactly the same problem but a similar.

And by the way, this is the key to A I completely uh, essential for the recent success of of these large language models. You know the public now was beginning to use is that they they they're not parents. They just they're not.

They don't memorize what they they have data they taken in. They have to generalize. That means to be able to do well on new things that come in that are similar to the old things that you've seen, but allow you to solve new problems. That's the key to the brain, that the brain is a really, really good at generalizing. And in fact, in many cases, you only need one example to generalize.

Like going to a restaurant for the first time, there are a number of new interactions. There might be a hoster or a hostess. You sit down at these tables, you never said somebody asks you questions, you read IT. Okay, maybe it's A Q R code these days, but forever after you understand the process of going to restaurant, doesn't matter what the genre food happens to be, or what city sitting inside or outside, you can pretty much work IT out.

Sit the counter, sit outside, sit the tables that there are a number of key action steps that I think pretty much transact to everywhere unless you go to some super high and thing or some super low thing or it's a buffet or what IT, if you can start to fill in the blanks here. If I understand correctly, there is a an action function that learned from the knowledge and the experience exactly. And then where's that action functions stored? Is IT in one location in the brain? Or is that kind of an emergent property of multiple .

brain areas so that you're read of the costs here of a where we are in neuroscience right now? We don't know the answer to that question. In the past IT had been thought that uh you know the the cortex had a work like a countries on uh um that each of which each part of the cortex was dedicated to one function, right.

And interestingly, record for the neurons and IT certainly looks that way, right? Another words, there is a visual cortex in the back, and there is a whole series of areas. And then there is the auditory cortex here in the middle, and then the preval cortex for social interaction.

And and so IT looks really clear cut that is modular. And now we're facing is we could buy, we have a new way to record from neurons, you optically. We can record from tens of thousands, from dozens of areas simultaneously.

And what we're discovering is that if you want to do any task, you're engaging not just the area that you might think has the input coming against the visual system, but the visual system is getting input from the motor system right. In fact, you know there's more input coming from the motor system then from the eye really yes. Ah and torgan U C L A has shown that in the mouse uh this is so now we're looking at global interactions between all these areas, and that's where real a complex codner behaviors emerge is from those interactions.

And now we have the tools for the first time to actually be able to see them in real time. And eg, we're doing that now um first on a mice and monkeys, but um we now can do this in humans. So i'm been collaborating with a group at mass general hospital to record from people with eileen sy and and they have to have an Operation of for people who her drug resistant to be able to take out, find out where IT starts in the cortex, where IT is initiated with the seizure starts, and then to go in, you have to go in and record simultaneously from a lot of parts of the cortex for weeks until you find out where IT is.

And then you go in and you try to a take IT out and and often that helps. Very, very invasive. But for two weeks we have access to all those neurons in the cortex that are being recorded from constantly.

And so I ve used, if I started out because I was interested in sleep, I want to understand what happens in in the cortex of a human during sleep. But then we realized that, you know, you can also figure, you know, people who have these debilitating problems with seizure, you know, there for two weeks, that they have nothing to do. So they just love the fact that scientists are interested in helping them and and you teaching them things and finding out where in the cortex things are happening when they learn something.

This is a gold mine is is unbelievable. And I i've have learned things from humans that could, I could have never gotten from any other species. The language is one of them, but there are other things in sleep that we discovered having to the traveling ways.

There are a circular traveling ways that go on during sleep, which is astonishing. Nobody ever really saw that before. But if you were to describe one or .

two major functions to these travelling waves, what do you think they are accomplishing for us in sleep? And by the way, are they associated with deep sleep, slow way sleep, or with rapid eye .

movement sleep, or both? This is non rem sleep. This is a jargon. But this is during the intermediate transition states a transition states OK. Our audience will probably .

keep they they've heard a lot about slow wave sleep from me and that Walker .

from rapid live. And so what .

are these traveling waves accomplish?

okay. So in the case of they're called sleep spines, they last the the waves last for about um a second or two um and and they travel like a say in a circle around the cortex. And it's known that these spindles are important for consolidate experiences you've had during the day into your long term memory storage.

So so it's a very important function. And if if if you take out it's the hip campus that is is replying the experiences, it's a part the brain is very important for a long term memory. If you don't have a hippo campus, you can't learn new things to say you can't remember what you did the let yesterday, or for that matter, even an hour earlier.

But the hip camp has plays back. Your experiences, causes the sleep spending now to nee dads, to the cortex and and is important. You do that right? Because you don't want to overwrite the existing knowledge you have, you just want to basically incorporate the new experience into your existing knowledge base in efficient way that uh, that doesn't experience with what you're already know. So that's an example of a very important function that the traveling we have.

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The link is David protein dot com slash huberman. As I recall, there are one or two things that one can do in order to ensure that one gets sufficient sleep spindles at night, and thereby incorporate this new knowledge. This was from the episode that we did with gene pole from U.

C, L. A, I believe, and others, including matt Walker. My recollection is that the number one thing is to make sure you get enough sleep at night so you experience enough of these spindles.

And we're all familiar with the cognitive chAllenges, including memory chAllenges and learning chAllenges associated with lack of sleep intuition sleep. But the other was that um there were some interesting relationship between daytime exercise in nighttime prevalence of sleep spindles. Are you familiar with that?

Yes no this is is a fascinating literature um and it's all pointing the same direction which is that you know we always neglect to uh appreciate the importance of sleep. I mean, obviously you refresh when you wake up but there's a lot of things have is nothing your brain turns off is that IT goes into a completely different state and and memory consolidation ation is just one of those things that happens when you're fall asleep. And of course, you you know these dreams and so forth, we don't fully appreciate to understand exactly how all the different sleep stages are, are work together. But um exercises is a particularly important part of of of getting with the motor system um tuned up and and that is that that the of the the RAM rapid I move and sleep may be involved in that so that's that's you yet another part of the sleep stage as you go through you go back and forests between dream sleep and the slow westly back and forth back and forth during the night and then I think when you wake up you the in the RAM stage more and more RAM more more and RAM but you know that's all observation but know as a scientist which you perturb the system and and see if you can maybe if you have more sleep spindles maybe you'd be able to remember things Better so IT turns out sera bednets who said you see irvine did this fantastic experiment so IT turns out there's a drug called sop dm which um is is goes by the the name ambient. You may have some experience with that.

I'm never taken IT, but i'm aware of what IT is.

People use IT as a sleepy a lot of people take IT in her sleep okay ah well that turns out that IT causes uh more sleep mentals really yeah IT IT doubles the number of sleep spend tals. If you if you take the drug um you take the drug and after you done the learning, you do the learning at night and then you take the drug and you have choices, many spindles. You wake up in the morning, you can remember twice as much from what .

you learn and the memories are stable over time. Yes, it's in there.

yes. No, it's consolidates IT mean that's the point.

What the downside of?

Okay, here's the downside. Okay, so people who take the drugs say, if you're going up to europe and you take IT and then you sleep really soundly, but often you you find yourself in hotel room, you completely have no clue, you have no memory of how you got there.

I ve had that experience without amby or any other drugs where I am very badly jet lagged. Yes, and I wake up and for few seconds, but what feels like eternity have no idea where .

I K it's terrifying that, well that that's another problem that you have with jet lag. That lag really crews, things up. But this is something where you could be an hour, you know, you, you, you took the train or you you took a taxi, or is something and you, and so here, here, then this seems crazy.

How could that be A, A, A, A, A way to improve learning and recall and one hand, and then forgetful this, on the other hand, well, IT, turns out, was important. Um dep when you take the drug right um other words, IT helps consolidate experiences you've had in the past before you took the drug, but IT will wipe out experiences you have in the future after you take the drug right. You feel i'm not .

laughing and must be a terrifying experience but i'm laughing because you know there are some beautiful pharmacy gy and indeed some um wonderfully useful a pharmaceuticals out there. Uh you know some people may clinging to hear me say that, but there are some very useful drugs out there that save lives and help people deal mat set a side effects are always a concern but this particular drug profile ambient that is um seems to reveal something perhaps even more important than the discussion about spindles or ambient or even sleep, which is that you got ta pay the pipes somehow as they say that's right, that you tweet one thing in the brain, something else, something else goes you, you, you don't get anything for .

free that's a true I think that this is something that um is true, not just of drugs for the brain, but steroid for the body sure yeah .

I mean steroids um even low dose testosterone therapy, which is very popular nowadays, give people more vigor at that. But IT is introducing a sort of second puberty in puberty is perhaps the most rapid phase of aging at the entire lifespan. Same thing with people.

Take growth form on will be a probably a Better example because certainly those therapies can be beneficial to people, but growth hormone gives people more vigor, but IT accelerates aging. Look at the quality of skin that people have when they take growth of money. IT looks more age physically change and i'm not for or against these things.

It's highly individual but I completely agree with you. I would also venture that um with the growing interest in um so called neutral pics and people taking things like modafinil, not just for narcolepsy, date, time, sleep ess but also to enhance cognitive unction, okay, maybe they can get a way. We're doing that every once in a while for a deadline task or something.

But my experiences is that people who obsess over the use of farmer ology to achieve certain brain states pay in some other way, absolutely, whether not stimulants or seditious or sleep drugs. And that behaviors will always prevail. Behaviors will always .

prevail as tools. yeah. And and one of the things about the way the body evolved is that is IT really has to baLance a lot of things. And so with drugs, you basically and unbalancing IT somehow and and what the consequences, as you point out, is that know what what it's order to make one part Better. One part of your body is you you sacrifice something else somewhere else.

And as long we're talking about brain states and connectivity across areas, want to ask a particular question then I want to return to this issue about how best to learn, especially in kids, but also in adult. I've become very interested in and spent a lifetime with the literature in some guests on the topic of psychodeviant s um let's leave the discussion about L D aside because do you know why there aren't many studies to elsy? This is kind of a fun one.

No one is expected to, I think.

But there so is sulfide in the mda and there are lots of studies is going about .

ah but when I was growing, as you know, I was against the right.

what I learned is that there are far fewer clinical trials expLoring the use of elastica because with the exception of switzerland, none of the researchers are willing to stay in the laboratory as long as IT takes for the subject together in the last journey where a silicide intends to be a shorter, right, a shorter experience. Okay, let's talk about suicide.

And for a moment, my read of the data on suicide is that IT still open to question, but that some of the clinical trials show me significant recovery from major depression is pretty impressive. But if we just set that aside and say, okay, mr. Needs to be worked out for safety.

What is very clear from the brain imaging studies before and after a resting state task related IT said a is that you get more resting state global connectivity, more areas talking to more areas than was the case prior to the use of the psych lic. And given the similarity of the psychiatric journey here, specifically talking about suicide ban to things like rapid I movement, sleep and things of that sort, I have a very simple question. Do you think that there is any real benefit to increasing brain wide connectivity? To me, IT seems a little bit haphazard.

And yet the clinical data are promising, if nothing else promising. And so is what we're seeking in life as we acquire a new knowledge, as we learn to or golf, or you know, take up singing or what have you, as we go from childhood into the late stages of our life. That whole transition is what we're doing, increasing connectivity and communication between different grain areas.

Is that what the human experience is really about? Or is IT that we're getting more modular, we're getting more segregated in terms of this area? Talk in to this area in this particular way. Feel free to explore this in any way that feels meaningful. Or do they pass if it's not a good question?

No, it's a great question. I mean, you have always great questions and we don't have complete answers yet. But uh, specifically with regards come activity, um if you look at what happens in a infant spring during the first two years as a tremendous amount of new synapse is being formed, this is your area, by the way.

you about this an idea.

but then you prove them right. The second phase is that you offer a abundant in apps and that what you want to do is to prove them. Why would you want to do that? Well, you know, synapse is are expensive.

It's talk takes a lot of of of energy to activate all of the neurons. And the synapses is especially because of the turn cover of the new transmitter. And so what you want to do is to, uh, reduce the amount of energy and only use those synapses that have been proven to be the most important right now.

Unfortunately, as you get older, you you the pruning slows down, what doesn't go away, the cortex thins and and so forth. So I think that goes in the opposite direction. I think that as you get older, you're losing connectivity. But you you retain interesting ly, you retain the old memories. The old memories are are really rock solid because they were put in when you were Young.

The foundation.

the foundation upon which everything else is built a but but it's not totally one way in the sense that even as an adult, as you know, you can learn new things, maybe not as quickly. By the way, this is one of the things that surprised me. So barber and I have looked at the the people who you know really were the benefit of the most IT turns out that the peak of the demographic is twenty five to thirty .

five in barba oak.

oak. Yeah, she's she's really the mastermind. She's a fabulous educator and background and engineering. But what's going on? So IT turns out that we we aimed our uh, our move at kids in high school and college because that's their business.

They go every day and they go into work, have to learn, right? That's their business. But in fact, very few of of the students are actually, you know, they weren't taking the court.

Why should they? They spend all day in the class, right? Why do they want to take another class?

So this is that your the learning to learn, learning how to learn. okay. So you did this with barba.

so I did with barber. And now twenty five to twenty five, we have this huge peak. huge.

So what's going on? Here's what's going on. It's very interesting. So you're twenty five, you going to college.

You have the people, by the way, who take the course, went to college, right? So it's not like filling in for college. This is like topping IT off.

But you're in the workforce. You have to learn new skill. May maybe you have mortgage, maybe your children, right? You can't afford to go go off and and and and take a course of get another degree. So you take a book and you discover, you know, i'm not quite as a gel as I used to be in terms of learning. But IT turns out with our course, you can boost your learning and so that even though you you're not as your brain, is that learning as quickly, you can do IT more efficiently.

This is amazing. I want to take this course. I will take this course. What um what sort of time commitment is the course you already double? That is zero costs.

which is amazing. It's spite sized videos lasting about ten minutes each and is about fifty or sixty over course of one month.

And are you tested or you self?

Yes, there are test. There are quiz. There are tests at the end. And there are, uh, forms where you can go and talk to other students who have questions. We have ts.

no, anyone can do this.

anyone in the world. In fact, we have people in india, housewives who say, thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Because I could have never learned about how how to be Better learner. And I wish I had to known this when I was going to school.

Why do more people not know about this learning to learn course? Although you, as people know, if I get really excited about IT, about anything, i'm never going to shut up about IT well. But I want to take the course first.

because I want to understand the got you, we have like ninety eight percent approval. This is phenomenal, is sticky .

like that is a .

math cabuli. No math no. But is not we're not teaching anything specific. We're not t we're not trying to give you knowledge. You're trying to tell you how to acquire your knowledge and how to do that, how do how to deal with exam anxiety, for example, or how how do you know we all procrit, right? We put things .

how to avoid that.

Teach you how to avoid that.

fantastic. okay. I'm going to skip back a little bit now with the intention of of double clicking on this learning to learn thing. You pointed out that in particularly in california, but elsewhere as well, there isn't as much procedural practice based learning anymore. I'm in a play devils advocate here and i'm going to point out that this is not what I actually believe.

But you know when I was growing up, you had to do your timetables in your division and you know in any fractions and your exponent and you know and you they build on one another. And then at some point, you know, you take courses where you might need you like a graphing calculator to some people. Give me like what is this? But the point being that there were a number of things that you had to learn implement functions and and you learn you learn by doing he learn by doing and likewise in in physics class, you know we were attaching things to strings and for micrometers ics and and learn in that stuff okay.

Um and learning from the chock ward lectures I can see the value of both certainly and you explain that the brain needs both to really understand knowledge and how to implement. And back in fourth but nowaday, you know you will hear the argument, well why should somebody learn how to read a paper map, unless is the only thing available because you have google maps? Or if they wanted do a calculation, they just put IT into the top bar function on the internet.

And mom outcomes, the answer. So there is a world where certain skills are no longer required. And one could argue that the brain space and activity in time and energy in particular, could be devoted to learning new forms of knowledge that are going to be more practical in the school and workforce going forward.

So how do we reconcile these things? I mean, i'm of the belief that the brain is doing math, and you and I agreed its electrical signals and chemical signals is doing math and it's running algorithms. I think you of that, i'm certainly.

But how are we to discern what we need to learn versus what we don't need to learn in terms of building a brain that's capable of learning the maximum number of things, or even enough things, so that we can go into this very uncertain future? Because as far as you know, and I know there's no neither of us have a Christal ball. So what is essential to learn? And for those of us that didn't learn certain things in our formal education, what should we learn? How to learn?

Well, this is generational. okay. So technologies provides with tools. You mention the calculator, right? Well, calculator didn't eliminate, uh, you know, the education you need to get in math but IT made certain things easier if they did possible you to do more things and more accurately tly.

However, interestingly, uh students in my class often ah come up with answers that are off by you know eight orders of magnus de and that if that's a huge amount right clear that they didn't key in the calculator properly but they didn't recognize that IT was IT was a rely finally was a completely way off the beam because they didn't have a good feeling for the numbers. They don't have a good sense of exactly how big IT should have been, you know, order back to the basic understanding. So it's kind of a there is a the benefit is that you can do things faster, Better, but then you also lose some of your intuition if you don't have the procedure system in place.

I'm thinking about a kid that wants to be a musician who uses A I to write a song about a bad break up that that is kind of recovered when they find new love. And i'm guessing that you could do this today and get a pretty good song out of A I but would you call that kid a song writer or a musician on the face of IT? Yeah, the AI is helping.

And then you'd say, well, that's not the same as sitting down with the guitar and trying out different chords and and feeling the introduction in the voice. But i'm guessing that for people, they were on the electric guitar. They were criticizing people on the acoustic guitar, you know, so we have this generation thing where we look back and say, that's not the real thing you need to get the so what what are the key fundamentals .

is really a critical question. okay. So back to that, because this what you put IT at the beginning had had to do with whether your how your brain is allocating resources.

okay. So when you're Younger, you can take in things your brains more valuable. For example, how good are you on social media?

I will. I do all my own instagram and twitter, and those accounts have grown in proportion to the amount of time I been doing IT. So yeah, I would say pretty. I I not the biggest account on social media, but for a science, health, and we would do okay.

And thanks to the audience, this speaks well of the fact that you've manage to of break there to go beyond generation and get up.

I can type with my thumbs.

Ry, o, they good. That's a manual skills that .

you new new phenomenon and human evolution. I couldn't .

believe that I saw people doing that. Now I can do to, uh, but the thing is that if you learn how to do that early in life, you're much more A A good at that. You can move your time much more quickly also, uh, you can have many more, you know, tweet going when that where they call them.

Then I call tweet on X I think they still call them tweet because you can. It's hard to verb letter x. You didn't think of that one. I like x because it's cos kind of point and it's got black, lacks kind of format and IT fits with kind of the that the you know the engineer like black x, you know this kind of thing. But we will .

still come tweets OK that's good. But you know I I, I walk across campus and I see everybody, like half the people are, or tweet or no, they are. They're doing something with their cell phone. I mean, is unbelievable.

You have beautiful sunsets at the sol institut. I'll put a link to one of them. I mean, IT IT is truly spectacular or inspiring. To see a sunset at the souk .

every day is different. And everyones .

on their phones these days.

sad. And they are looking down and they are found walking along, even people who are skate boarding. Unbeliever, I mean, no, it's mazing.

What human being can do, you know, when they're learned, get into something. But what happens is the Younger generation picks up whatever technology IT is, and the brain is really good at IT. And you picking, picking up later. But you are not quite as a gile, not quite as maybe obsessive IT fatigues me.

I will point this out. They're doing so. Doing anything on my phone feels fatigue in a way that reading up a paper book grievin just writing on a laptop or a desktop computer is fundamentally different. I can do that for many hours if i'm on social media for more than few minutes, I can literally feel the energy draining out of my body interest. I would I could do um springs or deadlift for hours and not feel the kind of fatigue that I feel from doing social media.

So you know, this is fascinating. I I like that what's going on in your brain? Why why is IT? And also I like to know from Younger people whether they have the same I think but not I think my guess is that they don't feel for tee because they got into this early enough.

Um and this is actually A A very, very I I think that has a lot to do with the foundation you put on to your brain. In other words, things that you that you get, you learn when you really Young are foundational. And they make things easier, some things easier.

Yeah, I spent a lot of time in my room as a kid, either playing with legos or action figures, or building fish tanks, or reading about fish. I would attend to read about things and then do a lot of procedural based activities. You know, I would read skateboard magazines and skateboard.

I I was never wonder, really just watch a sport and not play IT so that, you know, bridging across these things. So social media, to me, feels like an energy sink. But of course, I love the opportunity to be able to teach to people and learn from people at such scale. But at an energetic level, I I feel like I don't have a foundation for IT. It's like i'm trying to like A A T like Jerry rigged my cognition into doing something that IT wasn't designed to do.

Well, there you go. It's because you don't have the foundation. You didn't do IT when you're Younger. And now you have to sort of use the the cognitive powers to do a lot of what was being done now and a Younger person procedurally.

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I've going to tell you something which is going to help all of your listeners. My book chat dp and future V I, I went through and I looked at other people's experiences with chat D. P.

I just wanted to know what what people were thinking and what. And I came across. This was an article, I think, as an york times, of a technical writer who decide, as you spend one month using IT to help her write things, her articles. And he said that when he started out, you know, at the end of the day, he was drained, completely drained. And I was like, you know, working on the machine, you know, you like a tractor, something know, struggling, struggling, struggling to get IT to work.

And then SHE started said, well, wait a second, you know, what if I treated like him being? What if i'm polite instead of, you know, being cured? He said, suddenly I started getting Better answers by by being polite and back and forth the way with the human, you know, so saying.

could you please give me information about .

I really have having trouble? I know, know. That answer you gave me was fabulous, is exactly I was looking for. And you know, now I need you to go on to the next part and help you with that too. Now the worst way you talk to human, right.

if you are assistant, that is IT, that he was talking to the AI to ChatGPT IT sounds like in this case, in the way that her brain was familiar with asking questions to a human. In other words, can so is the A I learning her and therefore giving her the sorts of answers that are more fascine for her to integrate with?

I, I think it's both I the were first of all, the tragedy p is miring your the way you treat IT IT will meet that back. You treat me like a machine that will treat you like a machine, okay, because that's that's what is good at. But here's the surprise surprises, he said, once I, once I start treating IT like a human, at the end of the day, I wasn't fatigue anymore.

why? Well.

IT turns out that all your life, you you interact with humans in a certain way, and your brain is wired to do that. And IT doesn't take in the effort. And so by treating the chat GDP as if I were a human, you're taking advantage of the brain circus in your brain.

This is incredible. And i'll tell you why, because I think many people, not just me, but many people really enjoy social media. Learn from IT.

I mean, yesterday I learned a few things that I thought we're just fascinating about how we perceive our own identity according to whether not we're filtering IT through the responses of others or whether that we take a couple minutes and really just sitting think about how we actually feel about ourselves, very interesting ideas about locus of self perception and things like that. I also looked at a really cool video of a baby raccoon popping bubbles while standing on its high limbs. And I was really cool.

And social media could provide me both those things within the series of minutes. And I was seeing myself, this is crazy, right? The reaction is kind of trivial, but delighted me. And that's not trivial. So but here's the question, could IT be that one of the detrimental aspects of social media is that if we're complimenting one another or if we are giving hearts or we're giving thumbs down or were in an argument with somebody, or where doing a clap back or they're clamping back on us as IT, we're dunking as it's called on on x on that IT isn't necessarily the way that we learned to argue. It's not necessarily the way that we learned to engage in healthy dispute.

And so as a consequent, IT feels like, and this is my experience, that certain online interactions feel really good and others feel they kind of great on me like because there's almost like an action step that is allowed, like you can't fully explain yourself or understand the other person, right? And I am somebody who, you know believes in the in the power of real face to face dialogue, at least on the phone, right? And I feel the same way about text messaging.

I hate text messaging. When text messaging first came out, I remember thinking I was not a kid at passing notes in class. This feels like passing notes in class.

In fact, this whole text messaging thing is beneath me at how I felt. And over the years, of course, I became a text message and it's very useful for certain things. Be there in five minutes running a few minutes late.

In my case that's a common one um but I think this notion of what grades are on us and as IT relates to whether not if matches are our childhood developed template of how our brain works is really key because IT touches on something that I definitely wants to talk about today that I know you've worked on a quite a bit, which is this concept of energy. What we're talking about here is energy, not who biology, woo, science, wellness energy we're talking about. We only have a finite amount of energy.

And years ago, the great ben barrer sadly passed away. Our former colleague and up my uh post up advisor came to me one day in the hallway and he stopped me. He said, he called me andy, like you do.

And he said, andy, how can we get so? So just run down of energy as we get older. Why I, why am I more tired today than I was ten years ago? I don't know how you sleeping as I got to sleep, me, mine, but never slept much in the first place.

But he had a ton of energy. And I thought to myself, I don't know. Like, what is this energy thing that we're talking about? I want to make sure that we close the hatch on on this notion of a attempt neural system that then you either find the experiences invigorating or deleting. I I want to make sure we close the hatch, but I want to make sure that we related at some point to this idea of energy. And why is IT that with each passing year of our life, we we seem to have less of IT.

You know, you ask these great questions that I wish that I had great answer.

So are you so far, you really do have great answers. They're certainly novel to me in the sense that i've not heard answers of this sort. There is a tremendous N T.

Learning for me today, and I know for the audience OK. So, but let's say you, somebody is twenty years old versus fifty years old, what should they do? I mean, we need to integrate with a modern world. We also need to relate across generations.

Oh yeah.

now this is a this retiring as much. They are living longer. Birth rates are down, but we have to get all get along as they say.

So, you know, IT IT is interesting. I think it's true that uh we all as we get older have have less of the vigor vigor I use some much different work. Um we will come back to that um but I think there are some who managed to keep an active life and here's something that again in in our mood, we really emphasize. Could you explain move?

I think most people wonder what to do .

is just for their okay, this is they're been around for about actually started stanford and definite color. So they have a company called cross a and what what happens is that you get professors, and in fact anybody who is knowledge uh or professional expertise to give lectures that are available to anybody in the world who have access to the internet.

And and now IT could is like probably tens of thousands now, any special T V history, uh, science music, you know you name IT there there is somebody who's done, you know who's an expert on that once to tell you because they're excited about what they're doing. Okay, so so know what what what we want us to do was to help people with learning. And so part of the problem is that IT gets more difficult. IT takes more effort as as you get older, IT depletes your .

vigor more if we're going to stay with this language of any.

That's right. So let's actually use the word energy. As you know, in the cell there is a physical power plant called the metal kandarian which is supplying us with, uh, ATP, which is the coin of the realm for the cell to be able to Operate all of this machinery, right? So and so when the things that happens when when you get older is that your might central run down.

yeah fewer of them and they are less efficient.

That's right. They're less efficient and and actually drugs can do that. You too they they can harm by the country .

recreation .

drugs now the drugs we take for illness and mature about, uh, recreational drugs. But A I know I know is the case that there are a lot of drugs that people take because they have to. But but, but the other thing and and this is something this that's the bad news here is the good news.

The good news is that you can rely ish your energy by exercise. That exercise is the best drug you could ever take, is the cheapest drug you could ever take that can help every organ in your body IT helps, obviously your heart IT helps your brain rejuvenates your brain IT helps your immune system. Every single organ system in the body benefits from a regular exercise.

I run on the beach every day. The sock institute I can. And I also at the isa masa, three hundred forty four above. So I go down every day. And then I I climb up the Cliff.

yeah, those steps down the black beach are, are there are good work out.

They are, they are. And so this is something has kept me active. And I do hiking when hiking in the alps. This are in last fall. So this is in september.

So this is, I think, something that people really ought to realizes that you you know it's like, uh putting away reserves of energy for you when you get older, the more you put away, the Better off you are. Here's something else. Okay, now this is jumping out to alzheimer.

So um study that was done in china many, many years ago when I first came to uh h law Sandy ago um I heard this from the was the ahead of the alzheimer program. He had done a study in china on set, and he, they went, and they had three populations. They had presence who had almost no education.

Then they had another group that had high school education, and then they were people who are advanced education. So IT turns out that the onset of alzheimer's IT was earlier for the people who had no education, and IT was the latest for the people who had the most education. Now, this is interesting, isn't because and presuming the genes are dead different, right? I mean, if there are all chinese, so one possibility, and obviously we don't really know why, but one possibility is that the more you exercise your brain with education, the more reserve you have later in life.

I I believe in the notion, and I don't have a Better word for IT. Maybe you do or phrase for IT is a kind of a cognitive fifty. You know, I send them to will play with this so i'll read slowly or i'll see where my default ACE of reading is at a given time of day.

And then i'll intentionally trying to read a little bit faster while also trying to retain the knowledge I am reading, right? So i'm not just reading the words. I am trying to absorb the information and you can feel the energetic demand of that.

And then i'll play with IT. I'll kind of back off a little bit and then i'll go forward and I try to find the sweet spot where i'm not reading at th Epace t hat i s r eflective b ut j ust a l ittle b it q uicker w hile a lso t rying t o r etain t he i nformation. And I learned this um when I had a lot of catching up to do at one phase of my educational career. Fortunately, he was pretty early and I was able to catch up on most things.

You occasionally things slip through and after to go back and learn to learn, you know and if I get anything wrong on the internet, they should have pointed out and then we go back and learning and guess what i'd never forget that because punish ed punishment, social punishment is a great signal so thank you all um for keeping me are learning but I picked that up from my experience of trying to get good at things like skateboarding or soccer when I was Younger. There's a certain thing that happens when skateboarding, that was my sport growing up, where it's actually easier to learn something going faster. You know, most kids trying learn how to early and kick lip standing in in the living room on the park is the worst way to learn how to do IT.

It's all easier going a bit faster than you're comfortable. It's also the case that if you're not paying attention, you can get hurt. It's also the case that if you pay too much cognitive attention, you can perform the motor movements, right? So there's a sweet spot that eventually I was able to translate into an understanding of.

When I sit down to read a paper or a news article or even listen to a podcast, there's a pace of the person's voice and then all adjust the the rate of the audio where I have to engage cognitive ly. And I know i'm in a mode of retaining the information and learning well, as if I just go with my reflectiv Epace. It's rare that I mean that perfect zone.

So I I point this out because perhaps IT will be useful to people I don't know it's incorporate into you're learning how to learn course. But I do think that there is something which I call cognitive velocity, which is ideal for learning, which is kind of literally scrolling. And this is why I think that social media is detrimental. I think that we train our brain basically to be slow, passive and multiple text cycling through, and something is very high silents IT kind of makes us kind of fat and lazy. Forgive the language, but i'm going to be blunt here, fat and lazy cognitively unless we make IT a right to also engage learning and my guess is it's tapping into this my control system .

uh uh very likely ah that's one part of IT uh, by the way, uh you know the way that you have adjust to the speed is very interesting because IT turns out that stress, you know, every thinks of stress is bad, but no IT turns us stress that is trenching. You know, that is only for a limited on the time that you control is good for you, is good for your brain, good for your body. I run intervals on the beach just the way that you do cogito intervals when you're reading was I run, run like hell for about ten seconds and then know I I go to the job and I run like l for another ten seconds and is pushing your body into that a extra gear that helps the muscles the muscles need to know that this is what they've to put out and that's where you gain um muscle mass, not not from just doing the same running pace every day. Well, your .

intellectual and physical vigor is underived. I've been on a long time. You ve always had a slight forward center of mass in your uh, intellectually and even the speed at which you walked through there.

I say you're for a california. You're a quick Walker. okay. Yeah, so that's a compliment by the way, east costers, you know what i'm talking about and californians would be like, you know um why not slow down? The reason to not slow down too much for too long is that these mind, a control systems, the energy of the brain in body, as you point out, are very linked.

And I do think that below a certain threshold makes a very hard to come back, just like below a certain threshold is hard to exercise um without getting very depleted or even injured that we need to maintain this. So perhaps now will be a good time to close the hatch on this issue of um how to teach Young people everyone should take this learning to learn course as a free resource. amazing. As IT relates to A I.

do you think that Young .

people and older people, now i'm forty nine, so put myself in the older bracket, should be learning how to use A I.

They already learning how to use A I. And again, it's just like new technology comes long. Who picks up first is the Younger people and astonishing, you know, they're using a lot more than I. You know, I use that almost every day, but I know a lot of students who basically and by the way, it's alert is like any other tool at all uh, you you need how to know how to use IT.

Where do you suggest people start? So um I have started using claude A I, okay, this was suggested to me by somebody expert in A I as an alternative to ChatGPT. I don't have anything against ChatGPT but i'll tell you I really like the um atheling of cloud a eye.

It's a bit of a softer beige aesthetic IT feels kind of apple like I like the apple brand and IT gives me answers. Maybe it's the fun, maybe it's the full maybe this goes back to the example use earlier, where I like cloudy, I and am a big fan of IT, and they don't pay me to say this. I have never met them.

I have no relationship to them, except that IT gives me answers in a bullet pointed format that feels very esthetically easy to transfer that information into my brain or onto a page, right? So I like cloudy. I use ChatGPT. How should people start to explore A I um for sake of getting smarter, learning knowledge, just for sake of knowledge having fun with IT. What's the best way to do that?

Well, I think exactly what you did, which is of the there's now dozens and dozens of different uh chatbot out there and in different people will uh feel comfortable with one or the other chat. G D P is the first. So that's why it's kind of taken over a lot of the cognitive space, right? It's like become like clinics, right? That that word that was why I use that as the first word in my blue book because it's iconic. But uh but but some of them um I have to say that for example, there are some they're really much Better math than others.

Google .

german. I recently did some fine tuning with uh with called a in a chain of of reasoning. Another when you a reason you go through a sequence of steps and when you solve a math problem, you go through a sequence of a part of steps of doing, but, you know, fitting first, finding out what's missing and then adding that. And IT went from twenty percent correct, eighty right on those problems. And as people hear that.

they always thing, well, that means twenty percent wrong still, but could you imagine any human or panel of humans behind a wall where if you asked a question, and then another question and another question that I would give you back Better than eighty percent accurate information in a matter of second.

So I think we are uh um being uh perhaps a little bit unfair to compare these large language models to the best humans rather than the average man. right? As you said, most people couldn't pass the L A, T, the loss testing, get into law school or am cat the test against the medical school. And ChatGPT has.

Is there a world now where we take the existing A I LLM, these computers, basically, that can learn like a collection of human brains, and send that somehow into the future, right? Give them an imagined future. Can we give them outcome a and outcome b and let them for ridge into future states that we are not yet able to get to, and then harness that knowledge and explore the two different outcomes?

I think that perhaps the the Better question in some sense, because we can travel back in time, but we can perhaps travel into the future with A I if you provide a different scenarios and you say unlike a panel of people, panel experts, medical experts or um space travel experts or um c travel experts, you can say, hey, you know, I don't sleep tonight. You're just gone to work for the next forty eight hours. In fact, you're going to work for the next three weeks or three months.

Um and you know what, you're not going to do anything else. You're not can pay tension to your health. You're not can do anything else, but you can take a large language model and you can say just forage for knowledge under the following different scenario and then have that fleet of large language models come back and give us the information like no no tomorrow.

okay. So i've lived to this myself back in the thousand nine and eighties. I was just starting my career, and I was one of the pioneers and develop learning out rythm for neural network models.

Jeff inner and I collaborate together and something called the bozo machine. And he actually won a real prize for this just this year. Yeah, of my best friends.

brilliant. And and he dead. Well deserved IT for not just the boston machine, but all the work is on since then, machine learning and then back propagation and soft.

But back then we, jeff and I had this view of the future. A I was dominated by symbol processing rules, logic, right writing, computer programs for every problem. You did a different computer program.

And IT was very, uh, you know, human resource intensive, the right program, so that IT was very, very slow going and they never actually got there. They never wrote a program for vision, for example, even though the computer vision, computer computer really worked hard for a long time, but, you know, we had this view of the future. We had this view that the the nature has solve these problems is existence proof that you can solve the vision problem.

Look at every animal, conceive insects, right? Come on. I will figure out this, figure out how they did IT. Maybe we can help by following up when a nature we can actually, again, going back to algorithm M, I was telling. And so in the case of the brain, which makes a difference from a digital computer, disco computer is basically can rent any program. But a fly brain, for example, only runs the program that is a special purpose hardware.

allows IT run, not much neural plasticity.

There is enough there, just enough in habituation and so forth, us, so that you can survive. And this survived twenty four hours.

I'm not trying to be disparate ging. So the fly biologists, when I think of a neutral plasticity, I think of the magnificent neural plasticity of the human brain to customize to a world of experience, you know, I think about a fly, I think about a really cool set of neutral circuits that um that work really well to avoid getting swatted, to eating and to reproducing and not a whole lot else. They don't really build technology.

They might have interesting relationships, but who knows? Who cares? IT just sort of like it's not that IT doesn't matter, it's just a question of the lack of plasticity makes them kind of a my species. Okay.

I can see I cross your button here. No, no, no.

no. I love fly biog. They taught us about algorithms for direction selectivity in the visual system. I don't know. I I love that you're soft of biology. I just think that the lack of neuroplasticity okay reveals a certain um like key limitation and that the reason were the curators of the earth is because we have .

so much plasticity of course of course you but you have to you know one step at a time. Nature first has to be able to creatures that can serve and then you know their brains is bigger as the a environment gets more complex. And you know here we are but the but the key is that IT turns out that certain algorithms in the fly brain are present in our brain like conditioning classical condition.

And you can classical condition to fly in terms of you know training IT to to um when you give a reward, IT will produce the same action, right? This is like condition behavior. And that algorithm that I told you about that isn't your value function, right? Tempo difference learning that algorithm is in the fly brain, is in your brain, so we can learn about learning for .

many species. Okay, I was just have a little fun poking the fly. Biologist, I actually think your off a great deal, as has honeybee biology.

For instance, if you if you give caffeine to bees on particular flowers, they'll actually trying to pollinate those flowers more because they actually like the feeling of of being caffeinated. There's a bad pon about a buzz here, but i'm not going to make that point because everyone's done that before. I fully absorb and agree with the the value of study more simpler organisms to find the algorithms.

right? That's where we are right now. But I did not to go just go into the future.

I'm telling the story about what we were. We were, we were predicting the future. We were saying this is an alternative, traditional ai.

We were not taken seriously. Everybody was. Experts said, no, no. Right programs, right programmes, every getting all the resources, the grants, the jobs. And we were just like the little furry mamas under the feet of these dinosaurs, right? In retrospect.

Hello, logy. But the dinosaurs ed off this.

But the point of making is that is possible for our brain to make these extraordinary the future. Why not ai versions of brains? Why not I, I I think it's your ideas a great one.

yeah. I I mean, the reason i'm excited about A I and increasingly so across the course of this conversation is because there are very few opportunities to forge information is such large scale in around the circuitous clock. I mean, there's one thing that we are truly a slave to as humans is the circadian biology.

You got ta sleep sooner later. And even if you don't, your cognition really waxes and waves across the circadian an cycle. And if you don't, you're gona die early.

We know this. Computers can work, work, work. Sure, you're gotta power them.

There's the cooling thing. There are bunch of things related to that. But as that's tractable, so computers can work, work, work.

And the idea that they can provide a portal into the future and that they can just bring you back so we can take a lucky i'm not saying we have to implement their their advice, but to be able to send a panel of diverse computationally diverse experientially, diverse A I experts into the future and bring us back a panel of potential routes to take to me is so exciting. Maybe a good example would be um like treatment for schizophrenia. This is an area that I want to make certain than we talk about.

You know I grew up learning as a neth science student, that is, zophernes was somehow a the corruption of the dopamine system. Because if you give elective drugs that blocked doping receptors, that you get some improvement in the in the motor symptoms in some of the hycy's is set. You now also have people who say, no, that's not really the basis of kizer hanna, I love your thoughts and you have incredible work from people like Chris palmer at harvard.

We even have a department at stanford now a focusing what we even have people at stand for now, focusing on what Chris really founded as a field which is met a bloc psychiatric. The idea that who could imagine, when I makes sarcastic care, what you eat impact your ma ona, how you exercise impact your might continue ma contrary px ring function. And well then behold, metaphoric health of the brain in body impacts schizophrenia, a symptoms.

And he's looked at ways that people can use kioto ic diet, maybe not to cure, what to treat, and in some cases, maybe being cure sis of friend. So here we are, this place where we still don't have a code and cure for chizen hania. But you could send L, L, ms into the future and start to forage the most likely or all of the data in those fields to do that in an hour plus come up with A A bunch of hypothesize different positive and negative result.

Clinical trials that don't even exist yet. Ten thousand subjects in sanna via who, you know, go on key to generic diet who have a certain level of h superability is schizoid ia based on what we know from twin studies, things that never, ever, ever would be possible to do in an afternoon, maybe even in a year. There is in funding.

There is in, 嗯， get the answers back and let them present us those answers. And then you say, well, it's it's artificial, but so where are human brains coming up with these experiments? So to me, i'm starting to realize that it's not that we have to implement everything that AI tells us or offers us. But sure, hell gives us a great window into what might be happening or is likely to happen .

specifically for schizophrenia. I'm pretty sure that if we had these largely language models twenty years ago, we would have known back then the academy would have been a really good drug to try IT to help these people .

tell us about the relationship between cademy schizophrenia. okay? Because I think a lot of people and maybe you could define because of honey, even though most people think about people hearing voices and psychosis like there, there's a bit more to IT um that maybe we just can't bring out okay.

So um one of the things now that we know see the problem is that if you look at the end point, that doesn't tell you what started. The problem started during early in development because sophana is something that this appears that when you know late adolescence, early adult hood, but is actually is already a problem, do you have a problem from the big go?

So what is the concordance in identical twins? Meaning, if you have one identical twin, you have identical twins in the room, right? And one is destined to be full on schizophrenic. Okay, what's the probability?

The other? Here's, here's the experiment. OK. This is very, very been replicated many, many times in mice.

I should say, oh, no, actually, kay, let me start with the human. okay? So kadee is what for a long time and is still as a party drug.

Special key. I've never taken IT, but this is what I i'll tell .

you what happens because i've talked people have done this. You take academy sub understand way an anesthetic is given to children is a pretty good anesthetic and also use veteran medicine but any case you give IT you give IT to um you take Young adults, here's what the experience they experience out of body experience you know they they have this wonderful feeling of energy and they're very little bit is a high, but it's a very unusual high.

Now know if if if they just go and they have one experience, but if they have two like they they party two days in a row, a lot of them coming to the emersion zero. And here's what the what the symptoms are. Full blown psychosis. Full blown we're talking about, you know, in distinguishable from a schizophrenic break.

So auditory.

hu cine, yeah, auditory illustrations of paranoia, very, very advanced. You know, you should say that, my god, this this person here is is really is, is gone in in, has become a schizophrenic. And this is really a, like you say, the symptoms are the same.

However, if you isolate them for a couple days of, come back, right? So so that means that the symphonia can induce, uh, sorry, academy can induce a form of schizophrenia. Na ec choses temporarily, not permanently, fortunately.

Okay, so what is the attack? okay. And there's another literal on this IT turns out that IT beds to of a form of receptor, a glue mate receptor called N M D A receptor ors, which are very important by way for learning a memory.

But we know the target, and we also know what the the acute outcome is that IT IT reduces the strength of the inhibitory ory circuit, the the the internet that use inhibitory ory transmitters. The ensign that creates the inhibitory ory transmitter is downregulates. And what does that do IT means that is more exciting.

And what does that mean that is more exciting. That means that there is more activity in the bore tex, and this actually much more vigor. You do you start becoming crazy, right? If it's too much activity. So this is interesting. So this this is telling us, I think, that we should be thinking about a and and now there's a whole field now in psychic has to do with have a glutamate hypotheses for the first where where the actual um imbaLance ed first occurs is an imbaLance between the exciting tory inhibitory systems that are in the cortex are keep you imbaLance .

in N M D A and method D S party receptors are glutamate recept there one one classes.

class. That's right. okay. So now here is hypothesis for why academy might be good for depression.

People are taking IT now or depressed, right? So here you have a drug that causes over excitation. And here you have a person who is under excited.

Depression is associated with lower exciting story activity in some parts of the critics. Well, if you titrated, you can come back into baLance, right? So you, what you do is you fight depression with schizophrenia.

Touch your schizophrenia. Now you you know, you have to keep giving. I think once every three weeks, they have to have a new adobe of cademy. But IT helped an enormous number of people with very, very severe clinical depression. So so as we learn more about the mechanisms underlying some these disorders, the Better we are going to be at extrapolating and and coming up with some solutions, at least to prevent if you getting worse. By the way, i'm pretty sure that the large language metals could have figured this out Young a long ago.

So in an attempt to understand how we might be able to leverage these large language models now, how would we have used these large language models long ago? Let's say you had twenty four AI technology in nineteen to on here, nineteen ninety eight, the year that I started graduate school. Right at that time, I was like the dope.

My hypothesis is, kiss a rennie was in every textbook, there was a little bit about glue to mate, perhaps, but, you know, is all about dopa. So how would the large language models have discovered this? Can deming was known as a drug kadee.

Ine, by the way, is very similar to P, C, P. From client, which also burns the N B sector. Um so how would this also a party trip also?

Yeah not when I recommend nor cademy.

Frankly, I I don't recommend any recreational drugs, but i'm not a recreation drug guy. But what would those large language models do if they you so you got twenty, twenty four technology placed into one thousand nine hundred and ninety eight. They're ford ging for existing knowledge. But then are they able to make predictions like, hey, this stuff is going to turn out to be wrong or hey.

this stuff, you know, this is a very, very speculative uh and really um we can begin actually to see this happening now. Ah so I have a colleague at the skeans to rusticate very uh distinguished neuroscientist and he he was one of the he discovered that there are new neurons being born in the hip campus, right, which is something in adults, which is something that in the textbook says that doesn't happen, right?

I was around one nine hundred and eighty eight.

yes. And I actually have a paper which we tested L T P. Entrepreneurship of actually the effects of exercise. A neurogenesis exercise .

increases neurogenesis.

increases the the cells, increases neuron osi. And also the cells that are active are become part of the circuit. More cells become integrated.

And this is true in humans as well, right?

Yeah we and there was uh some cancer drug that was given that you know they show that that was uh their new cells that were able that they were able to later and post more than I am actually see that they were born in the adult. okay. So here we are okay in one hundred and ninety eight.

And the question is, uh, can you can you jump? Can you jump into the future? Okay, so rusty, we were, you know, happened to talk about this issue about, you know, he's using these large language models now for his research.

I say, oh, wow, how do you use IT? And he said we used that as a an idea pump. What would you mean idea pump? Well, we give IT all of the experiments that we've done. And, uh, and we have, you know, the literature is access to the literature. And so far then we ask you for ideas for lux.

I love IT. I love IT. I was on a plane where I SAT next to a guy that work at google and he he's one of the main people there in terms of voice to the text um in text to voice software and he showed me something i'll provide a link to IT because it's another one of these open resource things um and i'm not super techy.

I'm not like the I don't get enough and technology. I don't get in N A plus. I'm kind of in the male. So I think i'm pretty represented with the average listener for this podcast.

What you show me is that you can take um you open up this website and you can take P D F or you take um you are else the websites, website addresses and and you just place them in the margin. You literally just drag and drop them there and then you can ask questions and the A I will generate answers that are based on the content of whatever you put into this margin. Those P D F, those websites.

And the cool thing is IT references ces them. So you know which one which article IT came from, right and and then you can start asking IT more sophisticated questions like in the two examples of um the effects of a drug, one being very strong and one being very weak. Which of these papers do you think is more rigorous based on subject number? But also kind of the strength of the findings in a pretty vae thing.

Strength of findings is pretty vae, right? Anyone that argues weak findings, those aren't enough subjects. Well, we know a hell a lot about human memory from one patient.

H. M, so strength of findings when people is a subjective thing, right? You really have to be an expert in a field to understands, train the findings.

And even then, and what's amazing is that starts giving back answers like, well, if you're concerned about a number of subjects, this paper, but that's a pretty obvious one, which one had more subjects? But IT can start critically these statistics that they used in these papers in very sophisticated ways, and explain back to you why certain papers may not be interesting and others are more interesting. And IT starts to weight the evidence, oh my god.

And then you say, well, with that waited evidence, can you hypothesize what would happen if? And so i've done a little bit of this where IT starts trying to predict the future based on ten papers that you gave IT five minutes ago. I don't think any a professor could do that except in their very specific area of interest. And if they were already familiar with the papers and IT would take them many hours, if not days, to read all those papers .

in detail and they might not actually come up with the same answers. Right right. Yeah so so this is if actually this is something that um is happening in medicine, by the way, of for doctors who are using a is an assistant, this is this is really interesting so um and this is german ology was a paper in nature, you know skin lesion, several that two thousand skin lesion and some of them are are cancer us and others are and so any case they they tested the expert doctors and then they tested in the eye and and they were both both doing about you ninety percent right. However, if you let the doctor use the ai IT boost the doctor to ninety eight percent.

ninety eight percent accurate yes.

And what's going on there is very interesting. So IT turns out that although they they got the same ninety percent, they had different expertise that the A I had access to more data. And so I could look at the lesions that we're rare that doctor may never have seen, okay, but the doctor has more in depth knowledge of the most common ones that he seen over over again and those the subtleties and so for but so putting them together IT makes so much sense that they're going to improve if they work together.

And I think that, bell, what you're saying is that using AI as a tool for discovery, uh with the the the expert who is interpreting and and and looking at the arguments, the statistical al arguments and also um looking at the paper, maybe in a new way, maybe that's the future science. Maybe that's what can happen. Everybody everybody's worried about, oh, AI is going to replace us.

It's gonna be much Better than we are. Everything and and humans are absolutely nothing could be further from the case. Our strength and weakness is are different. And we by working together, it's going to strengthen. It's h you know both you know what we do and what A I does uh and it's it's going to be partnership is not going to be adversarial. It's going to a partnership.

Would you say that the case for things like understanding or discovering um treatments for neurologic illness, for avoiding large scale catastrophes like can IT predict macro movements? Let me give you an example. Here in los Angeles there occasionally an accident on the freeway.

Um you have a lot of cameras over three ways. Nowadays we have cameras in cars. You can imagine all of the data being sent in in real time.

And you could probably predict accidents pretty easily. And these are just moving objects right as specific rate who's driving up hazily. But you could also potentially um signal takeover of the brakes or the steering will of a car and prevent access.

I mean, certain cars already do that. But could you essentially eliminate, let's do something even more important, eliminate traffic. I don't know you can do that, but because that's a funeral problem. But could you could you predict physical events in the world into the future?

okay. This has already been done not for traffic, but for so you you know, as you know, the weather is extremely difficult to predict. And except here in california, where it's all you going to be Sunny here.

But now what they done is to feed a lot of previous data from previous heroes and also simulations of her riches. You can simulate them in a, in a supercomputer. IT takes days and weeks, so is not very useful for actually accurate predicting where is gna hit florida. But what they did was, after training up the A I on all of this data, IT was able to predict, with much Better accuracy, exactly where in florida is is going to make a landfall. And IT IT does that in on your laptop in ten minutes.

incredible. So I something just clicked for me in its probably obvious to you in the most people, but I I think this is true. I think what am about to say is true.

At the beginning of our conversation, we are talking about the acquisition of knowledge versus the implementation of knowledge, just learning facts versus learning had to implement those facts in the form of physical action or cognitive action, right? Math problems, cognitive action, physical action, okay, A, I can do both knowledge acquisition that can learn facts, lonely of facts and combinations. But presumably you can also run a lot of problem set and solve a lot of problem set. I don't think, except with some crude still to me, examples of robotics, that it's very good at action yet, but I will probably get there at some point. We're bots to getting Better, but they're not they're not doing what we're doing yet.

But that .

seems to me that as long as they can acquire knowledge and then solve different problems, that different iterations of combinations of knowledge, that basically they are in a position to take any data about prior events or current events and make pretty darn good predictions about the future and run those back to us quickly enough into themselves, quickly enough that they could play out the different iterations.

And so i'm thinking, you know, one of the problems that seems to really vexed neuroscientists in the field of medicine and the general public has been like increase in the at least diagnosis of autism. I've heard so many different hypothesis over the years. I think we're still pretty in the fog on this one. Could A I start to come up with new and and potential solutions and and treatments if they're necessary, but maybe get to the heart of this.

this problem IT might and IT IT depends on the data you have IT depends on the complexity disease um but IT will happen in other words, we will use those tools and the best we can because obviously if if you can make any progress at all and and jump into the future, wow, that would save life. That would help so many people out there.

I really think the promise here is so great that even though there are flaws in their regulatory problems, we just we really, really have to really push and we have to do that in a way that is going to help people. Uh, you know in terms of um making their jobs Better and and helping them solve problems that otherwise they would have had a difficulty with and so forth is beginning to happen. But you know it's where these are early days.

So we're at a stage right now IT with A I that is similar to what happened after the first flight of the right brothers. You know, other words is that the achievement that the Wright brothers bid was to get off the ground ten feet and to make power for, with a human being, one hundred feet, right? That was IT, that was the first light.

And IT took an enormous count of improvements that the most difficult thing that had to be solved with control, how do you control IT? How do you make a go in the direction you wanted to go? And shades of what's happening on an AI is that you we are off the ground. We we are not going very far yet, but who knows where will take us into the future?

Let's talk about parkinson's disease, a depletion of dolph in neurons that leads to difficulty in smooths movement generation um and also some cognitive and mood based um this function. Tell us about your work on parkinson's and and what what did .

you learn so um as as you point out, parkinsons is a first of the general disease is is very interesting because the doping cells are the particular part of the brain, the brain stem and and they are the ones that are responsible for procedure learning. I told you before about temporal difference.

It's not mean sells and it's a very powerful way for the is a global signals color modulator because IT module ates all the other signals taking place throughout the cortex and also it's very important for learning uh uh sequences of actions uh you know that produce um survival for survival and but the the problem is that a with certain h environmental insults you of especially you know taxes like pesticides ah those neurons are very vulnerable and when they die you get all of the symptoms that you just described that is this, the people who have lost those cells are actually before the treatment adopt, which is a dot mean pressure they actually were became tomatoes, right? They didn't move. They they were still alive, but they just didn't move at all.

No, because they locked in is called. Yeah, it's tragic, tragic. So when the when the first of trials of of of aldobrand we're given to them, IT was magical because suddenly they started talking. So I mean, this is amazing.

amazing. I'm curious, when they started talking again, did they report that their brain state during the locked in phase was slow, like was IT sort of like a dream like state, or they felt like they were in a nap? Or were they in there like screaming to get out because their physical velocity obviously was zero on their locked in after all. And i've long wondered when coming back from a run or from waking up from a great night sleep, when I shifted into my a waking state where they're not physical velocity and cognitive city okay.

that's wonderful observation or a question. You know the answer. Okay, here's here's something that is really a amazing IT was a discovered interestingly, when you know they they tend to move slowly, as you said, but to them cognitively, they think they're moving fast.

Now it's not because they can't move fast because you can say, what can you move faster? Sure, and they move Normal. right.

But to them, they think that moving at you super zero. So so it's a set point issue. So the set point issue, yes, it's all about set points. That's what's really going on and the set point gets further and further down, you know, now now without moving at all, they think they're moving, right? I mean, this is what's going, by the way, you can ask them, you know, what was the like know, we were talking to you and you didn't respond. I didn't feel like .

IT the brain confabulated .

an answer they have. Well, that they confabulated IT because they didn't have enough energy. They couldn't initiate, they couldn't initiate actions. That's one of the things that they have trouble with IT with movements. They are starting a movement.

You can tell. I'm fascinated by this notion of cognitive. And again, there may be a Better or more accurate or official a language for for but I feel like IT IT encompasses so much of what we try to do when we learn and the fact that during sleepy of these very um vivid dreams during rapid i've moved and sleeps.

So cognitive city is very fast, time perception is different thing and slow wave sleep dreams. And um I really think there's something to IT as as a um at least one metric that relates to brain state. Yes, I have long thought that we know so much more about brain states during sleep than we do about wakeful brain states.

We know about focus motivated flow. I mean, these are not scientific terms. I am not being dispersed ing of them. Thee prety much we've got um until we come up with something Better.

But like a biologist and neuroscientist and computational neuroscientist in your case, and like trying to figure out like like what brain data we in right now, our cognitive city is, is you a certain value? But I think the more that people think about this um you all ventured to say that the more that they think a little bit about their cognitive velocity at different times of day, start to notice that there's a tends to be a few times of day for me IT tends to be early to late mid morning um and then again in the evening after a little bit of dough and energy that boy that hour and a half each but that's the time to get real worked done because I I can mentally sprint far at those times, right? But there are other times of day when I don't care how much caffeine I drink and I care unless it's a stressful event that I need to meet the demands of that stress.

You I just can I can get to that faster pace while i'm also engaging. You can read faster, you can listen, but you're not using the information. You're not storing the information .

is right? What times a day for you are are now I get most done in morning and then you right later, if after dinner is. Is also a different though I think in the morning i'm i'm Better, I create a stuff and then I think that in the evening i'm Better. I actually just cranking IT out .

you know interesting um given the relationship between a body temperature and circadian rythm, I would like to run an experiment that um relates core body temperature to cognitive lost.

I actually noticed this is something that is just purely objective but the temperature of the sock inside the building is kept thirty five it's like you know rock solid. But in the afternoon I feel little chilly. It's probably my internal pressure, yeah, is probably going down.

And that may correspond to the loss of energy, you know, the amount of other ability for the brain and everything else. By the way, you know, this is q town. This is a jargon.

Every single enzi am in in your every cell can go at different rates depending on the temperature, right? And so so if the bite temperature doing this and all the cells are doing this too, right? So this is of is an explanation, i'm not sure is the right one.

But yeah, I crack heller. My colleagues, stanford in the biology department, has beautifully described how the insects tic a control over piute Y I believe IT is controls a muscular failure. That local muscular failure, you know, when people are like trying to move some resistance, has everything to do with the temperature, the local temperature that shuts down certain animals, tic processes that don't allow the muscles to contract the same way.

You know, he knows the details and he covered them on this procs. I'm forgetting the details. You start how, like these enzymes, es, are so beautifully controlled by temperature and of course, these laboratories focused on ways to bypass those temperature um or to change temperature locally in order to bypass those limitations.

And have shown them again and again it's it's just incredible yeah I don't here we're speculating about what that would mean for cognitive city, but I think um it's such a different world to think about the underlying biology I supposed to just thinking about like a drug increase dopamine in north an afan and an apple of an the social categories and you're going to increase energy, focus on alertness. Are you going to pay the Price? You're going have a trough and energy, focus on alertness.

That's proportional to how much greater IT was when you took the drug. That means are a good example why you the you you're going a mile a minute when you're taking the drug. Of course you know you it's it's it's I find a stand that's your impression and the reality is you don't actually accomplish .

that much more. Have any L L ms so AI been used to um answer this really pressing question of what is going to be the consequence on cognition for these Young brains that have wind while taking ridin, atall, vivants and other stimulus because we have a .

millions of kids experiment A A A whole generation. I I really would like to know the answer you I I wonder if anybody studying IT that's really a great question because we gave them speed effectively. They are the drug that the causes the brain to be activated but but by the way, but but you know there is the consequences that you know when that wears off, you have no energy, you just completely spent yeah that that's the pit .

that's the pit and .

so and but that's why you take more of IT. You say that's the problem is is a spiral .

um I love how today you're making IT so very clear how computation help math and computers and A I now are really shaping way that we think about these biological problems, which are also psychological problems, which are also daily chAllenges. I also love that we touch on ma contra and how to replenish my country.

A I want to make sure that we talk about a couple of things that I know in the back of people's minds no unintended here um which are consciousness and free will. Normally I don't like to talk about these things now because they're sensitive, but because I find the discussions around them typically to be more philology than newbie and they tend to be a pretty circular. And so you get people like Kevin mitchel um who is a real I think as a book about freewill he believes in free will.

You've got people like robbers suppose key the book determined he doesn't believe in free will. I feel about free will. And is IT even a discussion that we should be having?

Well, if you go back five hundred years, he has the middle es, the accounts that didn't exist, or at least not the way we use IT, because everybody IT was the the way that we, that humans felt about the in the world and how worked its its impact on them was that it's all fate.

They had this concept of fate, which is that is nothing you can you can do that something is going to happen to you because of the what's going on and the guys above, or whatever is right, you get you attributed to the, so the physical forces around you that caused them not not to your own free. Well, that is something that you did that caused you this that happen to you, right? So I saw, I think that these words, that, by the way, that we use freewill, consciousness, intelligence, understanding their whistle words because you can't pin them down, there is no definition of consciousness, that everybody goes on.

IT is tough to solve a problem, a scientific problem, if you don't have a definition that you can agree on. And and you know, there's a big controversy about whether these large language models understand language or not, right? The way we do.

And what IT really is revealing is we don't understand what understanding is. Literally, we don't have a really good argument or a measure, you know, that you can measure someone's understanding and then apply IT with chat GDP and see whether is the same IT. IT probably isn't exactly the same, but maybe there are some continuum here are talking about, right? You know, the way I look at IT, you know, IT is if an alien suddenly landed on earth and start talking to us in english, right? And the only thing we could be sure, but I was that it's not human.

and made some people that I wondered about their terrestrial origins OK OK.

Well, okay, now there is a big diversity among humans.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Certain colleagues of ours, one in particular in the physics department, who I absolutely adore as a human being, just had session, unusual pattern of speech, of behavior, totally appropriate behavior, but just unusual in the middle of a faculty meeting, which is kind of turn to me and start talking while the other person was presenting. And I was like, maybe not.

Now they in he would say, oh, okay, but in any other doman would say he was very socially adept. And so, you know, they're certain people that just kind of discard with convention and he kind of want to like A E N alien. It's kind of cool in a cool way. Like, you know is one of my again, when a friend and somebody I really delighted.

It's true. It's true. You know every night everybody um has adopted the same social conventions, but IT could be a touch of autism. I mean.

yeah that's a problem.

I mean was a very high functioning autistic people out there.

He's brilliant .

and and often there I was you know um is is a there are five people who are brilliant that with autism but you know .

could you build an LLM that was more um on one end of the spectrum versus the other to see what kind of information to be a really important thing to do that has been done?

Okay, there was a paper that I reviewed where they, they, they took the problem when they find tuned with different data from people with different disorders. You know, the artisans of worth and social pets, you know.

not going.

but you want to know the ends. No, they got these elements to behave just like those people who who have these disorders, you can get them to behave that way.

Could you do um political leaning and values? I haven't seen that.

But it's pretty clear that to me at least that that if you can do sociopathy, you can probably do political belief.

you know but you could also view all this is um you could take benevolent tracks.

You could also say hyper creative, uh um sensitive to um emotional tone of voices and find out what kind of information that person brings up excuse me, that L M O brings back verses, somebody who is very oriented towards just the content of people's words are supposed to you know, because among people you find this, you know, if you've ever left a party with a significant and sometimes someone will say i've had this experience with, like did you see that interaction be seeing? Like what you talking about? Like to do hear them like, no, not at all. I didn't hear, I heard the words, but I did not pick up on picking up on right. And I was clear that there are two very different experiences of the same content based purely on a on a difference in interpretation of the tonality.

Okay, there's a lot of information that is as you point out, which has to do with um the tone the uh in spain expressions. Uh you know there is a true amount of information that is is past not just with words, but with all the other parts, the visual input and south. And some people are good at picking up and how this or not, there's a tremendous variability between individuals.

And you know that that biology is to all about diversity and is all about you needing gene pool is very diversity that you can evolve in and uh um survive catastrophic changes that uh occurred in a climate, for example. But dub wouldn't be wonderful if we could create LLM. They could understand what the those differences are. I just think about IT, right?

That could truly diverse l and that integrated all those.

yes. So here's how you'd have to do. What you'd have to do is to train them up and data from a bunch of individuals, human individuals.

Now one of the things about these alarms is that they don't have a single personal. They can adopt any personal. You have to tell you what what you're expecting from.

or ask IT in a way that works for you. And you'll get .

back a certain part. If if I once gave IT an abstract from a paper, very technical and competition paper, and I said, you are a neuroscientist, I want you to explain this abstract to a tenure old. I did IT in in a way that I could never have done that and really simplify IT. Some of the socialities were not in IT, but you know what plastic IT was and explain what a syn nabis. And is there.

like a qualifying example? Graduate student, I saw something today on x, formerly known as twitter, that blew my mind that I want your thoughts on that. Very appropriate to what you're saying right now, which is somebody was asking questions of an l alarm on ChatGPT or maybe one of these other anthropic or claude or something like that probably misuse those names.

One of the the A I um uh online sites and somewhere in the middle of its answers, the L M. Decided to just take a break and start looking at pictures of landscapes in your semey like the LLM was doing. What what a what a maybe com cognitive ly fatigue person, or what any kind of online person person online would do, which was did like take a break and look at a couple pictures or something.

They maybe they think about going camping ing there or something and then get back to whatever task we hear about all luCindy in AI. That something that I can imagine, things that aren't there just like a human brain, but um that blew my mind. I haven't .

encounter that but you know is in IT faster uh you know that that's a sign of of of a real general internal model.

Um if if so here's the thing that the thing that most distinguishes, I think, and only from human, is that you know if if you if if if you go into a room, quiet room and just sit there without any sensory stimulation, your brain keeps thinking right in other words, you you think about what you want to do, you know, planning ahead or what something happened to you during the day, but your brain is always generating internally. You know, after talking to you, one of these large language models just goes blank. There is no self continuous, self generated thoughts.

And yet we know cl generated thought, and in particularly brain activity during sleep. As you illustrate earlier with the example of sleep's mindless and rapid aid movement, sleep are absolutely critical for shaping the knowledge that we were experienced during the day. So yes, so these elms are not quite where we are at yet. I mean they they can out performance and certain things like go, but how soon will we have L A I that is with self generated internal activity.

we're getting closer. Um and and so this is something i'm working on myself actually trying to understand how that's done in our own brains was generating continual a brain activity that leads to you planning and things that we don't know what the answer to that is yet in the science.

And by the way, you go to a lecture and you you hear the words went after the next over an hour, and you see the slides went after the next, and then you ask a question, right, just let's think about what you just did. Somehow you were able to integrate all that information over the hour and and then use your long term memory, then come up with some insiders on issue that you want. How did your brain remember all that information? Working memory, traditional working memory that neth scientists studied is only if a few seconds, right, maybe a telephone number or something.

But we're talking about long term working marriage. We don't understand how that was done. And L L, ms, actually, large language models can do something, is called in context learning and and is a really IT was a great surprise because there is no plasticity.

The thing learns at the beginning. You trained IT up on data, and then all IT does after that is to inference. You know, fast loop of activity, one word after the next, right? That's what happens with no learning, no learning.

But it's been noticed that as you continue your dialogue, e IT. Seems to get Better at things. How could that be? How could that be in context learning, even though there is no placation? That's a mystery. We don't know the answer to that question yet, but we also don't know what the answer IT is, what the answer is for humans either right?

Can ask you a few questions about you in as IT relates to science in your trajectory um building of what you are just sing do you have a practice of meditation or eyes closed sensory input reduced or shut down um to drive you're thinking in a particular way or you you know at your computer talking to students and post docs and sprinting on the beach you know sorry no it's .

funny you mention that because I get my best ideas uh not printing on the beach but you know just a either walking or jogging um and it's wonderful I don't know I think serotonin goes up it's another model think that that stimulates ideas and thoughts and so inevitable I come back to the my office. And I can't remember any those great as, yes.

what do you do about that?

Well, now how I take notes okay.

voice memo.

Yeah and and so much to a pan out, you know, is no doubt about IT that you're put into a situation, uh IT IT is form meditation. You know if you're running uh, in steady pace, nothing distracting about know the beach or do .

you listen to music or podcasts?

I I never listen anything. It's my my own thoughts .

so there's a former guest on this podcast who SHE happened to be triple degree ed from harvard, but she's more in the kind of like personal coach space, but very, very high level and impressive mind, impressive humans all around. And SHE has this concept of worthlessness that um can be used to accomplish our different things. But this idea that allowing oneself for or creating conditions for oneself to enter states throughout the day or maybe once a of very minimal sensory input, no lecture, no podcast, no book, no music, nothing in allowing the brain to just kind of um idle and go a little bit nonlinear, if you will, right? We we're not constructing thoughts or paying attention to anyone else has thoughts through those media venues in any kind of structured way as a source of great ideas and creativity.

It's been studied psychologist mind wandering. Mind wandering now is a significant literature and it's uh often when you have an aha moment, you know you're mind and is wondering and it's it's thinking and on lineally in the sense of not following a sequence of that is logical, you helping from things to think often ask when you get A A great idea with just letting your mind wonder yeah and that happens to me.

I wonder whether social media and just texting and phones in general have eliminated a lot of the, you know, walks to the car after work, where one would Normally not be on a color in communication with anyone or anything. I used to do experiments where I was, you know, like pipette and running, know as to chemistry. And IT was very real.

Xing, and I could think while I was doing, because I knew the procedures, and then, you know, you had to pay attention to certain thing, write them down, but but I would often feel like, wow, i'm both working and relaxing and thinking of things. And then I I would listen to music sometimes. Okay.

so we have a whole session, uh, uh, a clip, and learning how to learn about exactly this phenomenon. Here's here's what we tell our students, right, is that you know if you're having trouble with some concept or you know you don't understand something, you're beating your head against the wall. Don't stop, stop.

Just go off and do something. Go off and and clean the dishes. Go off and walk around the block.

And inevitably what happens is when you come back here, your mind is clear and you figure out what to do. And and that's one of the best pieces of advice that anybody could get because, you know, we don't. Nobody has told us how the brain works. We some people are really good at in two days um because theyve experience maybe um and and and and but everybody I okay. The other thing is everybody I know who's really made important contributions and I bet you're one of them you know you're were struggling with some problem at night, and you go to bed and you wake up the morning 啊， that's the solution.

That's what I should do. First thing in the morning when I wake up is when I am almost bombarded with, I wouldn't say insight and not always meaningful insight, but certainly what was unclear becomes immediately clear on.

right? right? That's the thing that is so amazing about sleep. And and, and and you can see, people who know this can count on IT.

Now the words, the key is to think about IT before you go to sleep, right? Your brain works on during the sleep period, right? And so you don't watch TV because and who knows what your brain is going to work on, you know, use the time before you fell asleep to think about something that is bothering you or maybe something that you know you're trying to understand. Maybe you know a paper that you read the paper and say, oh, you know, i'm tired, I want to go to sleep you wake up in the morning say, oh, I know what's going on in the paper yeah I mean, that's what happens. You can use, you know, once you know something about how the brain works, you can take advantage of that.

Do pay attention to your dreams.

Do you record them? No, no. okay. So here's the problem. Dreams seem so iconic and and like people, you know, somehow attribute to things to them. But there seems never been any good theory or any good understanding. First of all, why we dream, we still still not completely clear.

I mean, there are some ideas, but or um what trick why this particularly dream is this is, does I have some significance for you and the only thing that I know that might explain a little bit is that you know the dreams are often very visual um you know rapid eye vee sleep so that there's something happening actually is interesting. All the gender modulators are done regulated during sleep and then during rem sleep. And the see to Colin income is upright.

So that is a very powerful nor modulator is important for attention, for example. But IT doesn't come up in the preferable cortex, which means that the circus, in the preferable critics that are interpreting what the sensory input coming in, uh, are not turned down. So any of these, whatever happens in your visual cortex, is not being monitor more. So you get bizarre things, you know, that you start floating and, you know, things happen to you and you is not anchored anymore. And so but that still didn't explain why why you have that period is important because if you black IT and there are some sleeping pills that do block IT, you know IT really does cause problems with you know Normal cog .

function cannabis as well. People who um come off cannabis experienced tremendous rem rebound and out lots of dreaming in the you know the days and weeks and months after kana. I don't want to call with drugs that .

is a different thing. No no it's imbaLance that was cause of the brain adJusting to the the cabot levels and now um is got to go back and IT takes time but it's interesting an interest .

i'm told I can have a user but no judgement there are I just do not actually A A A book I read years ago when I was in college so long, long time ago by Allan hobson, who is out of who oh cool so I I never met him um but he had this interesting idea that dreams, in particularly rapid I movement dreams were so very similar to the experience that one has on certain psychic ex L D I casa dif mind or solicit an and that perhaps dreams are revealing the unconscious mind, you know, not saying the same psychological terms when we're sleep, our conscious mind can control thought and action in the same way, obviously. And kind of sort of a recession of the waterline. You so we're getting more of the the the unconscious processing revealed.

You know that's an interesting hypothesis. How would you test IT?

I pray have to put someone in the scanner, haven't go to sleep, put him in the scanner on a Sullivan journey, this kind of thing. You know that it's tough. I mean, any of these observation studies, of course, we both know our deficient in the sense that what you'd really like to do is control the neural activity.

You'd like to get in there and tickle the are on over here and see how the brain changes. And you'd love to get real time subjective report. This is the problem of sleep and dreaming as you can wake people up and ask them what they were just dreaming about, but you can't really know what you're dreaming about in real time.

It's true. Yeah, it's true right way you know there are two kinds of dreams very interesting ah. So if you ask someone up during RAM sleep, you you get very vivid changing dreams that are is are eyes different changing but if you take someone up during slow way sleep, you often get a dream report. But it's a kind of dream that keeps repeating over over again every night. And it's a very heavy emotional content.

Interesting that's in in slow wave sleep. Yeah, because i've had a few dreams over and over and over throughout my life. So this would be in slow way sleep.

yeah, probably slow way sleep.

yeah. Fascinating as a neuroscientist who is computationally oriented. But really, you incorporate the biology so well into your work. So that's one of the reasons you are you, you're the illumination of your field. And who is also now really excited about A I what you most excited about now like if you had and you know, of course this isn't the case, but if you had like twenty four more months to just pour yourself into something and then you had to hand the keys, your lab, over to someone else, what would you go all in on? Well.

so the N I H has only called the pioneer award. And what you're looking for, our big ideas that could have a huge impact, right? So I put one in recently and here's the title is A. Temporal context in brains and transfers and in .

brains and .

transforms transformers .

formers ai.

the key to uh chat GDP is the fact this is a new architecture, is deeper learning architecture before the network, but is called the transformer and IT has certain parts in IT that are are unique as one called self attention and and it's it's it's a way of doing called temporal context um what IT does is a connect words that are far part. You give IT a sequence of words and I can tell you the association like if I use the word this, and then you had to figure out in the last sentence, which they did refer to, well, there are three or four nouns that could have referred to. But from context, you can figure out which one IT does, and you can learn that .

association. Could I just play with another example to make sure I understand this correctly? Um i've seen these word bubble charts like if we were, say piano, you'd say keys, you would say music, you'd say seat, you d and then build out of a word cloud association.

And then over here we'd say, I know i'm talking about the solin. I say sunset, stonehenge, anyone that looks like there's this phenomenon. And then you start building on a word cloud over there. These are desperate things, except i've been to a classical music concert at the slk institutions nonis twice. So they are not completely not overlapping until you start getting associations at a distance in, eventually they bridge together.

Is this what you're referring to? eat? Yes, I think that's example. But uh, IT turns out that every word is a bias that has like three, four meetings.

And so you have to figure that out in context and and there's so another where the words that live together and and that come up often, and you can learn that from just by predicting the next word in sense. That's how a transformer is a train. You give that a bunch of words and that keeps predicting the next word in a sentence.

like in my email. Now IT tries to predict the next word, and it's mostly right part of the time.

okay. Well, that's because this is a very primitive version of this algorithm. What happens if you at if you trade IT up on enough, not only can not answer the next word IT IT built internally builds up a semantic representation in the same way you describe the words that are related to each other having associations, uh, IT can figure that out.

And IT has representations inside this very large network with trillions of parameters, and unbelievable how big they are gotten up. And the are those those associations now for an internal model of the meaning of the sense, literally IT, IT, IT is been. This is something that now we've probed these transformers.

And so we pretty much pretty confident and that means that is forming an interview model of the outside world, this case budget words, and that's how is able to actually respond you in a way that is sensible, that makes sense and actually is interesting and so forth. Uh, and it's off the self attention i'm telling king with syndicate, my pioneer proposal is to figure out how does the bring to self attention, right? Is it's gotto. Do IT somehow i'll give you little hint, basically ganglia.

It's in the basal ganglia.

That's my hypothesis. Well, we'll see. I mean, no, i'll be working with experimental people. Uh uh i've worked with john runs, for example, who studies uh, primate visual cortex. And we've looked at traveling ways there and there are other people that have looked at in in primates and and so now these traveling waves, I think I are also a part of the the puzzle pieces of the puzzle that are going to give us a much Better view of how the the cortex is organized and how to interact acts of the basically gangly i've we've already been there, but we still, neuroscientists have studied each one of these parts of the brain independently. And now we have to start thinking about putting the pieces of the puzzle together, right, trying to get all the things that we know about these areas and see how they work together in a computational way. And that's really .

where I want to go. I love IT and I do hope they decide to fund your pioneer way yeah and should they make the bad decision not to, you know, you will figure out another way to get IT get the work done and certainly you will um Terry, I I want to thank you um first of all for coming here today taking time out of your busy cognitive and running and teaching and research schedule to share your knowledge with us and also for the incredible work that you're doing on public education and teaching the public, I should say, giving the public resources to learn how to learn Better at zero cost.

So we will certainly provide links to learning how to learn and your book and to these other incredible resources that you shared. And you've also given us a ton of practical tools today related to exercise my a country and some of the things that you do, which, of course, are just your versions of what you do. But that certainly, certainly are going to be a value to people, including me, in our cognitive and physical pursuits and Frankly, just longevity.

I mean, this this is a not lost on me and those listening that a your vigor is, as I mention earlier, undeniable. And it's been such a pleasure over the years to just see the amount of focus and energy and enthusiasm that you bring your work and to observe that IT not only hasn't slowed, but you're picking up velocity. So thank you so much for educating us today.

I know it's become behalf of myself and many, many people listening and watching. Is this a real gift, a real incredible experience to learn from you? So thank you so much. Well.

thank you. And I have to say that i've been blessed over the years with wonderful students and wonderful colleagues, and I count you among them who really i've learned a lot from. Thank you. But you know where where, you know, science is a social activity and and we learn from each other, and we all make mistakes, but we learn from our mistakes. That's the beauty of science, is that we can make progress.

Now, you know, your career has been remarkable too, because you have affected and influence more people than anybody else I know personally with with the the knowledge you are uh a broadcasting through your interviews but also you know just in terms of your interest really I am really impressed with what you've done. I want you to keep you know add IT because we we need people like you meet up. We need a scientists who can actually express and reach the public.

If we we don't do that, everything we do is behind closed doors, right? Nothing gets out. And and so you you're one of the best of of the breed in terms of being able to explain things in a clear way that gets through to more people than anybody also I know well.

thank you. I'm very honor to hear that it's a labor of love for me and um and i'll take those words in and I I really appreciate you and it's an honor and a privilege to sit with you today and please come back again.

I will be a love to I would love to you right?

Thank you Terry. You're thank you for joining me for today's discussion with doctor Terry oski to find links to his work, the zero cost online learning portal that he and his colleagues have developed and to find links to his new book, please see the show note captions. If you're learning from end or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe our youtube channel.

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