Dr. Terry Sejnowski: How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI

Welcome to the huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday [Music] life I'm Andrew huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Opthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine my guest today is Dr Terry snowski Dr Terry snowski is a professor at the sulk Institute for biological studies where he directs the Computational neurobiology laboratory and as his title suggests he is a computational neuroscientist that is he uses math as well as artificial intelligence and Computing methods to understand this overarching Ultra important question of how the brain works now I realize that when

people hear terms like computational Neuroscience algorithms large language models and AI that it can be a bit overwhelming and even intimidating but I Assure you that the purpose of Dr sow's 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 snowski explains how a single rule a

single learning rule Drives all of our motivation related behaviors and it of course relates to the neurom 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 Dr sinowski shares not just information about how the brain works but also practical tools that he And colleagues have developed including a zeroc 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 Dr snowski also explains how he himself uses physical exercise of a particular type in order to enhance his cognition 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 diseased brain in conditions like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's and how particular tools that relate to mitochondrial function can perhaps be used in order to treat various diseases including Alzheimer's dementia I'm certain that by the end

of today's episode you will have learned a tremendous amount of new knowledge about how your brain works and practical tools that you can Implement in your daily life before we begin I'd like to Emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford it is however part of my desire and 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 the sponsors of today's podcast our first sponsor is betterhelp better help offers Professional Therapy with

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pillows and now for my discussion with Dr Terry sinowski Dr Terry sinowski welcome 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 Neuroscience you're considered by many a computational neuroscience so you bring mathematical models to an understanding of the brain and 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 this podcast before because they understand there are cells those cells are neurons those neurons connect to one another in very specific ways that allow us to see to hear to think Etc 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 right 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't just be okay the hippocampus remembers stuff and the you know the visual cortex perceives 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 quote unquote 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 and we're a little groggy till we make it to that first cup of coffee or water or maybe even just to urinate first thing in the Morning what is going on in there what a great question and um you you know the I have a u Pat church and I wrote a book computational Brain and in it there's this levels diagram uh and it at levels of Investigation

at different spatial scales from molecular at the very bottom to synapses and neurons circuits neural circuits how they're connected with each other and then brain areas in the cortex and then the whole central nervous System span 10 orders of magnitude you know 10th to the 10th in spatial scale so you know where is consciousness in all of that so uh there are two approaches that neuroscientists have taken uh I shouldn't say neuroscientist I should say that scientist had taken uh and the one you describe which is you know let's look at all the parts that's

the bottomup approach you know take it apart and reductionist approach and you Make a lot of progress you can figure out you know how things are connected and and understand how development Works how neurons connect but it's very difficult to really make progress because uh you quickly you get lost in the forest now the other approach which has been successful um but at the end unsatisfying is the top down approach and and this is the approach that psychologists have taken looking at Behavior and trying to understand you know the the the the laws of behavior

this is the behaviorists uh but you know even people in AI were trying to do a top down to write programs that could replicate human behavior intelligent Behavior and I have 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 AI at exactly the same time at this moment in history it's really quite remarkable so there's an intermediate level between the implementation level

at the bottom how you implement some particular uh mechanism uh and the the the actual behavior of the whole system is called the algorithmic level it's in between so Algorithms are like recipes they're like you know when you bake a cake you have to have uh ingredients and you have to say how the order in which they're put together and how long and you know if you if you if you get it wrong you know it doesn't work you know the the it's 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 U Speaks to the computational level of of how to understand you know the function of the neural circuit but uh I'm going to give you one example of an algorithm which uh is is one we worked on back in the 1990s when um Peter de and Reed monu or postto in the lab and it had to do with a part of the brain below the cortex called the basal ganglia 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 coordinate many muscles and 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 basil ganglia basically is taking over from the cortex and producing actions that get better and better and better and better and that's true not just of the the muscles but it's also true of thinking if you Want to become good in any

area if you want to become a a good uh Finance here if you want to get become a good doctor or a neuroscientist right you you you have to be uh practicing practicing practic iing in terms of understanding what uh you know what 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 basal ganglia 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 basil ganglia as I understand are involved in the um organization of two major types of behaviors go meaning to actually perform a behavior but the basil ganglia also instruct noo don't don't engage in that behavior and learning a an expert golf 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 basil 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 uh region and just thinking about their motor behaviors what to do and what not to do they presumably need to think about what to think about but also what to not think about you don't Want that um surgeon thinking about how their kid was a brat that morning and um and they're frustrated because the two things interact so is there go no- go in terms of action and learning and is there go noo in terms of thinking well I mentioned

the prefontal cortex and that part the loop with the basil G that is one of the last to mature in uh you know early adulthood and you know what the problem is that for adolescence it's not the no-go part for for you know Planning and actions 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 a problem that we cracked first

theoretically in the 90s and then experimentally later by recording from neurons and also brain Imaging in humans so it turns out we know the algorithm That is used in the brain for how to learn sequences of actions to achieve a goal uh and and it's a simplest possible algorithm you can imagine it's simply to predict the next reward you're going to get if I if I do an action well I will it be a give me something of value and uh and you learn every time you try something whether you got the amount of reward

you expected or less you use that to update the synapses synaptic plasticity so that the next Time you'll have a better chance of getting a a better reward and you build up what's called a value function so the cortex now over your lifetime is building up 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 good for you right you've had lots of meals in a lot of places and now that is

part of your value Function this is the same algorithm that was used by Alpha go this is the program that deep mine built this is an AI program that beat the world go champion and go is the most complex game that humans have ever come uh played you know on a regular basis far more complex than chess as I understand yeah that's right so uh go is to chess where chess is to something like Che Checkers you know other words the level of difficulty is another you way off above it because you Have to think

in terms of of of battles going on all over the place at the same time and the order in which you put the pieces down are going to affect what's going to happen in the future so this value function is super interesting and I wonder whether and I think 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 let's say swinging a Tennis racket to do a perfect tennis surf or or even just a decent tennis

surf when somebody goes back to the court let's say 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's question number one and then the other question is do you think that this value function is also being played out in more complex Scenarios not just motor learning such as let's say a domain of life that for many people involves some um trial and error it would be like human

relationships we learn how to be friends with people uh we learn how to be a good sibling uh we learn how to be a 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 are we only paying attention to what is rewarding or we're also integrating punishment we don't get an electric shock when we get the serve wrong but we can be frustrated what you

identified is um some a very uh important feature uh which is that rewards uh by the way you know every time you do something you're updating this value function every time and and it accumulates and the answer to your first question the answer is that It's always going to be there it doesn't matter it's it's a very permanent part of your experience and who you are and uh and interestingly and and the behaviorist knew this back in the 1950s that uh you can get there two ways of trial and error you know small rewards are

good because you're constantly coming closer and closer to getting the uh 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 100 trials to you know what you need you know when you're training a rat to to do some task with small food rewards but if you if you just shock the rat boy that rat doesn't forget that yeah one really bad relationship will have you have you learning certain things forever and this Is also

PTSD post-traumatic 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 and and you you pointed out something really important which is that a large part of the prefrontal cortex is devoted to social interaction and this is how humans you know when you come into the world you don't know what language you're 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 things that are expected of you all of that has to become through experience through building this value function so this is and this is something we discovered in the 20th century and and now it's going into AI it's called reinforcement learning in AI it's a it's a form of procceed ual learning as opposed to the cognitive level where you think and you do things Cognitive thinking is much less efficient uh because you have to go step by step with procedural learning uh it's automatic can you give me an example of procedural learning in the

context of um a comparison to cognitive learning like is there an example of perhaps like how to make a decent cup of coffee using uh you know purely knowledge-based learning versus procedural learning where procedural learning wins and I I I can imagine one but you're the true Expert here well you know no you know a lot of examples but uh my my just since we've been talking about tennis can you imagine learning how to play tennis through a book reading a book that's so funny on the plane back from Nashville yesterday the guy sitting across

the aisle from me was reading a book about um uh maybe he was working on his pilot's license or something and I I looked over and couldn't but notice these diagrams of the of the plane Flying and I thought I'm just so glad that this guy is a passenger and not and not a pilot and then I thought about how the pilots learned and presumably it was a combination of practical learning and textbook learning I me when you scuba dive this is true I'm scuba dive certified and when you get your certification you you learn

your dive tables and you learn why you have to wait between Dives Etc and gas exchange and a number of things But there's really no way to simulate what is to take your mask off underwater put it back on and then you know 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 it to really get drilled in yes you you you you you uh it's really essential for things that uh have to be executed quickly

and and uh expertly to to get that you know really down path so you don't have to Think uh and this happens in school right in other words you you you you have classroom lessons where you're given explicit instruction but then you go do homework that's procedural learning you do problems you solve problems and and you know I'm I'm a PhD physicist so I I I went through all of the classes you know in theoretical physics and um it was really the problems that really were the core of becoming a good physicist You know you

can memorize the equations but that doesn't mean you understand how to use the equations I think it's worth highlighting something a lot of times on this podcast we talk about what I call protocols it would be you know like get some morning sunlight in your eyes to stimulate your supermatic nucleus by way of your retinal gangling cells audiences of this podcast will recognize those terms it's basically get sunlight in your eyes in the morning and set your Circadian clock that's right and you can hear that a trillion times but I do believe that there's some

value to both knowing what the protocol is the underlying mechanisms there are these things in your eye that you know encode the sunrise qualities of light it's Etc and then send them to your brain etc etc but then once we link knowledge pure knowledge to a practice I do believe that the two things merge someplace in a way that um let's say reinforces both The knowledge and the practice right so these things are not necessarily separate they bridge in other words doing your theoretical physics uh problem sets reinforces the examples that you learned in lecture

and in your textbooks and vice versa so this is a battle that's going on right now in schools uh you're you know what you've just said is absolutely right you need both we have two major Learning Systems we have a cognitive learning system Which is cortical we have a procedural learning system which is subcortical basil gangli and the two go hand in hand 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

get rid of the procedural that's ridiculous they don't want students to practice because it it's it's going to be uh you know you're You're stressing them that you don't want them to be to feel that you know that they're having difficulty so but we can but for those listening I'm covering my eyes because I mean this would this would be like saying um goodness there's 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 swam right and now you're

expected to be able to survive let alone swim well it's crazy It's crazy but I'll tell you Barbara Oakley um has uh and I have a a moo massive open online course on learning how to learn and it helps students we aimed it at students but it actually has been taken by four million people in 200 countries ages 10 to 90 what is this called learning how to learn is it uh is there a pay wall no it's free completely free amazing and uh and you know I get incredible you know feedback uh you know

faman letters almost every day well You're about to get a few more okay I did an episode on learning how to learn and my understanding of the research is that we need to test ourselves on the material the testing is not just a form of evaluation it is a form of uh identifying the the errors that help us then compensate for the errors and learn but it but it's it's very procedural it's not about just listen and regurgitating you you're 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 there there the the way the brain works right is is not it doesn't memorize things like a computer but you you have to it has to be active learning you have to actively engage in fact um when you're you're trying to solve a problem on your own right this is where you're really learning by trial and error and that's procedural system if someone tells you what the right answer is you know you Know that's just something that is a fact that it gets stored away somewhere but

it's not going to automatically come up if you actually are faced with something that's not exactly the same problem but it's similar and by the way this is the key to AI completely uh essential for the recent success of of these uh large language models you know that the public now is beginning to use is that they're they're not parrots they just they're not they just don't Memorize what they what they've the data that they've 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 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 right there might be a host or a Hostess you sit down at these tables you've never sat at somebody asks you questions you read it okay maybe it's a QR code these days but right um Forever After you

understand the process of going into a restaurant doesn't matter what the genre of food happens to be or what city sitting inside or outside you can pretty much work it out sit at the counter sit outside sit at the table it's there a number of key Action steps that I think pretty much translate to everywhere unless you go to some super high-end thing or some super lowend thing where it's a buffet or whatever you know you can start to fill in the blanks here if I understand correctly there's a an action function that's learned from

the knowledge and the experience exactly and then where is that action function stored is it in one location in the brain or is it kind of An emergent property of multiple brain areas so that you're right at the cusp here of uh 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 uh were like uh countries on uh uh that Each of which each part of the cortex was dedicated to one function right uh you know

there and and interestingly you record for the neurons and it certainly looks that way right in Other words the there's a visual cortex in the back and there's a whole series of areas then there's the auditory cortex in the here in the middle and then the prefrontal cortex for social interaction and and so it looked really clearcut that it's modular and now we're facing is by uh we have a new way to record from neurons 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 you know has the input coming in 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 than from the eye really yes yeah an churchin at UCLA 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 uh Complex cognitive 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 and we're we're doing that now U First on uh mice and monkeys but uh we now can do this in humans so I've been collaborating with a group at Mass General Hospital to record from people with epilepsy and and they have to have an operation for people who are drug resistant to be able to uh take out find Out where it starts in the cortex you know and and where is initiated where 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 uh take it out and and often that helps very very invasive but for two weeks we have access to all those neurons in that cortex that are being you know recorded from constantly and so I've used I Started out because I was interested in sleep and I wanted to understand what happens in in the cortex of a human during sleep but then we be realized

that you know you can also figure you know people who have these debilitating problems with seizures you know they're there for two weeks and they have nothing to do so they just love the fact that scientists are interested in helping them and and you know teaching them things and Finding out where in the cortex uh things are happening when they learn something this is a gold mine it's it's unbelievable and I I've I've learned things from humans that could I could have never gotten from any other species amazing obviously language is one of them but

there are other things in sleep that uh We've we discovered having to do with traveling ways there are circular traveling ways that go on during sleep which is astonishing nobody ever really Uh saw that before but uh if you were to ascribe one or two major functions to these traveling waves what do you think they are accomplishing for us in sleep and by the way are they associated with deep sleep slow wave sleep or with rapid ey movement sleep or this is uh this is uh non-rm sleep this is a jargon this is uh during

uh intermediate transition States the transition state okay our audience will probably keep they've they've heard a Lot about slow wave sleep from me and Matt Walker from Rapid ey light slow a sleep yeah and so what do these traveling waves accomplish for us okay so in the case of the they're called sleep spindles they last the waves last for about u a second or two um and and they travel like I say in a circle around the cortex and it's known that these spindles are important for consolidating 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 see it's the hippocampus that is is is is replaying the experience is it's a part of the brain is very important for long-term memory if you don't have a hippocampus you can't learn new things that to say you can't remember what you did the yesterday or for that matter even an hour earlier but the hippocampus plays back your Experiences causes the sleep spindles now to knead that into the cortex and and it you it's 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 exist existing knowledge base in an efficient way that uh that doesn't interfere with what you already know so that's an example of of very important function that these traveling wavs have I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor ag1 ag1 is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that includes prebiotics and adaptogens I've been drinking ag1 since 2012 and I started doing at a time when my budget was really Limited in fact I

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you can go to david.com huberman again the link is david.com huberman as I call 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 Gina Po from UCLA 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 um cognitive challenges including memory challenges

and learning challenges associated with with lack of sleep insufficient sleep but the other was that um there was some interesting relationship between daytime exercise and nighttime prevalence of sleep Spindles are you familiar with that literature oh yes no this is a this is a fascinating literature uh 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're refreshed when you wake up but there's a lot of things happen it's not that your brain turns off it's that it goes into a

completely different state and and memory Consolidation is just one of those things that happens when you're fall asleep and of course you you know there's dreams and so forth we don't fully appreciate or understand exactly how all the different sleep stages are are uh work together but uh exercis is a particularly important part of of of getting uh the motor uh system uh uh tuned up and and that it's thought that the uh this the REM rapid eye Movement sleep may be involved in that so that that's a that's yet another part of the Sleep

uh stages you go through you go back and forth between um dream sleep and the slow way sleep back and forth back and forth during the night and then at the when you wake up you're in the in the REM stage more and more REM more and more REM but you know that's all observation but we you know as a scientist what you want to do is perturb the system and and See if you can maybe if you had more sleep spindles maybe you'd be able to remember things better so it turns out Sarah mednick

who was at UC Irvine did this fantastic experiment so it turns out there's a drug called zulum which um is is goes by the the name ambian you may have some experience with that if I've never taken it but um I'm I'm aware of what is people use it as a sleep aid that's right it's it's it a lot of people take it in order to Sleep okay uh well it turns out that it causes uh more sleep spindles really yeah it it doubles the number of sleep spindles if you you know if you take

the drug uh you take the drug uh after you've done the learning right you do the learning at night and then you take the drug and you have twice as many spindles you wake up in the morning you can remember twice as much from what you learned and the memories are stable Over time it's like it's in there yes yeah no it's it's it it it consolidates it I mean that's the point is what's the downside of ambient okay here's the downside okay so people who take the drug say if you're going uh to Europe

and you take it and then you sleep really soundly but often you you find yourself in the hotel room and you completely have no clue you have no memory of how you got there had that experience without ambian or any other Drugs where I am very badly jetlagged yes and I wake up and for a few seconds but what feels like eternity I have no idea where I am okay it's terrifying that well that that's another problem that you have with jet lag jet lag really screws things up but this is something where it could

be an hour you know you you you took the train or you you took a taxi or something and you're and so here here now this seems crazy how could it be a a way to improve Learning and recall on one hand and then forgetfulness on the other hand well it turns out what's important is um that when you take the drug right uh in 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 yeah you Ste sorry I'm not laughing it must be a terrifying experience but I'm laughing because you know there's some Beautiful pharmacology and indeed some um wonderfully useful uh Pharmaceuticals out there uh you know some people may cringe to hear me say that but there are some very useful drugs out there that save lives and help people deal with symptoms Etc um side effects are always a concern but this particular drug profile ambian that is um seems to reveal something perhaps even more important than discussion About spindles or ambient or even sleep which is

that you got to pay the piper somehow as they say that's right that you tweak one thing in the brain something else uh something else goes you you you don't get anything for free that's a TR I think that this is something that uh is true not just of drugs for the brain but steroids for the body right sure yeah I mean steroids um even lowd dose testosterone therapy Which is very popular nowadays um will give people more Vigor Etc but it is introducing a sort of um second puberty and puberty is perhaps the most

rapid phase of Aging in the entire lifespan same thing with people take growth hormone would be 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 hormone it looks more aged they physically change and I'm not for or against these things it's highly individual but I completely agree with you I I would also Venture that um with the growing interest in um so-called neut tropics and people taking things like

modafanil not just for narcolepsy daytime sleepiness but also to enhance cognitive function okay maybe they can get away with doing that every once in a while for a a deadline task or Something but my experience is that people who obsess over the use of pharmacology to achieve certain brain States pay in some other way absolutely whether or not stimulants or sedatives or sleep drugs and that behaviors will always Prevail behaviors will always Prevail as tools yeah and and uh the one of the things about the way the body evolved is that it's it's it really

has to balance a lot of things and so with drugs you're basically unbalancing it Somehow and and and the consequence is as you point out is that you know what what in order to make uh one part better one part of your body or you you sacrifice something else somewhere else as long as we're talking about brain States and um connectivity across areas um I 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 adulthood um I've become very interested in

and spent a Lot of time with the literature and some guests on the topic of psychedelics um let's leave the discussion about LSD aside because do you know why there aren't many studies of LSD this is kind of a fun one no one is expected to know against the law I think oh but there's so is sosy in her MDMA and there are lots of studies going on about those yeah changed but when I was growing up you know as you know it was against the law right so that what I Learned is that the

that there are far fewer clinical trials exploring the use of LSD as a therapeutic 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 to get through an LSD Journey whereas psilocybin tends to be a shorter a shorter experience okay let's talk about psilocybin from a moment my read of the data on psilocybin is that it's still open to question but that some of The clinical trials show pretty significant recovery from major depression is pretty impressive but if we just set

that aside and say okay more needs to be worked out for safety what is very clear from the brain Imaging studies that sort before and after resting state task related Etc 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 Psychedelic and given the Similarity of the Psychedelic journey and here specifically talking about psilocybin to things like rapid eye movement sleep and things of that sort I have a very simple question do you think that there's any real benefit to increasing

brainwide connectivity to me it seems a little bit halfhazard and yet the clinical data are promising if nothing else promising and so is what we're seeking in life as we acquire new knowledge as we learn tennis 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 brain 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 talking to this area in this particular way um feel free to explore this in any way That feels meaningful or to say pass if it's not a good question no it's a great question I mean you have all these great questions and we don't have complete answers yet but uh specifically with regard to connectivity um if you look at what happens in an infant's brain during the first two years there's a tremendous amount of new synapses being formed this is your area by the way you know more about this than I do

yeah that's true but then you prune them right there's Then the second phase is that you over abundant synapses and now what you want to do is to prune them why would you want to do that well you know synapses are expensive it's talk takes a lot of uh of energy to activate all of the neurons and the synapses especially because there's the turnover of the neurotransmitter 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 have the pruning slows down but doesn't go away so the cortex Thins and and so forth so I think it's goes in the opposite direction I think that as you get older you you you're losing connectivity but you you retain interestingly you retain the old memories the old memories are are really rock solid because they were put in when You were young yeah the foundation the foundation upon which everything else is built uh but but it's not totally uh one way in in the sense that even as

an adult as you know you can learn new things maybe not as quickly by the way uh this is one of the things that surprised me so Barbara and I have you know looked at the people who you know really were benefited the most it turns out that the peak of the demographic is 25 to 35 Barbara Oakley Oakley yeah She's she's she's really The Mastermind she's a fabulous uh educator and and uh background in engineering but what's going on so it turns out we we aimed our uh uh our Muk at kids in high

school and college because that's their business they go every day and they go into work and they have to learn right that's their business but in fact very very few uh of of the students are actually uh you know they weren't taking the C why should They they they spend all day in the class right why do they want to take another class so this is the your um the the learning to learn class learning how to learn okay so you did this with Barbara so we did this I did with Barbara and now 25

to 35 we have this huge Peak huge so what's going on here's what's going on it's very interesting so you're 25 youve gone to college half the People by the way who take the course went to college right so this it's not Like you know filling in for college this is like topping it off but you're in a Workforce you have to learn new skill may maybe you have mortgage maybe you have children right you can't afford to to go go off and and and and take a course of in get another degree so you

take a moo and you discover you know I'm not quite as agile 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're not as your your brain is isn't learning as quickly you can do it more efficiently this is amazing I I want to take this course um I will take this course what um what sort of time commitment is the course you already point out that it's zero cost which is amazing yeah yeah okay so uh it it's

bite-sized videos lasting about 10 minutes each and there's about 50 or 60 over the course of one month and are you tested are you self test Yeah there there are tests there are quizzes there are tests at the end and there are uh forums where you can go and talk to other students you have questions we have Tas know it's and 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 to how to be

a better learner and I wish I had 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 or about anything I'm I'm never going to shut up about it but I'm going to take the course first because I want to understand the gut you you'll enjoy it uh we we have like 98% approval which is phenomenal it's it's sticky lot is is it math vocabulary no math no vo it's not we're not teaching anything

specific we're not te we're not trying to give You knowledge we're trying to tell you how to acquire knowledge and how to do that how to how to deal with exam anxiety for example or how to how to uh you know we all procrastinate right we we put things off well n no I'm kidding we all procrastinate how to avoid that we we we 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 Particular in California but elsewhere as well um there isn't as much procedural practice based learning anymore um I'm going to play devil's advocate here uh 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 times tables and your Division and you know and then your fractions and your exponents and you know and you they build on one another um and then at some point you know you Take courses where you might need it like a graphing calculator

to some people they going be like what what is this but the point being that there were a number of things that you had to learn to implement functions and and you learn you learn by doing you learn by doing um likewise in in physics class we you know we were attaching things to Strings and for macr mechanics and and learning that stuff okay um and learning from the chalkboard uh Lectures I can see the value of both certainly and you explained that the brain needs both to really understand knowledge and how to implement and

back and forth but noways you know you'll hear the argument well why should somebody learn how to read a paper map unless it's the only thing available because you have Google Maps or if they want to do a calculation they just put it into the top bar function on the internet and boom out comes the answer So there is a world where certain skills are no longer required and one could argue that the brain space and activity and 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 agree it's electrical signals and Chemical signals and it's doing math and it's running algorithms I think you convinced us of that um 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

into this very uncertain future because as far as you know and I know there's no neither of us have a crystal 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 uh this is uh generational okay so Technologies provide us with tools you mentioned the calcul calcor right uh well a calculator didn't eliminate uh you know the education you need to get in math but it made certain Things easier it SP it made it possible for you

to do more things and more accurately however interestingly uh students in my class often uh come up with answers that are off by you know eight orders of magnitude then that if that's a huge amount right it's clear that they didn't key in the calculator properly but they didn't recognize that it was it was a very far it was completely way off the beam because they didn't have a good Feeling for the numbers they don't have a good sense of you know exactly how big it should have been you know order of magnitude basic you

know understanding so it's it's kind of a there there's a the benefit is that you can do things faster better but then you also lose some of your intuition if if you don't have the procedural system in place I'm thinking about a kid that wants to be a musician who uses AI to write a song about a bad Breakup that then 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 AI but would you call that kid a songwriter 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 a guitar and trying out different chords and and feeling the intonation in their voice but I'm guessing that for people that were on the electric guitar they were Criticizing people on the acoustic guitar you know so we have this generational 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 I'm gonna

come back to that because this is how the way you put it at the beginning had had to do with uh whether your how your brain is allocating resources Okay so when you're younger you can take in Things your brain is more malleable for example uh how good are you on social media I well I do all my own Instagram and Twitter and those accounts have grown in proportion to the amount of time I've been doing it so yeah I would say pretty good I mean I'm I I'm not the biggest account on social media

but for a science health account we we're doing okay um thanks to the audience well well well this speaks well for the fact that You've uh managed to uh break you know to go beyond the generation gap because I can type with my thumbs Terry okay there you go that's a manual skill that you learn new new uh new phenomenon in human evolution I I couldn't believe it I saw people doing that and now I can do it too but uh but the thing is that if you learn how to do that early in life

you're much more uh good at it you you can you move your thumbs much more quickly also uh you can have many more You know tweets go and not what are they called now they're not called tweets on X I think they still call them tweets because you can't it's hard to verb the the the letter X Elon didn't think of that one I like X because it's cool it's kind of punk and it's got black black uh kind of format and it fits with kind of the the the the you know the engineer like

black X you know and this kind of thing but yeah we'll still call them tweets well okay we'll call them tweets Okay that's that's good but you know I I I walk across campus and I see everybody like half the people are are Tweeting or you know they're they're doing something with their cell phone they're I mean it's unbelievable you have beautiful sunsets at the Suk Institute we'll put a link to one of them I mean it is it is truly spectacular awe inspiring to see a sunset at the Sal Institute every day is different

and everyone's on their phones these days sad and and you they're Looking down at their phone and they walking along even people who are skateboarding unbelievable I mean you know it's amazing what the human being can do you know when they learn to get into something but what happens is younger generation picks up whatever technology it is and the brain gets really good at it and you Pi can pick it up later but you know not quite as agile not quite as uh maybe obsessive it fatigues me I will point this out that Doing so

doing anything on my phone feels fatiguing in a way that reading a A paperbook or even just writing on a laptop or a desktop computer is fundamentally different I can do that from many hours if I'm on social media for more than few minutes I can literally feel the energy draining out of my body interesting I would I could do um Sprints or deadlifts 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 to know what's going on in your brain

why why is it and and also I'd like to know from younger people whether they have the same I think not I think my guess is that they don't feel fatigued because they got into this early enough uh and this is actually uh a very very uh I I think that has a lot to do with the foundation you put into your brain in other words things that you that you get you learn when you're 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 I tended to read about things and then do a lot of procedural based uh activities you know I read skateboard magazines and skateboard I I was never one to 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 sync 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 like Jerry rig my cognition into doing something that it wasn't designed to do well there you go and it's because you don't have the Foundation you didn't do it when you were younger and now you have to sort of Use the the cognitive powers to do a lot of what was being done now in a younger person procedurally I'd like to take a quick break and thank one of our sponsors element element is an electrolyte

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know what what people were thinking and what and I came across it was an article on I think It was the New York Times of a technical writer who decided she would spend one month using it to help her write things her articles and she said that when she started out you know at the end of the day she was drained completely drained and it was like you know working on a machine you know like a tractor or something you know he struggling struggling struggling to get it to work and then she started said well

wait A second you you know what if I treat it like a human being what if I'm polite instead of you know being CT she said suddenly I started getting better Answers by by being polite and you know back and forth way with a human you know so saying could you please give me information about so and so please I'm really having trouble oh you know that answer you gave me was fabulous is Exactly what I was looking for and you know now I need to to go on to the next part and help me

with that too in other words the way you talk to a human right if an assistant that you or is it that she was talking to the AI to chat GPT 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 AI learning her and therefore giving her the sorts of answers that are more fasile for her to to integrate with I I think it's both I the first of all the chat GDP is mirroring you're the way you treat

it it will mirror that back you you treat it like a machine it will treat you like a machine okay because that's that's what it's good at but here's the surprise surprise is she said once I re once I started treating it like a human at the end of the day I wasn't fatigued anymore why well it turns out that all your life you inter you interact with Humans in a certain way and your brain is wired to do that and it doesn't take any effort and so by treating the chat GDP as if it

were a human you're taking advantage of all the brain circuits 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 um learn from it I mean yesterday I learned a few things that I thought were just fascinating about how We perceive our own um identity according to whether or not we're filtering it through the responses of others or whether or not we take a couple minutes and really just sit and think about how we actually feel about ourselves very interesting

ideas about Locust of 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 hind Limbs and that was really cool and social media Could provide me both those things within the series of minutes and I was thinking to myself this is crazy right the raccoon is kind of trivial but it it delighted me and that's not trivial so but here's the question could it be that one of 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 Downs or we're in an argument with somebody or we're doing a Clapback or they're clapping back on us as it or dunking as it's called on on X on um that it isn't necessarily the way that we learned to argue it's not necessarily the way that we learn to engage in healthy dispute and so as a consequence it feels like and this is my experience that certain online interactions feel really good and others feel like they kind of great on me like because there's almost like an

action step that isn't 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 or at least on the phone dialogue 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 that passed notes in class this feels like Ming notes in class in fact this whole text messaging thing is beneath me that's how I felt and over the years of course

I became a text messager 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 GRS on us and as it relates to whether or not it matches our our childhood developed template of how our brain works is really key because it touches on something that I definitely want to talk about today that that I know you've Worked on quite a bit which is this concept of energy what we're talking about here is energy not

woo biology woo science Wellness energy we're talking about we only have a finite amount of energy and years ago the great Ben Baris sadly passed away our former colleague and uh my uh postto adviser came to me one day in the hallway and he stopped me and he said he called me Andy like you do and he said Andy how can we get so so a run down of energy as we get older why Are we more why am I more tired today than I was 10 years ago I was like I don't know how

are you sleeping he's like I'm sleeping fine Ben 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 a template neural system that then you either find experiences invigorating or depleting I Want I want to make sure we close the hatch on that but I want to make sure that we relate it at some point to this idea of

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 asked these great questions and I wish that I had great answers well so far 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 um So there's a tremendous amount of learning for me today and I know for the audience so so but let's say you're somebody is 20 years old versus 50 years old versus what should

they do I mean we need to integrate with the modern world world we also need to relate across Generations oh yeah no this is true this is people aren't retiring as much they're living longer birth rates are down but we have to get all get along as They say so you know it is interesting I think it's true that uh we all as we get older have have less of the you know the Vigor Vigor if I could use a somewhat different word from energy uh we'll come back to that um but I think there

are some who manage to keep an active life here's something that again in in our moo we really emphasize could you explain a moo I think most people won't know what what a moo is just for their sake okay this is uh they've been around For about actually started at Stanford uh Andrew in uh and de nicer so they have a company called Cera and what what happens is that you get professors and in fact anybody who has knowledge or you know professional expertise to give lectures that are available to anybody in the world who

have access to the internet and and uh you know it could there's like probably tens of thousands now any any specialty history uh Science music you know you name it there there's Somebody who's done you know who's an expert on that wants to tell you because they're excited about what they're doing okay so so you know what what what we wanted 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 energy and vigor yeah yeah 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 mitochondrian which is supplying us with uh ATP which is the coin of the realm for the cell to be able to operate all of its Machinery right so and so one of the things that happens when when you get older is that your mitochondrial run down you have fewer of them and they're less efficient they're they they that's right they're less efficient

and and Actually drugs can do that to you too it could they can they can harm mitochondria or recreational drugs no the drugs you take for illness I'm not sure about uh recreational drugs but uh I know I know it's a case that there are a lot of drugs that people take because they have to but uh but but the other thing and and this is something this that's the bad news here's the good news the good news is that you can replenish your energy by Exercise that exercise is the best drug you could ever

take it's the cheapest drug you could ever take that can help every organ in your body it it helps obviously your heart it helps your brain it it rejuvenates your brain it helps your immune system every single organ system in the body benefits from regular exercise I run on the beach every day at the Suk Institute I can I and I also at the it's on a Mesa 340 foot above the so I go down every day and then I I climb Up the cliff yeah those steps down to Black's Beach are are they're good

workout they are they are and so this is this is something has kept me active and it's and I I do hiking I went hiking in the Alps this in last fall so this is uh in September so this this is I think something that people really ought to realize is that you know it's like uh putting away you know reserves of energy for you know when you get older the more you put away the better off you are Here's something else okay now this is jumping now to Alzheimer's so uh a study that was

done in China many many years ago when I first came to U uh La Hoya San Diego um I heard this from the the it was the head of the Alzheimer's program he had done a study in China on onset and he he they they went and they had three populations they had PE peasants who had almost no education then they had another group that had high school Education and then they were people who were you know Advanced education so it turns out that the onset of Alzheimer's 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 interesting isn't it because it's it's and presumably the genes aren't that different right I mean they're all Chinese so one possibility and 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 of kind of a cognitive um velocity you

know I sometimes will play with this I'll I'll read slowly or I'll see where my default pace of reading is at a given time of day and Then I'll intentionally try and read a little bit faster while also trying to retain the knowledge I'm reading right so I'm not just reading the words I'm I'm trying to absorb the information and you can feel the energetic demand of that and then 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 and find the sweet spot

where I'm not reading at the pace that is reflexive but just a little bit quicker while also trying to Retain the information and I learned this um when I had a lot of catching up to do at one phase of my educational career fortunately it was pretty early and I was able to catch up on most things you know occasionally things slip through and I have to go back and learn how to learn you know um and if I get anything wrong on the internet they sure as heck pointed out and then we go back

and learn and guess what I never forget that because punish punishment social Punishment is a great signal so thank you all um for uh keeping me uh 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 um 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 try and learn how to Olie and kickflip standing in the in the living room on the carpet that's 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't perform the motor movements right so there's this 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 I'll adjust the the rate of

the audio where I have to engage cognitively and I know I'm in a mode of retaining the information and learning whereas if I just go with my reflexive Pace it's rare that I'm in that perfect zone so I I point this out because perhaps it will be useful to people I don't know if it's incorporated into your learning how to learn course but I do think that there is Something which I call kind of cognitive velocity which is ideal for learning versus kind of leisurely 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 multicontext cycling through and unless something is very high salience 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 point to Also engage learning right and my guess is it's tapping into this mitochondrial system uh very likely uh that's one part of it uh by the way uh you know the way that you've adjusted the speed is very interesting because it turns out that

uh stress you know everybody thinks oh stress is bad but no it turns out stress that is Trent you know that is only for a limited amount of time that you control is good for you it's good for your brain it's good for your body I run Intervals on the beach just the way that you do cognitive intervals when you're reading in other words I run I run like hell for about 10 seconds and then I you know I I go to a jog and I run like hell for another 10 seconds and it's pushing

your body into into that extra gear that helps the muscles the muscles need to know that this is what they've got to put out and that's where you gain uh uh you know muscle mass not not from just doing the same running pace every day Well your intellectual and physical Vigor is undeniable um I've known you a long time you've always had a slight forward Center of mass in your uh intellect and even the speed at which you walk Terry D I say okay you're for a Californian you're a quick Walker okay yeah so uh

that's a compliment by the way um East Coasters 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 mitochondrial systems the energy of the brain and body as you point out are very linked and I do think that below a certain threshold it makes it very hard to come back just like below a certain threshold is hard to exercise um without getting depleted or even injured that we need to maintain this so perhaps now would

be a good time to close the hatch on this issue of um how to teach young people everyone should take this learning tolearn course As a free resource amazing um as it relates to AI do you think that young people and older people now I'm 49 so put myself in the older bracket should be learning how to use AI they are already learning how to use Ai and uh again it's just like uh at new technology comes along who picks it up first it's the younger people and it's it's astonishing uh you know they they're

using it a lot more than I am you know I use it uh almost every day But uh I know a lot of students who basically and by the way it's a it's like any other Tool It's A Tool uh that you you need how to know how to use it where do you suggest people start so um I have started using Claude AI okay this was um suggested to me by somebody expert in AI as an alternative to chat GPT I don't have anything against chat GPT but I'll tell you I really like the

um aesthetic of Claude AI 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 font maybe it's the feel maybe this goes back the example use earlier where I like Claude Ai and I'm 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 aesthetically easy to transfer that information into my brain or

onto a page right so I like Claud AI you use chat GPT how should people start to explore AI um for sake of getting smarter learning knowledge just for the 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 there's there's now dozens and dozens of different uh chat Bots out there and different people will uh feel comfortable with one or the other chat GDP is the first so that's why it's kind of taken over a lot of the uh cognitive Space

right it's it's become like Kleenex right that that word that was why I Ed it as the first word in my new book because it's iconic but uh but but some of them um I have to say that for example there are some that are really much better at math than others uh there such as Google's Gemini recently did some fine tuning with uh what's called uh you know chain of of reasoning other words when you reason you go through a sequence of Steps and when you solve a math problem you go through a sequence

of par of steps of doing you know fitting first finding out what missing and then adding that and it went from 20% correct to 80 right on on those problems and as people hear that they probably think well that means 20% wrong still but could you imagine any human or panel of humans behind a wall where if you asked it a question and then another question and another question that it would give You back better than 80% accurate information in a matter of seconds so I think we we are uh uh being uh perhaps a

little bit uh unfair to compare these large language models to the best humans rather than the average human right as you said most people couldn't pass the LSAT the law test to get into law school or MCAT the test to get into medical school and chat GPT has is there a world now where we take the existing AI llms 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 okay could we give them outcome a and outcome B and let them

forage into future states that we are not yet able to get to and then harness that knowledge and explore the two different outcome comes I think that's perhaps the the better question in some sense um because we can't travel back in time but We can perhaps travel into the future with AI if you provide it different scenarios and you say unlike a panel of people panel of experts medical experts or um space Travel Experts or um sea Travel Experts you can't say hey you know what don't sleep tonight um you're just going to work for

the next 48 hours in fact you're going to work for the next 3 weeks or three months um and you know what you're not going to do anything else you're not Going to pay attention to your health you're not going to do anything else but you can take a large language model and you can say just forage for knowledge under the following different scenarios and then have that Fleet of large language models come back and give us the information like I don't know tomorrow okay so I've lived through this myself back in the 19 1980s

I was just starting my career and I was one of the Pioneers in developing Learning algorithms for neural network models Jeff Hinton and I collaborated together on something called the B Machine and he actually won a no prize for this Rec just this year yeah one of my best friends uh you know brilliant and and he he well deserved it for not just the Boler machine but all the work he's done since then on um machine learning and then uh back propagation and so forth but um back then we Jeff and I had this view

of the Future AI was dominated by symbol processing rules logic right writing computer programs for every problem you need a different computer program and it was very uh you know human resource intensive to write programs so that it was very very uh slow-going and they never actually got there they never wrote a program for vision for example even though the computer vision computer Community really worked hard for a long time but you know we had this view of The future we had this view that uh the the Nature has solved these problems and is existence

proof that you can solve the vision problem look every animal can see even insects right come on uh well figure out let's figure out how they did it maybe we can help by following up uh when on nature we can actually again going back to algorithms I was telling you and so in the case of the brain what makes it different from a digital computer digital computers basically can Run any program but a fly brain for example only runs the program that it's a special purpose Hardware allows it to run not much neuroplasticity there's enough

there just enough you habituation and so forth uh so that you can survive and this is survive 24 hours I'm not trying to be disparaging to the fly biologist but when I think of neuroplasticity I think of the Magnificent neuroplasticity of the human brain to customize to a world of Experience I agree you know when I think about a fly I think about a really cool set of neural 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 meh species okay I can see I've Pressed your button here no no no no I love fly biology they taught us about algorithms for direction selectivity in the visual system no no I I love the drop biology I just think that the lack of neuroplasticity reveals a certain um like key limitation and that the reason we're the curators of the earth is because

we have so much plasticity of course of course uh but you have to take you know one step at a time nature first Has to be able to create creatures that can survive and then you know their brain get bigger as they uh environment gets more complex and you know here we are but uh but the the the the the key is that it turns out that certain algorithms in the fly brain are present in our brain like conditioning classical conditioning you can classical condition of fly in terms of you know training it to to

uh when you give it a reward it will produce the same action right this Is like conditioned behavior and that algorithm that I told you about that is in your value function right temporal difference learning that algorithm is in the fly brain it's in your brain so we we can learn about learn from many species I was just having a little fun poking at the fly biologist I actually think dropa has done a great deal as has honeybee biology uh for instance if you if you give caffeine to uh uh bees on particular flowers they'll

Actually um try and pollinate those flowers more because they actually like the feeling of of being caffein there's a bad pun about a buzz here but I'm not going to make that pun cuz everyone's done it before um right no I I I fully absorb and agree with the the value of studying simpler organisms to find the algorithms right that's where we are right now uh but uh now to go just go into the future now I'm telling the story about what where we were we were Predicting the future we were saying this is an

alternative traditional uh AI we were not taken seriously everybody was experts said no no WR programs right programs they were getting all the resources the grants the jobs and we were just like the little furry mammals under the feet of the these dinosaurs right in retrospect I love the analogy but but here but the dinosaurs died off this is this is but the point I'm making is that it's possible for our Brain to make these extrapolations into the future why not AI versions of brains why not I I I think it's your idea is a

great one yeah I I mean the reason I'm excited about Ai and increasingly so across the course of this conversation is because there are very few opportunities to forage information at such large scale and around the circadian clock I mean if there's one Thing that we are truly a slave to as humans is the Circadian biology right you got to sleep sooner or later and even if you don't your cognition really waxes and wains across the Circadian cycle and if you don't you're going to die early we know this computers can work work work uh

sure you got to power them there's the cool thing there are a bunch of things related to that but that's 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 it back so we can take a look see 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 AI experts into the future and bring us back a panel of potential routes to take to me is so

Exciting um maybe a good example would be um like treatments for schizophrenia this is an area that I I want to make certain that we talk about you know I grew up learning as a neuroscience student that schizophrenia was somehow A A disruption of the dopamine system because if you give neuroleptic drugs that block dopamine receptors that you get some improvement in the in the motor symptoms some of the hallucinations Etc you now also have people who say no That's not really the basis of schizophrenia I love your thoughts and you have incredible work from

people like Chris Palmer at Harvard and we even have a department at Stanford now uh focusing we even have people at Stanford now focusing on what Chris really founded as a field which is metabolic Psychiatry the idea that who could imagine I'm being sarcastic here what you eat impacts your mitochondria how you exercise impacts your mitochondria Mitochondria impacts brain function and what and behold metabolic health of the brain and body impacts schizophrenia symptoms and he's looked at ways that people can use ketogenic diet maybe not to cure but to treat and in some cases maybe

even cure schizophrenia so here we are at this place where we still don't have a quote unquote cure for schizophrenia but you could send llms into the future and start to forage the most likely all of the data In those fields I could do that in an hour plus it come up with a bunch of hypothesized different um positive and negative result clinical trials that don't even exist yet 10,000 subjects in Scandinavia who you know go on ketogenic diet who have a certain level of um uh susceptibility of schizophrenia 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's isn't funding there isn't And boom get the answers back and let them present us those answers and then you say well it's it's artificial but so 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 it just sure as 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 large Language models 20 years ago we would have known back then that ketamine would have been a really good drug to try to help these people tell us about the relationship between ketamine and schizophrenia okay um because I think a lot of people and maybe you could Define schizophrenia even though most people think about people hearing voices and psychosis like there's there's a bit more to it um that maybe we just you know con bring out so uh one of the Things now that we know

see the problem is that if you look at the endpoint that doesn't tell you what started the problem it started during early in development you know schizophrenia is something that uh is appears when you know late adolescence early adulthood but it actually is already a problem uh genetic problem from Theo so what is the concordance in identical twins meaning if you have one identical twin if you have if you have identical twins in the Womb right and one is destined to be full-blown schizophrenic what's the probability the other so here's here's here's the experiment okay

this is very very been replicated many many times in mice I should say oh no actually it it okay let me start with a human Okay so ketamine is was for a long time and it still is a party drug Special K I've never taken it but this is what I hear of anesthetic but I'll tell you what happens because I've I've talked to These you know people who have done this you take ketamine sub anesthetic by the way it's an anesthetic it's given to Children uh it's a pretty good anesthetic and it's also used

veterinary medicine but in any case you give it you give it to um you take you know young adults here's what they experience they experience out of- body experience you know they they they have this wonderful feeling of energy and they're very you know it's a It's a high but it's a very unusual high now you know if if if they just go and have one experience but if they have two like they they party two days in a row a lot of them come into the imersion emergency room and here's what the what the

symptoms are full-blown psychosis full-blown we're talking about you know indistinguishable from a schizophrenic Break so auditory hallucination yeah auditory hallucinations you know paranoia very very Advanced you know you'd say that my God this this person here is is really is gone you know in in has become a schizophrenic and this is really uh like I say the symptoms are the same however if you isolate them for a couple days they'll come back right so so it means that schizophrenia can induce I me sorry ketamine can induce a form of schizophrenia Psychosis temporarily not permanently fortunately

okay so what does it attack okay and there's another literature on this it turns out that it binds to a a form of receptor a glutamate receptor called nmda receptors which are very important by way for learning a memory but we know the Target and we also know what the uh the acute outcome is that it it reduces the strength of the inhibitory circuit the the interneurons that use inhibitory Transmitters get the the the enzyme that creates the inhibitory transmitter is downregulated and what does that do it means that there's more excitation and what does

that mean when there's more excitation it means that there's more activity in the cortex and there's actually much more Vigor and and you you you you start becoming crazy right if it's too much activity so this is interesting so this is this is telling us I think that we should be thinking About uh and now there's a whole field now in Psychiatry that has to do with uh you know the glutamate hypothesis for the the the the first uh where where the actual um imbalance first occurs it's an imbalance between the exciting inhibitory systems that

are in the cortex are keep you in balance and nmda and methylaspartate receptors are glutamate receptors one one class that's one class that's right okay so now here Is hypothesis for why ketamine might be good for depression people are taking it now who are depressed right so here you have a drug that causes overe excitation and here you have a person who's undere excited depression is associated with lower excitatory activity in some parts of the cortex well if you titrate it you can come back into balance right so you what you do is you fight

depression with Schizophrenia a touch of schizophrenia now you you know you have to keep giving I think once every three weeks they have to have a you know a new dose of ketamine but it's helped an enormous number of people with very very very severe you know clinical depression so so as we learn more about the mechanisms underlying some of these disorders the better we are going to be at extrapolating and and coming up with some solutions at least to prevent it From getting worse by the way I'm pretty sure that the large language models

could have figured this out you know 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 2024 AI technology in 19 let's have fun here um 1998 the year that I started graduate school right at that time it was like The dopamine hypothesis of schizophrenia was in every textbook there was a little bit about glutamate perhaps but you know um it was all about dopamine so how would the large language models

have discovered this ketamine was known as a drug ketamine by the way is very similar to PCP F cycline which also binds the nmda receptor um so how would which is also a part of drug which is also yeah not one I recommend nor ketamine uh frankly I I don't recommend any Recreational drugs but I'm not a recreational drug guy but um what would those large language models do if they so you got 2024 technology placed into 1998 they're foraging 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 okay okay you know you know this is all very very speculative uh and really uh we can begin actually to see this happening now Uh so I have a colleague at the Suk Institute Rusty Gage very distinguished neuroscientist and he was he was one of the he he discovered that there are new neurons being born in the hippocampus right which is something in adults which is something that in a textbook says that doesn't happen right so that was around 1998 did right that's right and

I actually have a paper with him where we tested ltp longterm potentiation of for Actually the effects of exercise on neurogenesis exercise increases neurogenesis it it increases the the the the the cells that it increases neurogenesis and also this the the cells that are act are become part of the circuit more cells become integrated and this is true in humans as well right yeah we and there was some cancer drug that was given that you know that they showed that it was uh there new cells that were able that they were able to Later in

postmortem to actually see that they were born in the adult okay so here we are okay in 1998 and the question is uh can you C can you jump can you jump into the Future Okay so Rusty we were at you know had to happen to talk about this issue about you know he's using these large language models now for his research I said oh wow how do you use it and he said we Ed it as an idea pump What do you mean idea pump well we you know we give it all of the

experiments that we've done and uh and we have it you know the the literature its access to the literature and so forth and we ask it for ideas for new experiments oh I love it I love it I was on a plane where I sat next to a guy that worked at works at Google and he he's one of the um main people there in terms of voice to to text um and text to voice uh 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 an F in technology don't get an A+ I'm kind of in the middle so I think I'm pretty representative of the average listener for this podcast presumably what you show me is that you can take um you open up this website and you can take PDFs or you can take um URLs so websites uh website addresses and you just place Them in the margin you literally just drag and drop them there and then you can ask questions and the AI will generate

answers that are based on the content of whatever you put into this margin those PDFs those websites and the cool thing is it references 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 you know subject number but also kind of the strength of the findings you know pretty vague thing strength

of findings is pretty vague right anyone that argues those are weak findings those aren't enough subjects well we know a hell of a lot about human memory from one patient hm so strength of findings when people is a subjective Thing right you really have to be an expert in a field to understand strength of findings and even then and what's amazing is it starts giving back answers like well if you're concerned about number of subjects this paper but that's a pretty obvious one which one had more subjects but it can start critiquing the 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 wait the evidence oh my God and then you say well with that weighted 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 you know 10 papers that you gave it five minutes ago amazing I don't think any uh 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 they might not actually come up with the same answers right right yeah so so this is so actually this is something that uh is happening in Medicine by the way uh for doctors who are using AI as an assistant this is this is really interesting so so uh and this is Dermatology was a paper in nature uh you know skin lesions there's several 2,000 skin Lesions some of them

are are you know cancerous and others are benign and so in any case they they tested the expert doctors and then they tested an AI and they were both doing about you know 90% right however if you let the doctor use the AI it boosts the doctor to 98% 98% ACC yes and what's going on there it's very interesting so it turns out that although they got the same 90% they had different expertise that the uh AI Had access to more data and so it could look at the lesions that were rare that the doctor

may never have seen okay but the doctor has more in-depth knowledge of the most common ones that he's seen over and over again and those the subtleties and so forth but so putting them together it makes so much sense that they're going to improve if they work together and I think that now what you're saying is that using AI as a tool for Discovery uh it with you know the expert who's interpreting and and and looking at the arguments the statistical arguments and also uh looking at the paper maybe in a new way maybe that's

a future of science maybe that's what's going to happen everybody everybody's worried about oh AI is going to replace us it's going to be much better than we are everything and and humans are obsolete nothing can be further from the case our strengths and weaknesses are Different and we by working together it's going to strengthen it's uh you know both you know what we do and what AI does uh and it's it's it's going to be partnership it's not going to be adversarial it's going to be a partnership would you say that's the case for

things like understanding or discovering um treatments for neurologic illness um for um avoiding you know large scale Catastrophes like can it predict um macro movements uh let me give an example um here in Los Angeles uh there's occasionally an accident on the freeway um you have a lot of cameras over freeways nowadays um you have cameras and cars you can imagine all of the data being sent in in real time and you could probably um predict accidents pretty easily I mean these are just moving objects right at a specific rate who's driving haphazardly but you

could Also potentially um signal takeover of the brakes or the steering wheel of a car and prevent accidents I mean certain cars already do that but could you essentially eliminate well let's do something even more important let's eliminate traffic I don't know if you can do that but um because that's a funel problem but um could you could you predict um physical events in the world into the Future Okay this has already been done Not for traffic but for hurricanes so you you know as you know the weather is extremely difficult to predict and except

here in California where it's always going to be sunny but now uh what they've done is uh to feed a lot of previous uh data from previous hurricanes and also uh simulations of hurricanes you can simulate them in a in a supercomputer it takes days and weeks so it's not very useful for actually accurately Predicting where it's going to hit Florida but what they did was after training up the AI on all of this data it was able to predict with much better accuracy exactly where in Florida is going to make a landfall and it

it does that in on your lab laptop in 10 minutes incredible so I something just clicked for me and it's probably obvious to you and to most people but I I think this is true I think what I'm about to say is true at the beginning of our Conversation we were talking about the acquisition of knowledge versus the implementation of knowledge just learning facts versus learning how to implement those facts in the form of physical action or cognitive action right math problem is cognitive action physical action okay AI can do both knowledge acquisition it can

learn facts long lists of facts and combinations of facts but presumably it can also run a lot of problem sets and Solve a lot of problem sets I don't think except with some crude still to me examples of Robotics that it's very good at action yet but it will probably get there at some point robots are getting better but they're not they're not doing what we're doing yet but it seems to me that as long as they can acquire knowledge and then solve different problem sets 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 and to 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 have really vexed neuroscientists and the field of medicine and the general public has been like the increase in the Um at least diagnosis of autism I've heard so many different hypotheses over the years I think we're still pretty much in the fog

on this one um could could AI start to come up with um new and and um 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 of the disease um but it will happen in other words uh we will Use those tools at the best we can because obviously this if if you can make any progress at all and and jump into the future wow that would save lives that would help so

many people out there I I I really think the promise here is so great that even though there are flaws and there are regulatory problems we just we really really have to really push and and we have to do that in a way that is um going to help people uh you Know in terms of U making their jobs better and and uh helping them uh solve problems that otherwise they would have had difficulty with and so forth and it's beginning to happen but you know it's uh these are early days so we're at a

stage right now with I that is similar to what happened after the first flight of the W Brothers you know in other words it's that significant the the the the achievement that the right brothers made was to get off the ground 10 feet And to power forward with a human being 100 feet right that was it that was the first flight and it took an enormous amount of improvements the the most difficult thing that had to be solved was control how do you control it how do you make it go in the direction you want

it to go uh and shades of what's Happening Now in AI is that you know we are off the ground we we're not going very far yet but who knows where it will take us into The future let's talk about Parkinson's disease a depletion of dopamine neurons that leads to difficulty in smooth movement Generation Um and also some cognitive and mood-based um dysfunction um tell us about your work on Parkinson's and and what what did you learn so uh as as you point out Parkinson's is uh first a degenerative disease it's it's very interesting Because

the DOP mean cells are a particular part of the brain the brain stem and and they are the ones that are responsible for procedural learning I told you before about temporal difference it's DOP mean cells and uh it's a very powerful way for the it's a Global signals called a neurom modulator because it modulates all the other signals taking place you know throughout the cortex and also it's uh very important For uh learning uh uh sequences of actions uh you know that produce um survival for survival and um but the the problem is that uh

with certain uh environmental insults you know of especially you know uh toxins like pesticides uh those neurons are very vulnerable and when they die you get all of the symptoms that you just described that the the the people Who have lost those cells uh actually before the treatment you know elopa which is a DOP mean precursor they actually were um became Kos right they didn't move they were still alive but just didn't move at all you know they they tragic yes locked in it's called yeah it's tragic tragic so when the when the first uh

Trials of of of elopa were were given to them it was magical because suddenly they started talking again 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 yes was slow velocity 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 um they're locked in after all and I've long wondered when coming back from a

run or from waking up from a great night's Sleep when I shift into my you know waking State whether or not physical velocity and cognitive velocity are linked okay that's a wonderful observation or question you know I bet you know the answer okay here's here's something that is really uh amazing it's it was uh discovered interestingly when you know they they tend to move slowly as you said but to them cognitively they they think they're moving Fast now it's not because they can't move fast because you can say well can you move faster sure and

they move normal right but to them they think they're moving at you know super velocity so so it's a set point issue so it's a set point issue yes it's all about set points that's what what's really going on and and and the set point gets further and further down you know that now now they they without moving at all they think they're moving Right I mean this is what's going on by the way you can ask them you know what was it like you know we were talking to you and you didn't respond oh

I didn't feel like it the brain confabulates an answer they have well they they they that they confabulated it because they didn't have enough energy or they couldn't initiate they couldn't initiate actions that that's one of the things that they have trouble with it with uh movements you know starting a movement Yeah as you can tell I'm I'm fascinated by this notion of cognitive velocity and again there may be a better or more accurate or official uh um language for for it but I feel like it it encompasses so much of what we try to

do when we learn and the fact that during sleep you have these very um vivid dreams during rapid I've move and sleep so cognitive velocity is very fast time perception is different than in SL slow wave sleep dreams Um I really think there's something to it as a as a um at least one metric that relates to brain State yes I've long thought that we know so much more about brain States during sleep than we do about wakeful brain States like we talk about Focus motivated flow I mean the these are not scientific terms I'm

not I'm not being disparaging of them they're pretty much all we've got um until we come up with something better but like we're biologists and Neuroscientists and computational neuroscientists in your case and and we're like trying to figure out like like what brain state are we in right now our cognitive velocity is is a you know a certain value but I think the more that people think about this um you know I'll venture to say that the more that they think a little bit about their cognitive velocity at different times of day I start to

notice that there's a tends to be a few times of day for me it Tends to be early to late midm morning um and then again in the evening after a little bit of trough and energy that boy that hour and a half each like that's the time to get real work done I can 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 I don't care unless it's a stressful event that I need to meet the demands of that stress

you I just can't I can't 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 right what time a day for you are are no I I I get most done in the morning and then you're right later uh after uh uh dinner uh is is also different though I think in the morning uh I'm I'm better at creative stuff and then I think that in the evening I'm better at actually just Cranking it out you know interesting um

given the relationship between uh body temperature and circadian rhythm I would like to run experiment that um relates uh core body temperature to cognitive velocity you know I've actually noticed this is something that is just purely subjective but the temperature of the Sal inside the building is kept 75 it's like you know rock solid but in the afternoon I feel a little Chilly it's probably my you know internal sure you know body temperature body temperature yeah is probably going down and that may correspond to the loss of energy you know the amount of the ability

for the brain and everything else by the way you know this is Q10 this is a jargon every single enzyme in in your every cell can go at different rates depending on the temperature right and so yeah so if the body temperature Is doing this and all the cells are doing this too right so this is uh it's an explanation I'm not sure if it's the right one but yeah uh Craig heler my colleague at Stanford in the biology department has beautifully described how the enzymatic uh control over pyruvate I believe it is controls um

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 wow that shuts down certain enzymatic processes that don't allow the muscles to contract the same way you know he knows the details and he covered them on this podcast I'm forgetting the details you start to go wow like these enzymes are so beautifully controlled by temperature and of course his laboratory is focused on ways to bypass those temperature um or to change temperature locally in order to bypass those limitations

and and have shown them Again and again it's it's just incredible yeah I don't I here we're speculating about what it would mean for cognitive velocity but I think um it's such a different world to think about the underlying biology as opposed to just thinking about like a drug you know you increase dopamine in norepinephrine and and epinephrine the so-called catacol means and you're going to increase energy focus and alertness but you're going to pay the price you're Going to have a trough in energy focus and alertness that's proportional to how much greater it was

when you took the drug boy amphetamines are a good example Boy you know 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 f understand that that's your impression and the reality is you don't actually accomplish that much more have any llms so 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 been weaned um while taking riddlin adderal viance and other stimulants because we have a we have you know

millions of of kids that have been raised experiment on our our you know whole Cadre a whole generation and you know I I really would like to know the answer you you're I I wonder if anybody studying that that's really a great question because we we gave them Speed effectively you know the drug that causes uh the brain to be activated but uh but by the way but but you know the the you know there's the consequence is that you know when it wears off you have no energy right right you you're just completely spent

yeah that's it that's the pit that's the pit and so and but that's why you take more of it you see that's the problem is it's it's a spiral um I love how today you're making It so very clear how computation how math and computers and AI now are really shaping the way that we think about these biological problems which are also psychological problems which are also Daily challenges I also love that we touched on mitochondria and how to replenish mitochondria I want to make sure that we talk about a couple of things that I

know are in the back of people's minds no pun intended here um which are Consciousness and Free Will normally I don't like to talk about these things not because they're sensitive but because I find the discussions around them typically to be more philosophical than neurobiological and they tend to be pretty circular and so you get people like Kevin Mitchell um who is a real I think he has a book about free will he believes in Free Will um you've got people like Robert spolski wrote the Book determined he doesn't believe in Free Will how do

you feel about Free Will and is it even a discussion that we should be having well if you go back 500 years you know the Middle Ages the the the concept didn't exist or at least not in the way we use it because everybody it was it was the the way that we that humans felt about the you know the world and how it worked and and and it's its impact on them was that it's all fate they had this concept of Fate which is that there's nothing you can you can do that that something

is is going to happen to you because of the what's going on in the the gods up above or whatever it is right you get you attribute it to the to the physical forces around you that caused it not not to your own free will not to something that you did that caused you to this to happen to you right so so I think that these words that by the way that we use Free Will Consciousness intelligence Understanding their weasel words because you can't pin down there is no definition of Consciousness that everybody agrees on

and it's it's tough to solve a problem scientific problem if you don't have a definition that you can agree on and uh and you know there's this big controversy about whether these large language models understand language or not right the way we Do and uh and and what what it really is revealing is we don't understand what understanding is we literally we don't have a really good argument or measure you know that you could measure someone's understanding and then apply it to chat GDP and see whether it's the same it it probably isn't exactly the

same but maybe there's some Continuum here we're talking about right um you know the way I look at it uh you know it's as if an Alien suddenly landed on Earth and started talking to us in English right and the only thing we could be sure of was that it's not human I met some people that I wondered about their uh terrestrial Origins okay okay well okay now there's a big diversity amongst humans too you're right about that yeah yeah certain colleagues of ours at UCSD years ago uh one in particular in the physics department

who I absolutely adore as a human being um just had such An unusual pattern of speech of behavior totally appropriate behavior but just unusual in the middle of a faculty meeting we just kind of turn to me and start talking while the other person was presenting and I was like maybe not now and they'd go and he would say oh okay but in any other domain you'd say he was very socially Adept and so you know that there's certain people that just kind of discard with convention and You kind of Wonder like is he an

alien it's kind of cool in a in a cool way like you know he's one of my again a friend and somebody it's true it's true you know no no every not everybody uh has adopted the same social conventions uh you know it could be a touch of autism I mean yeah that's a problem that I mean in other words there are very high functioning autistic people out there well he's brilliant this and often they are you Know it's U they're high people who are brilliant that with autism uh but but you know could you

build an llm that was more um uh on one end of the spectrum versus the other to see what kind of information they for paper I reviewed a paper seem would be a a a really important thing to do it's been done okay there was a paper that I reviewed where they they they took the LM they fine-tuned it with different data from people with different disorders you know The autism and so forth um and um sociopaths you know that's scary but you want to know the answer no and and they got they got these

llms to behave just like those people who have these disorders you can get them to behave that way yes could you do um political leaning in values I haven't seen that but uh it's pretty clear that to me at least that that if if you can do sociopathy you can Probably do any political belief you know but you could also view all this as um you could take benevolent tracks you could also say um hyper creative uh um sensitive to um uh uh emotional tone of voices and find out what kind of information that person

bring uh excuse me that llm okay brings back versus somebody who is very oriented towards just the content of people's words as opposed to what what you know because among people you find this you know if You've ever left a party with a significant other and sometimes someone will say I've had this experience with like did you see that interaction between so and so I'm like know what are you talking about like did you hear that I'm like no not at all I didn't hear I heard the words but I did not pick up on

what you were picking up on right and it was clear that there's 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 you as you point out which has to do with uh the tone the uh in spatial Expressions uh you know there's a tremendous amount of information that is is pass not just with words but with all the other parts the visual input and so forth and some people are good at picking that up and others are not

there's a tremendous variability between Individuals and you know that's that's biology is all about diversity and it's all about you know needing gene pool that's very diverse so that you can evolve and and uh uh survive catastrophic changes that uh occur in a climate for example but uh wouldn't it be wonderful if we could create an llm that could understand what the those Differences are now just think about it right like a truly diverse llm that integrated all those differences but here's how what you'd have to do what you'd have to do is to train

it up on data from a bunch of individuals human individuals now one of the things about these llms is that they don't have a single Persona they can adopt any Persona you have to tell it what what you're expecting from or ask it in a way that Works for you and you'll get back a certain Persona if you if you if I once gave it an abstract from a paper very technical computational paper and I said you are a neuroscientist I want you to explain this abstract to a 10-year-old it it did it in in

a way that I could never have done it it really simplified it it some of the subtleties were not in it but it explained you know what plasticity it was and explained what a Synapse is and you know it it did that it's almost like a qualifying exam for a graduate student I saw something today on X formerly known as Twitter that blew my mind that I wanted your thoughts on that is very appropriate to what you're saying right now which is someone was asking questions of an llm on chat G PT or maybe one

of these other anthropic or Claude or something like that u i probably misuse those names one of the the the AI um uh online sites And somewhere in the middle of its answers the llm decide to just take a break and start looking at pictures of landscapes in yede like the llm was was doing what a what a what a maybe cognitive cognitively fatigued person or what any kind of online person person online would do which was to like take a break and look at a couple pictures of something they you know maybe they're thinking

about going camping there or something and then get back to whatever Task we hear about hallucinations in AI that some that it can imagine things that aren't there just like a human brain but um that blew my mind I haven't encountered that but you know isn't it fascinating uh you know that that's a sign of of a real generative internal model uh if if it's see here's the thing that U real the thing that most distinguishes I think in llm from a 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 something that happened to you during the day right 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 uh continuous self-generated Thoughts and yet we know self-generated thought and in particular brain activity during sleep as you Illustrated earlier with the example of sleep spindles and rapid eye movement sleep

are absolutely critical for um shaping the knowledge that we were experience during the day so yes so these llms are not quite where we are at yet I mean they they can um outperform Us in certain things like go um but how soon will we have llms ai that is with um self-generated internal Activity we're we're getting closer um and and so this is something I'm working on myself actually uh trying to understand how that's done in our own brain brains was generating continual uh brain activity that leads to you know planning and things that

we don't know what the answer to that is yet in Neuroscience it it it and by the way you go to a lecture and you you hear the words one after the next over an hour and you see the slides one after The next at the end you ask a question right just let's think about what you just did somehow you're able to integrate all that information over the hour and and then use your long-term memory then to come up with some insight or some issue that you want that how did your brain remember all

that information working memory traditional working memory that neuroscientist study is only for a few seconds like or maybe A telephone number or something but we're talking about long-term working memory we don't understand how that is done and llms actually large language models can do something it's called in context learning and and it's a really it was a great surprise because there is no plasticity the thing learns at the beginning you train 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 That's what happens with no learning no learning but it's been noticed that as you continue your dialogue it seems to get better at things how could that be how could it be in context learning even though there's no plasticity 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 what the answer is for humans either right could I ask you a few questions About you and as it relates to science and your trajectory um building off of what you were just

saying do you have a practice of meditation or um eyes closed sensory input reduced or shut down um to drive your thinking in a particular way or are you you know at your computer talking to your students in postto and sprinting on the beach you know it's no it's funny you mention that because I get my best ideas uh not sprinting on the beach but You know just uh either walking or jogging uh and it's it's wonderful I don't know I think you know serotonin goes up it's it's another neurom modulator I think that that

stimulates ideas and thoughts and so inevitably I come back to the my office and I can't remember any of those great ideas what do you do about that well now I take notes okay voice memos yeah uhhuh and uh and some of them are pan out you know there's no doubt about It that you're put into a situation uh it is a form of meditation you know if you're running uh in a steady Pace nothing distracting about you know the beach or do you listen to music or podcasts or no I I never listen to

anything except except my my own thoughts so there's a a former guest on this podcast um who she happens to be triped degreed from Harvard but she's more in the um kind of like personal coach space but very very high level and Impressive mind impressive human all around and she has this um concept of wordlessness that um can be used to accomplish a number of different things but this idea that allowing oneself or or creating conditions for oneself to enter States throughout the day or maybe once a day of very minimal sensory input no lecture

no podcast no book no music nothing and allowing the brain to just kind of um idle and go a little bit uh nonlinear if you will right where we're Not constructing thoughts or paying attention to anyone else's thoughts through those media venues um in any kind of structured way as a source of great ideas and creativity it's been studied psychologists call it mind wandering mind wandering yeah it it's it is a significant literature and it it's uh often when you have an aha moment when you know your mind it's wandering and it's it's thinking nonlinearly

uh in the sense of not Following a sequence that is logical you know hopping from things the thing often that's when you get a a great idea uh with just letting your mind wander yeah and that happens to me I I wonder whether social media and just texting in 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 call or in communication with anyone or anything I used to do experiments where I was you know like P petting and Running imun

you know imunohistochemistry and it was very relaxing and I could think while I was wow I'm and relaxing and thinking of things and then I I would listen to music sometimes okay so we have a whole session uh you know a clip in 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 ju stop stop just go off and do something go off and and

clean the dishes go off and you know walk around the block and inevitably what happens is when you come back your 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 right we we we we some people are really good at Intuiting uh because they've experienced you maybe um and and and and but everybody I okay the other thing is everybody I know who's really uh made important contributions

and I'll bet you're one of them uh you know you're struggling with some problem at night and you go to bed and you wake up in the morning Ah that's the solution that's what I should do right first thing in the morning when I wake up is when I I'm almost bombarded With um I wouldn't say insight and not always meaningful Insight but certainly what was unclear becomes immediately clear onw that's the thing that is so amazing about sleep and and and and you can see people who know this can can count on it in

other words the key is to think about it before you go to sleep right your brain works on it during the sleep period right and so you know don't watch TV because then who Knows what your brain's going to work on you know use you know use the time before you fall asleep to think about something that is bothering you or maybe something that you know you're trying to understand maybe uh you know a paper that you you read the paper and say oh you know I'm I'm tired I'm going to go to sleep you

wake up in the morning say oh I know what's going on in that 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 you pay attention to your dreams do you record them no no okay so here's the problem dreams seem so uh iconic and and a lot of people you know somehow attribute things to them but it it there's has never been any good theory or any good understanding first of all why we dream we still it's

still not completely clear I mean there are some ideas but or uh what Tri why This particular dream is this this does that have some significance for you and the only thing that I know uh that might explain a little bit is that uh you know the dreams are often very visual uh you know rapid eye movement sleep so that there's something happening that that actually it's interesting all the neuromodulators are downregulated during sleep and then during G sleep the cocoline comes up right so that's a very powerful neuromodulator it's important For attention for example

but it doesn't come up in the prefrontal cortex which means that the circuits in the prefrontal cortex that are interpreting what the sensory input coming in uh are not turned on so any of these whatever happens in your visual cortex is not being monitored anymore so you get bizarre things you know that you start floating and you know things happen to you and you know it's it's not Anchored anymore and so but that does still doesn't explain why right why you have that period it's important because if you block it and there are some sleeping

pills that do block it you know it really does cause problems with uh you know normal cognitive function cannabis as well people who um come off cannabis um experience a tremendous REM rebound and lots of dreaming uh in the T you know the days and weeks and months after um Cannabis um wow with I don't want to call it withdrawal cuz that is different meaning no no it's it's it's a it's a imbalance that was caused of you know because the the brain adjusted to the you know the endocannabinoid levels and now uh it it's

got to go back and it takes time but it's interesting isn't interesting it affects dreams I I think that may be a clue maybe very very common uh phenomenon um I'm told I'm not a cannabis user but uh no judgment there I just am not um it's actually a uh a book I read years ago when I was in college so lot long time ago um by Alan Hobson who was out at Harvard oh yeah I know him who um oh cool so I never met him um but he had this interesting idea that dreams

in particular rapid eye movement dreams were so very similar to the experience that one has on certain psychedelics LSD lysergic acid dimide or psilocybin and that perhaps dreams are revealing the unconscious mind you know And not saying this any psychological terms you know that you know when we're asleep our conscious mind can't control thought and action in the same way obviously and kind of a it's sort of a recession of the water line you know so we're getting more of the the uh unconscious processing revealed you know that's an interesting hypothesis how would you test

it uh probably have to put someone in a scanner have them go to sleep put them in the scanner on a um Psilocybin Journey this kind of thing um you know that it's tough I mean any of these observational studies of course we both know are deficient in the sense that what you'd really like to do is control the neural activity that's right you'd like to get in there and tickle the neurons over here and see how the brain changes and you'd love to get real- time subjective report this is the problem with sleep and

dreaming is people you can wake people up and ask Them what they were just dreaming about but you can't really know what they're dreaming about in real time it's true yeah it's true by the way you know there are two kinds of dreams h very interesting uh so if you wake someone up during R sleep you you get very Vivid uh changing dreams are always they're always different and changing but if you wake someone up during slow wave sleep you often get a dream report but it's kind of dream that keeps Repeating over and 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 wave sleep yeah probably slow W sleep yeah fascinating um as a neuroscientist who's computationally oriented but really you incorporate the biology so well into your work so that's one of the reasons You're you you're this luminary of your field and who's also now really excited about AI what are you most excited about now like if you had and you

know of course this isn't the case but if you had like 24 more months to just pour yourself into something and then you had to hand the keys to your lab over to someone else what would you go all in on well so the NIH has something called the Pioneer award and what they're looking for are Big ideas that could have a huge impact right so I put one in recently and and and here's the the the the title is um a temporal context in brains and Transformers and in brains and transforms Transformers formers AI

right the the the key to uh chat GTP is the fact there this new architecture it's a deep learning architecture feedforward network but it's called a Transformer and it has certain parts in It that are are unique there one called self attention and and and it's it's it's a way of doing what is called temporal context uh what it does is it connects words that are far apart you give it a sequence of words and it can tell you the association like if I you use the word this and then you have to figure out

in the last sentence what it did refer to well there's three or four nouns it Could have referred to but from Context you can figure out which one it does and you can learn that Association could um 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 to say piano you'd say keys you'd say music you'd say seat you and then you know it kind of builds out a word cloud of Association and then over here we'd say um I don't

know I'm thinking about the Salin say Sunset Stonehenge anyone that looks up there's this phenomena Sal henge then you start building out a word cloud over there these are disperate things except I've been to a classical music concert at the Suk Institute Symphony OFA twice so they're not completely non-overlapping and so you start getting associations at a distance and eventually they Bridge together is this what you're referring to yes I think that that's uh an example but uh it turns out that every word is Ambiguous it has like three four meanings and so you have

to figure that out from Context and and there so in other words there there are words that live together and and uh that come up often and you can learn that from just by you know predicting the next word in a sentence that's how a Transformer is get trained you give it a bunch of words and it keeps predicting the next word in the sentence like in my email now it tries To mostly right part of the time okay well that's because it's a very primitive version of this algorithm what happen is if you treat

if you train it up on enough it not not only can It answer the next word it it it build internally builds up a semantic representation in the same way you describe the words that are related to each other having uh you know associations uh it can figure that out And it has representations inside this very large network with trillions of parameters unbelievable how big they gotten uh and the uh th those those associations now form an internal model of the meaning of the sentence literally it it it it it it's been this is something

that now we've probed these Transformers and so we we pretty much are are pretty confident and that means that it's Forming an internal model of the outside world in this case a bunch of words and that's how it's able to actually respond to you in a way that is sensible that makes sense and actually is interesting and so forth uh and it's all the self- attention I'm talking about so any case my Pioneer proposal is to figure out how does the brain do self-attention right it it's got to do it somehow and I'll give you

a little hint Basil ganglia it's in the basil ganglia that's my hypothesis well we'll see I mean you know I've I'll be working with experimental people uh I've worked with John Reynolds for example who studies uh primate visual cortex and we've looked at traveling ways there and and there are other people that have looked at U in primates and the you know and so now these traveling waves I think are also a Part of the of the the you know 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 it interacts with the basil ganglia I've already we've already been there but we're we we still you know 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 award

I do too yeah and should they make the bad decision not to you know maybe we will'll figure out another way to get it get the work done 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 know 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've shared and you've also given us a ton of practical tools today related to exercise mitochondria and Some of the things that you do which of course are just your versions of what you do but that c certainly certainly are going to be of value to people including me in our cognitive and physical Pursuits and frankly just longevity I mean this this is uh not lost on me and those listening that uh your Vigor is

as I mentioned 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 to your work and to observe that it not only hasn't slowed but you're picking up velocity so thank you so much for for educating us today I I know I speak on behalf of myself and many many people listening and watching this is a real gift uh 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 we're we're you know science is a social ity and and we learn from each other and we all make mistakes uh but we learn from our mistakes and 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 influenced more people than anybody else I know Personally with with uh the knowledge that you are

uh uh broadcasting through your interviews but also you know just in terms of your interests uh really I'm I'm really impressed with what you've done and and I want you to keep you know at it because uh we need people like you um we need uh we need U scientists who can actually Express and reach the public if we if we don't do that everything we do is behind closed Doors right nothing gets out and and so you're you're one of the the best of of the breed in terms of being able to uh explain

things in a clear way that gets through to more people than anybody else I know well thank you I'm very honored 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 it uh it's an honor and a privilege to sit with you today and please come back again I would be love to I would love to you all right Thank you Terry you're welcome thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr Terry sinowski to find links to his work the zeroc

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 Andor enjoying this podcast please subscribe to our YouTube channel that's a terrific zeroc cost way to support us in addition please follow the podcast on both Spotify and apple and on both Spotify and apple you can leave us up to a five-star review please check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode that's the best way to support this podcast if you have questions or

comments about the podcast or guests or topics that you'd like me to consider for the hubman Lab podcast please put those in the comment section on YouTube I do read all the comments for those of you that haven't Heard I have a new book coming out it's my very first book it's entitled protocols and operating manual for the human body this is a book that I've been working on for more than 5 years and that's based on more than 30 years of research and experience and it covers protocols for everything from sleep to exercise to

Stress Control protocols related to focus and motivation and of course I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that Are included the book is now available by pre-sale at protocols book.com there you can find links to various vendors you can pick the one that you like best again the book is called protocols an operating manual for the human body if you're not already following me on social media I am hubman lab on all social media platforms so that's Instagram X formerly known as Twitter threads Facebook and Linkedin and on all those platforms I discuss science

and Science related tools some of which overlaps with the content of the hubman Lab podcast but much of which is distinct from the content on the huberman Lab podcast again that's hubman lab on all social media platforms if you haven't already subscribed to our neural network newsletter our neural network newsletter is a zeroc cost monthly newsletter that includes podcast summaries as well as protocols in the form of brief 1 to3 page PDFs those one To three-page PDFs cover things like deliberate heat exposure deliberate cold exposure we have a foundational Fitness protocol we also have protocols

for optimizing your sleep dopamine and much more again all available completely zero cost simply go to hubman lab.com go to the menu tab scroll down to newsletter and provide your email we do not share your email with anybody thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with Dr Terry sinowski and Last but certainly not least thank you for your interest in science [Music]